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  • Pages: 19
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  • Western Carolina University
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  • HL_MPML_Yang_Hotaling_2019-05-29_transcript

Lynn Hotaling 1 Interviewee: Lynn Hotaling Interviewer: Emily Yang Interview Location: Cullowhee, NC Date of Interview: May 29, 2019 Interview Length: 1:26:20 Emily Yang: OK. Well, first we’ve got the… this thing. Lynn Hotaling: This says it’s all right for you to do whatever you do with the interviews. That’s basically it. EY: I think it’s like the release form. LH: Yeah. Which says you can use the interview. This the 28th? EY: 29th LH: There you go. EY: It’s in pencil so it’s all legal right? (laughter) LH: I guess it is now. EY: Are you aware that you’re being recorded? LH: Yes. EY: Have you read and consent to the interview agreement? LH: Yes. EY: Cool. Great. LH: I consented any way. EY: Well, first I guess where did you live prior to coming to Sylva? LH: I lived in Chamblee, Georgia and I’ve never lived in Sylva. I’ve always lived in either Cullowhee or Tuckasegee or Cashiers. But I came here in 1970 because I graduated from a junior college over in the extreme north Georgia right near the North Carolina line and wasn’t real sure what to do next but several of my friends from Young Harris, that’s the name of the school, had… were from Hayesville and Murphy and places like that and they commuted to Young Harris but they were all going to come to Western so I thought what the heck. Let’s go. So that’s how I ended up here. EY: How did you feel about leaving home? LH: I had already left home. I liked that part a lot. No. I meant. You know how it is when you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty. You’re ready to be on your own. In fact, that was one thing I didn’t like. I had gone back home for the summer and had taken a few classes at Georgia State in Atlanta and it just wasn’t a good fit, so I was ready to be back away from home and I like the mountains and this was another opportunity in the mountains. EY: How was Georgia different from Sylva? Or the mountains? Lynn Hotaling 2 LH: I don’t know that Georgia is that different from Sylva or the mountains, but the Atlanta metropolitan area is very different. I had gone to a high school where there were probably 600 kids in my graduating class. Something like 3,000 in the whole school because at the time Georgia schools were grade eight to twelve in high schools. So, Young Harris there were maybe 600 kids on the whole campus so that was a nice change for me. I liked that a lot better. I’ve never been one to do well with crowds. So that was… I mean it was just going from built up metropolitan area to a rural area that I enjoyed. EY: What did you study at Western? LH: Well, I started out thinking I wanted to be a sociology major but then I didn’t like any of my classes and luckily for me the big computer that they used to use that was in the basement of what you call Forsyth now…we call the business building. It broke down so they extended drop/add for like three weeks so on the last day of it I dropped all my classes and added history and biology classes which is what I ended up doing. I had a major in history and a minor in biology. EY: What drove you to choose those as your field of study? LH: Didn’t like sociology classes (laughter). Had to go somewhere and that seemed more… it seemed more interesting at the time. I had liked history at Young Harris, so I thought I’d give that a shot. EY: Tell me about your professors. Who did you like? Who did you not like? LH: Let’s see. That first year I had Cliff Lovin who was a specialist in European history between the wars and he passed away about three years ago. I also had Jerry Schwartz for American history. He’s retired but still alive. And I must have taken a biology class. Yeah. I had Jim Horton for… it was… at Young Harris we had taken a two… we had quarters not semesters… a two-quarter system of zoology. Here they required for everybody not just… so I was kind of catching up. They required a two-sequence thing that was more of a whole generalized biology where you learn some botany and some zoology. So anyway, I had Jim Horton for that class. Some kind of… I don’t know the name of it… some kind of introduction. I liked all of them. They were real different but I liked them all. Cliff Lovin he shook his head like… You seriously think that you’re going to come into my class after three weeks and pass? I got an A but that’s ok. I had… later I had a guy named Brian Walton who’s retired. I think he lives in Franklin. I had him for a couple of classes. Max Williams… they were all really good at their subjects. I had other biology professors… I mean they’re all retired. I had Dan Patillo. I had Fred Coyle. I had Jim Wallace. I think most of them are still around… most of my biology. Henry Manring. I see them in the grocery store every now and then which is kind of neat. EY: Outside of you know taking classes, studying, what were your hobbies and interests? What did you do for fun? LH: Well it was kind of a different time. We didn’t have that many activities on campus. We just sort of hung out. We hung out in the town house. I didn’t have a car like I said. My roommate was from Bryson City. She didn’t have a car either, but we would hitch hike which of course I would never recommend my kids do or you do but at the time it was OK. We’d hitch hike to Bryson City on Sunday and eat a big dinner because we were broke. That’s another thing all the time. Then Donna’s mom would feel bad for us and she’d… somebody would bring us back. Either Donna’s brother or some neighbor... Donna’s dad… somebody would bring us back and she’d always send us a bunch of food out of the freezer. That was a big… And then she… Donna was a really good storyteller so by the time we got back that night in the Lynn Hotaling 3 town house she’d have thought we had the biggest adventure. You know, gone around the world or something. I was thinking really Donna? All we did was go to Bryson City and come back. So, we did that. We… you know. There weren’t computers with things to entertain you. There wasn’t an internet. We didn’t have cell phones. If I wanted to call my parents in Georgia, I had to call them collect. I only did that a couple times because… I mean a couple times a month. I really don’t really remember. We just sort of hung out. Guys played frisbee on what was the UC lawn before there was the tower there. The lodge. I mean there was just a lot of places where students just sort of gathered. Maybe they do now down there at the fountain. I don’t know. But nobody had anything to do. You couldn’t get any television. Maybe one station if you were lucky so you either studied or you were somewhere hanging out with your friends basically. EY: Can you talk to me about any memorable events that happened or didn’t happen during your time at Western? LH: I don’t remember anything especially that stands out. I mean it was a pretty… It was a kind of rowdy time on other campuses, but a lot of that 70s protest stuff hadn’t really gotten here. I do remember the end of one year there was a girl that was kind of in our crowd and she was a PE major. For some reason they had all these extra rules for PE majors. I don’t know why but they weren’t supposed to wear jeans… There was something they weren’t supposed to do. Like when I was at Young Harris you could not go into the dining hall. We didn’t call it a cafeteria we called it a dining hall and people laughed at me when I got here for that. But you could not go in the dining hall if you were a girl without a skirt or a dress. And if it was Saturday and you had on shorts because you’d been hiking or playing tennis or something you could put on a raincoat and that - like a knee length raincoat - and that counted. But here by the time… That had apparently been the case what would have been my freshman and maybe part of my sophomore year had I been here because the other kids told me about it but for some reasons some of those strange rules persisted with the PE majors and this one girl who was kind of in our group, she did whatever she wasn’t supposed to do. She wore jeans somewhere and they were going to kick her out and not let her graduate… bunch of us all got together on the UC lawn. I still remember that. No that’s not fair and all that kind of stuff. And I don’t remember whatever happened. I didn’t know her that well but that was the only thing I can remember. I think there were a few more organized protests in ’68 and ’69 before I got here but it was never on the level that it was on other campuses. When I was at Young Harris I had a roommate who was also from Atlanta and her boyfriend went to the University of Georgia and he was supposed to come get us and take us home one weekend and he didn’t come and he didn’t come and he finally got there and we found out… because there had been some protest and some group he was a part of had taken over some building on campus and so we get home about midnight that night and my dad looked at me and said, “So are you late because that Pat,” - that was his name, Pat. I forget his last name – “was involved in that protest I just saw on the news? (laughter) I said yeah. Pretty much. So you know. The bigger the campus I guess the more of the particular group of students who would protest they would have. EY: How do you think Western has changed since your time here? LH: You can’t park. Everybody’s got cars so you can’t park. You know that’s a hard question to answer since I don’t take classes. I would guess it’s just bigger. I mean I’m sure they still strive to get quality professors and make the experience good for each student. It seems you know now if a student like you’re in high school and sometime some of the college history students will come to the genealogy Lynn Hotaling 4 office or need help looking… you know with some local history project. You know of course they’re all about the internet and so they’ve all got their cell phones so they can text me and you know arrange time and we can change it at the last minute. You know you never could do that in the old days. They wouldn’t have been able to find a ride to Sylva. They wouldn’t have… I would have had to track them down through a dorm phone or something like that. You’ve never not had email or pretty much fairly instant… you’re what a senior? EY: I’m a sophomore. LH: Sophomore. Yeah. For sure you’ve never been when there weren’t text messages and email and all that. Once you were old enough to understand what they were. But see my oldest when she… there was no such… we didn’t know anything about email until she was probably about fifteen… probably about your age because she was a sophomore. She went off… She was applying to the School of Science and Math in Durham and I think that’s when she first figured out email and got an email account because the kids there had it and she was emailing a friend from here who was already there to ask things and that’s pretty much why I remember that’s when email came to our house. That would have been. She’s… she’ll be 38 this year so that would have been more than twenty years ago so that would have been around 1995 or so. EY: Going back in time. So, what drew you to stay in Sylva after you finished studying at Western? LH: Once again it was probably lack of ambition. A lot of people know exactly what they want to do, and I did have one professor that I mentioned before was my advisor. His first name was Jim. He wasn’t here long. I’m trying to think of his last name. Oh well. Anyway, he had looked at my interests and he said you should go to medical school. Ok. No. Thanks (laughter). Because I had actually been going to nursing school before I came to Western. I was accepted at Emory into their BA nursing program. In fact, they called up wanting to know why I didn’t show up but I’d just had had a job in a hospital that summer as a nursing assistant. One of the nurses was trying to help me you know… teach me things because I was going to be a nurse too, so she said here you take this guy’s IV out and I went are you sure about that and I did it. There’s kind of like a little extra blood and I almost fainted and I thought you know… maybe not. Maybe not nursing. Maybe not medicine. I didn’t go to medical school. So, failing that… What I should have done is gone to law school, but I didn’t realize that at the time. Anyway, I was just sort of at loose ends and the secretary in the history department was a friend of mine because I hung out in her office all the time and she said I’m going to Atlanta to work for a year you should take this job. I went, “What?” She said well you can type, and I said yeah I can do that. So I thought ok that’s as good as anything I’ll take this job for a year and then we’ll see so while I was taking that job for….somewhere along the way I decided I kind of liked biology a little better than history. Not a lot but a little and so while I was working on campus I found out if you were staff you could take a class for free. You had to work out the time. You had to do it during your lunch hour or get your supervisor to approve or whatever, so I thought this sounds like fun. So I went to my boss who was then the history head named Ellerd Hulbert and I said I want to take a class do you care? He said that’s fine just make sure some student could cover the office because we had a lot of student workers. Called it work study… I don’t know if they still have that. You don’t either you’re not in college yet. But anyway, I had probably six or eight kids who worked you know various times during the week so it was just a matter of rounding up one or two of them to cover the time. Because see, once I decided I was going to take a class I didn’t just take a class I took a class that had a one-hour lecture three days a week and a two hour lab another Lynn Hotaling 5 couple of times. Because you know its biology for you. So, I found people to work and we were all fine. So that was kind of fun. Then the next… no I think that was backwards. The first class I took was just lecture and it was lab you did on your own. It wasn’t structured. And then in the spring I took the big one. But anyway, so I took this class called Plant Anatomy from my former professor, Jim Horton and it was really neat and fun because you made slides and you looked at the inside of the cells and all that. I did good in there and then was taking another class in the spring and then like May or April… we went to school till June then because it was quarters but anyway at some point Jim Horton who I had had as an undergraduate and then I had again. He came over to the history office and said you don’t need to be doing this for the rest of your life. I’ve got an assistantship for you. I said ok what’s that? He said it’s where you get a stipend and you go to school, and you do this project for us. And I said oh ok. So, I did that for two years and then I was pretty much committed to staying around here because by then I’d lived out you know off campus out in the community and I met people. I didn’t want to go back to Atlanta or any of that, so I stayed. And I did that and then after I finished that another friend called me from High Hampton which is up in Cashiers and she said they need somebody to work here. Because I had been kind of thinking I’m going to have to move now because this assistantship has run out. You can’t get a PhD at Western. You couldn’t at the time anyway. I don’t think you can yet in Biology but I’m not sure. Anyway, so I went and worked at High Hampton and I met my husband and we ended up staying around here. EY: Sorry. LH: But I don’t know what this has to do with local Jackson County history but… EY: Well you’re a part of it so. LH: I guess that’s true. There’s some steps in between let’s see I probably left out so... In between working in the history office was when I first worked at the Christmas tree farm. The summer after I graduated, I worked there for a couple months and I worked in the… in fact I didn’t work in the history department right after I graduated now that I think about it. There was a year I worked… I worked on Tommy’s Christmas tree farm and then I got… somebody said… told me about a house way out in Tuckasegee I could rent cheap, so I did that, and I worked at Sapphire Valley for a while. Actually, High Hampton was later. Did Sapphire Valley and then I took the job in the history department. Then I had the assistantship. Then I went to High Hampton and then after High Hampton I came back to campus and worked in the… what we call the engineer’s office. Now they call it physical plant or something like that. I worked there and then I worked at the school board office and then after… that was a grant funded job and after that ran out, I worked for a newspaper in Cashiers. There’s how we finally get around to the newspaper. And then I had a baby… one baby. The oldest one I was telling you about. And then I went back to work at the newspaper and that newspaper got sold and there wasn’t a job for me but at that time I was about to have another baby and she was born in ’84 and then they needed somebody at the Sylva Herald so I started working there in the fall of ’84 and I worked there till 2016. EY: Gotcha. If it’s all right can I bring you back to the Christmas tree farm. LH: You can bring it back to anything you want (laughter). You’re the interviewer here. What do you want to know about that? EY: Well, how did you come to work there? Lynn Hotaling 6 LH: Well, you have to remember there weren’t any jobs to speak of in this county. You worked at Western. You worked at the hospital. You worked at the Paper Plant. There’s not a lot of… there weren’t… a lot of the businesses that you see along 107 weren’t even there. There were no like fast food places. No restaurants to speak of. Just maybe one or two and that never appealed to me anyway. So anyway, the spring before I graduated which would have been 1972 some friends and I were in the laundromat which is over there by… well the new building is there now but that store called Bob’s Mini Mart. Do you remember that? Before they built… probably not you’re young. Anyway, it was a laundromat and if you lived off campus… If you lived on campus I don’t know if they still do it but it was the greatest thing. They had a laundry. You could take your dirty clothes over to that laundry and go back and pick them up and they’d be all folded and it was great. But if you moved off campus you couldn’t do that anymore so there was the laundromat and somehow we’d met these guys who had dropped out of Brevard College and they were living way out in what we call Canada community and working on the Christmas tree farm. And that sounded just kind of interesting and different and I was ready for something totally different and new. So, I said that sounds like fun. How do I do that? And they said well you go out to see the boss, Tommy Beutell and they told me his phone number… I guess I called him first because I didn’t have a car still. No. I didn’t have a car by that time. I’m trying to remember. That was a big deal when I got a car up here. It must have been sometime that summer. But anyway, I called him up and he said I don’t need anybody right now, but I will in a couple months and so finally on around August I think he needed somebody to help prune white pines. So, I did that and then I worked… in the late summer you prune the trees and you gradually move into getting them ready for the ones their going to harvest that year. Because you do them… at least at the time you pruned them late… real late in the summer right before he cut them, so they’d look like a Christmas tree. That’s what they all told me. I said what do I do? Make it look like a Christmas tree they said. So, then I worked that whole harvest season and then after that when there was nothing to do and in January is when I started working at Sapphire Valley. But so I guess it was because we met… you know I’d never thought about working on a Christmas tree farm you know… something out of my range of experience but when they said that’s what they do it sounded intriguing. So, then Tommy’s crew at the time consisted of those guys. Whose names were Tim and Chuck… Dennis I think was the other one. And then a bunch of people who’d grown up in the Canada area because that’s where all his tree fields were. So, it was like… they were kind of hippies or what was known at the time as hippies. They were smart boys they were just… they just wanted to get back to nature and one of them’s grandmother owned a farm up there. She lived down in Brevard or somewhere like that but she had that farm so they could go stay up there and they’d work on the tree farm to support themselves. And then people who had grown up in Canada who had real, real good life skills. I mean they could fix anything. They could drive anything. They could cut down a tree. Make it fall where they want it to fall but you know… they liked staying at home and they liked working in their own community so that’s why they were there and so… but I guess I got to know some of them but it was just real interesting to hear their stories about how interesting things used to be. I found out that you know up in Canada which is starting to be more populated again but apparently back in the forties and fifties it was a lot of people up there but then they all moved off because they all moved off because they couldn’t get jobs. A lot of them went to Washington State to work in the timber industry because logging was kind of over with here… at least the large-scale logging. We just liked hearing their stories. It was just kind of fun. It’s like learning about a whole new… just a different way of living. It was just. . . In the early seventies there still wasn’t… There still were a lot of housing without Lynn Hotaling 7 electricity or indoor plumbing. It’s kind of like you read about in books. Here you were living in the middle of it. EY: In one of your articles you said that Alvin Burrell gave all “foreigners” nicknames. What was yours? LH: Red. My hair was very red at one time in my life. Yeah. He called me Red. He called Donna Chunky. He called our friend Linda the Lone Ranger. Who knows why? We never knew if he was saying Long Ranger or Lone Ranger. She was short so he might… we kind of thought he might be saying long as a play on that. We never could understand well enough to know for sure. Tim who like me was a red head from Georgia but for some reason instead of calling him Red he called him Kim. Not Tim. Kim. Chuck, I don’t think he called anything different. I think he just called him Chuck. Hugh and Dennis, the other Round Mountain Boys as we called them collectively, they were spotty. They were here a week, gone a week. I don’t think he ever bothered. But Tim and Chuck were pretty much the constants. I don’t think Alvin ever bothered with nicknames for them, it wasn’t worth his time to mention them, don’t you know. Alvin was a hoot and he’d decided they were all hippies and he’d tell him he’d kept his mary-juana… that’s the way he said it… in the trunk of his car. And they needed to come over and see him after work because he had his mary-juana in his car. And he had a brother who was just the opposite of him. Alvin was never hushed. Always ready with a joke and a nick name or an insult or whatever. Roger was real quiet and I got it backwards. I always thought… I knew they were different politically and I always thought Alvin was the Democrat and Roger was the Republican but I actually looked at some voter registration roles that are still available in the courthouse in Sylva in the Deeds Office and it was just the opposite. Roger had signed up as a Democrat and Alvin as a Republican. I don’t know how I had it backwards all those years, but I did. But they like they wanted to teach you to prune the trees different ways. You have this big knife with a blade about twelve or eighteen inches long and Alvin wanted you to like [measure] the top. You know this thing that sticks up you know where you hang your star. That’s called the leader. And Alvin wanted you to cut that first. Kind of gauge where it should be. Cut it off and then come down. Roger thought you should prune the sides and then make your leader fit or maybe it was the other way around. I don’t know. One of them wanted you to cut the top first and one of them last. And so… kind of had to watch who was helping you that day. But mostly Roger stayed back and sharpened knives. He liked that and he was good at it. He was older I think. I think he was a little older. I think he was probably the oldest one out there, so he got the knife sharpening job because it was less physical. EY: What did you learn from your time at the Christmas tree farm? LH: Just a lot about… a lot about getting along with people, I think. Because it was probably the first job I’d had where you had so many different… people with different personalities like you know… Alvin was always kidding and Roger was always quiet. And then there was Geraldine and she was super sweet, but she was… I mean she could work as hard as anybody, but she was always timid around the guys. I guess that was the… women were less in society in those days, so she tended to stay back even though she really knew as much or more as any of the rest of them. And then hearing just… you know just seeing how people made it in the world without the stuff I’d always grown up taking for granted. Like maybe my grandmother had told me stories like before she had a bathroom in the house, and they had to go out to the privy or having a cow, but it really didn’t mean anything because it was just a story. But these people they still had cows. They still butchered them at home. They still put up the meat. They still had smokehouses. They still had outdoor toilets. They still had all that stuff that you know I only read about Lynn Hotaling 8 back… couple of the houses I lived in still had an outhouse so. I think that was it. Just seeing a whole different way of living and making your way in the world. EY: I think you also wrote about local customs that you found unexpected. I don’t know if there was one you’d like to talk about. LH: Remind me about… It’s been a long time since I wrote whatever it was. I mean… There was like when I moved out there my closest neighbor was somebody, I’d known on the Christmas tree farm and he’s ten or fifteen years older than me. He would show me around. Like he’d take me on hikes and stuff, and I thought this was nice but everybody in the community assumed we were like engaged and about to get married because you know you just didn’t do that. Guys and girls just didn’t go around together or socialize if they weren’t courting or I guess would be the word for it. So that was a big shock to me that I was practically engaged. I had no… that’s what I mean. It’s just a whole different way of thinking. You know I’d always grown up running around in a group like in church or church group or school clubs. We just always did things… boys and girls. It wasn’t… didn’t mean you were romantically involved but apparently that’s where they thought we were headed so that was a little weird. Other than that, I mean… and they were scared of everything which I couldn’t understand because to me there was nothing scary out here in the country. What was scary was downtown Atlanta but there was… one of my neighbors, Fannie Mae, was always warning me about this guy. You better watch out. Don’t ever be around JB. I don’t remember his last name and I probably wouldn’t want to use it if I did but she’s always telling me. You know he was like bad or whatever so… then there were these other guys on the tree farm and one of the… his nickname was Bunny. I don’t remember his real name right off hand, but it wasn’t anything to do with that but… Bunny was probably the one. Bunny and this other kid named, Keith. I don’t remember his last name. They were like teenagers working and everybody else was pretty much older and had families and stuff. But anyway, Bunny he kind of took up with Donna and me because we were different, and he was young enough to… so he’d always hang out with us and eat lunch with us and marvel at whatever we brought for lunch. They would always bring things like saltines and crackers which I thought was odd but anyway so one night, Bunny shows up at my house with this guy and he’s like acting real funny like, “Oh I’m really doing something now. I’ve come out to see this woman who lives by herself,” which was also unheard of. So, I invited them in and I had iced tea. I had coke. I had water. I don’t know. I had something. I offered them something to drink. So, they’re sitting there on my couch and I realize Bunny… and this other guy is looking so bashful and he can’t even believe he’s in this house and I realized that Bunny hadn’t told me his name. I said Bunny you didn’t introduce me to your friend. This is JB. This was you know the person I was supposed to be so scared of who looked terrified to be inside my house (laughter). I’m like ok. Whatever. I don’t know. Ask something else. You’ve read all the stories. EY: All right. Ok. So probably the thing you’re most well-known for is editing the Sylva Herald. Your work at the Sylva Herald. So, tell me about it. How did you come to work there? LH: As usual it’s the case of… it just happened. I actually got my start in newspapers at the Western Carolinian because the last… I told you we were always broke well that was true. We’d have five dollars and that would be groceries for the week. So, then somebody said… as usual. You can type. We need a type setter. This was the fall of my senior year at Western. So, I said ok. And what they had…it looked like a typewriter and you type the words, but it punched holes in like a tape about this wide. I guess it’s kind of like ticker tape from Wall Street or whatever. So, you would type it and you’d end up with your Lynn Hotaling 9 story on this whole tape. So, then you had a machine and you fed it into that machine and it could read it and it would make it come out on a strip of glossy paper like this in a column. That’s why newspapers had columns I guess because the first one of those machines you couldn’t do it any other way. So anyway, you’d have you’re… I’d type it. It’d be on this ticker tape. You’d feed it through this thing, and I don’t know how… It would read it somehow and print it on that tape and it was on this thicker paper so then you took that and you trimmed it and you used a machine… roller and hot wax and you put it through there and it would stick to your layout page and if you’d made a mistake the proofreader would find it like say… in a strip this long there’s five words that might say, “Went through the house twice” and so maybe you’d spelled “house” wrong so you’d… Then they would bring it back to you and you would do just that line. And then you’d do the same thing again. You’d take your little tape and you’d print it out and you’d get a strip that said, “went through the house twice,” only this time “house” was spelled right, and they would paste it right over it. So anyhow by the time for the winter quarter somehow the newspaper funding got cut or there were budget cuts across campus. I don’t know. But anyway, they had been paying us by the hour like $2.00 an hour or something. Well they said we don’t have any money to do that. We’re going to pay you… we can only pay you $20 a month. Well, its twenty dollars I didn’t have so ok I did that. So that’s how I learned how to do the newspaper type setting and then that summer Donna and I fooled around and wrote a little column and then that was it for that. But anyhow by the time my… when my school board job was done somebody said didn’t you use to do something at a newspaper? So, I went and I was going to be a type setter there. By this time, it was a computer thing but it still… instead of the… it eliminated the punch step. So, you typed it on this computer keyboard but it still came out on a film that had to be developed. Through chemicals like a photo. You had to feed your film through that and then your words would appear. We’re still doing corrections line by line. That’s just the way you did it for a long time. So, I did that and then that… he needed somebody to write and I thought I can do that, so I wrote a few stories and then… his name was Dan. He wanted somebody to be an assistant editor so he could be gone, and he asked me if I’d do it and I said sure. So, I did that. And then like I said that paper got sold so when the Herald needed somebody, they needed somebody to work in advertising which at the time the newspaper was really the only game in town. It was easy to sell. I’m not much of a salesman but it was easy to sale ads because you really didn’t have to sell them. People wanted them. People came in to see you because there wasn’t a local television station really or cable or any of that. There weren’t a lot of billboards. It was pretty much if you wanted people to know you were around you advertised in the local newspaper. So, I did that, and I did special sections and then it just kind of evolved. I did the special sections. I did more writing and then around, I guess it was ’93, the long time news editor left and a different one came and she wanted to kind of expand local coverage so she asked me to help out even though I was still in the advertising realm. And then when she left, I had been in charge of a whole lot of special sections by that time which is basically being an editor for you know a one-time publication so I was asked to do that. I think Jim Gray who was the publisher at the time. He’s still the owner. But I think he had asked somebody who’s from Sylva who was working in the Asheville paper and I think he was amazed at how much that guy was getting paid (laughter). I think that’s when he settled on me but he never really said. And he always was complimentary. Like he thought I was doing a good job. He must have been reasonably happy with his choice. EY: I mean what drove you to stay with journalism and with the Herald? Lynn Hotaling 10 LH: I think the same thing that caused me to major in history and minor in biology which is not really a… you know… history, political science. That kind of thing people do. I just like a lot of things but I’m not really an expert in any of them. And that’s what newspapers are. You know. It’s not scientific writing. It’s not historical research, footnoted…. you know, writing. You just talk to people and you write what they say, or you go to the meeting and write what the officials do. So that appealed to me because it never was the same thing. You might have to get out a paper every week but you weren’t getting out the same paper. It was always something new. That I think is what… and I was reasonably good at it. I found out I had a knack for it. I had a knack for seeing how the stuff would fit together on the page and I liked that. It was interesting. It was always interesting. Because you didn’t know what… you might think oh yeah this week we’ll have this and this on the front page but then Monday night something weird happens or you hear that you know… you hear that the school board’s done something strange and you get to go find out about that so… I liked that aspect of it. EY: Of all the jobs you’ve had. You know advertising sales representative, special sections editor, editor. How were they all different? Which one did you like or any of them? LH: Who doesn’t like being in charge? I like the special sections because I could make every single decision. On the early ones I sold all the ads, I wrote all the stories. I did that and that was kind of gratifying when it would be successful, and people would brag on it or it would win an award. Advertising, not so much because I’m not an artist and so you know I could do a basic ad. They gave me their logo, or they had some artwork and put some type in there, but I never did feel like… I’m not a graphic designer. I didn’t feel like they were necessarily getting their money’s worth if I was doing their ads, so I was glad to move to something else. But the special sections editor in some ways was the best because it was one thing you know. And you kind of built up and then it was out this week and you could relax. Being the editor of the whole paper, I was like every week there was going to be a paper and if you were there at Tuesday at midnight that was just too bad because it had to go out the next day. But I mean… that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy. I did enjoy it. The last couple of years it got to be like anything I think you kind of get to the point where it’s like I’ve done this and done this. I’m ready to not do it anymore but overall yeah. It was a lot of fun. EY: In one of your articles you talk about how each day of the week at the Herald was different. I thought that was pretty cool. Like you know from looking through information sent by readers on Friday to try to get everything to fit together on Wednesday. LH: Right. I liked that tool I have to say. I’ve always been the one who even when I changed my major to history, and I liked history a lot… I go in the class the first day and they wanted a term paper. I was out of there. Book reports? I’ll do that. Term papers? Not so much. But anyway, if I got stuck in a class and couldn’t get out of it and I had to a write a paper, I was going to write that paper the night before it was due. I might do a little research here and there along the way but never was I gunna start. So, a newspaper is perfectly suited for somebody like that. My husband is totally different. He knows he has something to do three months from now he’ll do a little bit of it each day… yeah. You know. When the time comes, he just moves right along but not me. I’m going to wait till the last second. But I did like that because I’d had jobs where you know you come in and it’s the same thing, every day, over and over. I liked having a different pace. EY: That’s really interesting. Lynn Hotaling 11 LH: You’ve just read and read, haven’t you? EY: Yeah. (laughter) A little bit. LH: Well that’s good. You can ask me anything. It’s all been out there in the newspaper for people to read. I’m not worried about it (laughter). EY: Can you tell me about your process of writing? LH: What kind of story? Because they are different? Ok. Let’s take three things I wrote about for the newspaper. Cover local government meetings… more of an enterprise or not really investigative. I wouldn’t call myself that much of an investigator… a few times. But something where somebody gives you a tip and you’ve got to find out the information and write the story. Well then there’s a column which is basically just I talk to somebody that’s interesting. I sort of merge it with my own experience. Do that so. A local government story now that’s a piece of cake. You just go there. You write down everything they say. Just like… it’s just like taking notes in class and then you sort of look at it and you think about it and you say… hmm. What did they really do? And that’s your lead, your first paragraph. You think about well if you had spent two hours there and you got tell your friend what they did and that’s your first paragraph. Tonight, Sylva leaders decided to ban parking downtown or to, you know, something like that. And then you go back through… that will be your first part. You go back through who said what and how they came to that decision. And then you sort of list anything else that happened at the end like you know any minor decisions. But you try to get the most interesting things to your readers up there in your first part of the story. So those are… I mean they’re the related things. The public hearings that sometimes have a lot of drama to them because people are standing up saying different… but it’s still the same thing. You get back and you’ve got all your notes and it’s like ok. What was the most interesting thing I heard? What do I think readers want to know the most? Like, when they were… do you remember… what year were you born? EY: 2003. LH: Ok. Well in 2006 or so Duke Energy started talking about this whole relicensing process and they were going to remove Dillsboro dam. That’s what they wanted to do as part of it. Well, they were having all these meetings and they had all these people there and they were trying to make it really boring and so… but out of this four-hour session the thing they talked about was removing the Dillsboro Dam. Well clearly that’s what I wrote about. That’s what any of the other journalist who were there wrote about and then like the people in the group they were saying, “What did you do that for?” That’s just one of the things we’re talking about. Well… duh. That’s what people care about. That’s news. Yeah maybe you’re going to increase water flow by one-cubit foot. Maybe you’re going to build a boat landing. Big deal. Taking out a dam. That’s news. So, that’s… you know you kind of do that. But then if you’re trying to track down a story that somebody gives you then that’s harder because you’ve got to figure out who you can talk to who might know something about it. But on the other hand, you already have your main point. Somebody calls you up and said, “Did you hear they were going to make a golf course up on top of Cullowhee mountain?” Well, if you can track it down - and that is one that I wrote about - you know that’s your story. Once you verify it. This group is talking about making a golf course on Cullowhee mountain and it’s just a matter of talking to the developer if you can find out who they are. See what they say. Talking to people nearby. Talking about why it’s a good idea or a bad idea. Trying to have people saying stuff. So, with that one you’ve got your most interesting fact right at the beginning, but Lynn Hotaling 12 you have to find enough people to flesh out the story. That can tell you things about it. I mean that’s… There were a lot of stories like that where some of them never panned out because somebody would call and they’d be all outraged because somebody was going to do something or they were going to do whatever and sometimes you’d found out it wasn’t even so or at least you couldn’t find anybody saying on the record. Columns can be the most fun, but they’re also the most challenging because, that’s another thing, I’d be staring at my typewriter. I’d end up writing them on Wednesday morning. Well, Wednesday is when the paper actually goes to press. I’d go in early on Wednesday mornings… write them a lot of times because I couldn’t clear my mind to do that until everything else was taking care of. All the little news items and church singings and all that stuff that you had to get ready. Whatever meeting I had covered that week. Till that was written. If there was a story you had to track down… get that all done. So, the columns ended up… and when I go back and read them and see a few of the typos or the same word in three paragraphs in a row I realized I did them last minute but other people don’t seem to mind as much. Does that answer your writing question? EY: Yeah it does. Definitely. Thank you. LH: You’re welcome. EY: I guess I’ll just take a quick turnaround. Tell me about your co-workers. Past or present. LH: I don’t have any anymore (laughter). No more co-workers. The most competent ones? The most memorable ones? The most aggravating ones? What? (laughter) EY: Anything you want to talk about. All of the above. LH: Well the Sylva Herald was an interesting place. There’s a lot of… When I first started there, there was a big commercial printing department which is you know brochures, posters, all the kinds of pieces of printing that businesses will use, especially a tourist related business. That’s pretty much gone by the wayside now because people can get it cheaper off the internet and they don’t do as much printed advertising anymore. You know. It’s mostly online and websites and things like that now. But because we had the big… we had you know people in the newsroom who were interested in words and writing and stuff and then you had people that sold advertising and then you had the guys downstairs that worked in the press room. They were a lot more just hurry up and get it done kind of thing. But they all... they were fun. They would come upstairs and proofread which we all thought was a little bit amusing in a way. Our proofreaders you know they had finished high school but that’s just how the system worked. That’s just who we had. And Harold, my favorite printer, he died in 2012. He had worked at the newspaper for thirty or forty years and I’d get kind of… I’d start feeling the stress every once in a while, on Wednesday morning like about 9:30… like how in the world are we going to get this all done by 12:30, and he’d just look at me and say, just calm down. We’re smarter than it is. Meaning we’re smarter than the newspaper pages. And he just was always real calm and he just… he learned a lot. Harold was smart. He’d learned a lot from JD, the one-time news editor, and he knew how to build a page as we call it. That was when… when I was telling you when the copy came out on the strips. The film that you developed and then you trimmed it. All the stories were hanging on the wall because you waxed them, stuck up on the wall, then you pulled them down and put them on the page. And that was fun when we did all that. When we were all out there doing it together. Once we went to building the pages on the computer it was a little more of a solitary occupation because you can’t have like… you might have forty stories on the wall and anybody if it’s not designated for the front page… whoever’s Lynn Hotaling 13 working on whatever page grabs a few ads puts them on a page, grabs a story and makes them work out and it’s pretty much fair game. But once you’re doing that on a computer you can’t have three people trying to use the same stories. So that was pretty much when I was doing the pages. Pretty much. Like Cindy would do the classifieds. Carey would do the sports pages and if it was a full-page ad the ad department would do it but the other pages I pretty much was drawing in the ads and making the copy fit. But you wanted me to tell you about them but not how it worked. Well we had Jeff who was… we called him our curmudgeon. Nothing ever pleased him. Nothing. One time he used to… before we started doing it on the computer he would always make up the editorial page for some reason and one time I was trying to help and I said, well you could make that smaller and put that there and he said, that ain’t the way we do it here. I said, okay. Left it alone after that. Then another time I actually put something down and he said, don’t never touch my page again. But he was really sweet. He was just that way. He had this grumpy exterior. The advertising people they always wanted every ad they sold to be on page three. You know why. You open the front page… typically doesn’t have any ads although that’s changing. Second page back in those days was the editorial page. Page three was the first… and a right-hand page. Not just a… you can’t get it on page three it has to be on a right-hand page because people allegedly see ads more on right hand pages. So anyway, you always had to deal with them because you can’t put everything on page three. There have to be ads somewhere else. You have to… But they were… that was just… they just wanted the best spot they could get for their customers. I don’t know. I don’t really feel all the comfortable going into personalities on this because I don’t know where it’s going to end up or who is going to see it. So, I’m going to leave it at that. And then everybody in the newsroom we pretty much… you all had your varying degrees of stress you know. Everybody thought their story was the most important one and so you know. They don’t want to have… it would be like Monday, Tuesday morning and we’re all trying to get our stories written… nobody wants to answer the phone or talk to people who come upstairs with some random news thing. So, it’s like, I’m not doing it you do it kind of thing. It’s not that we didn’t appreciate people coming in, but not then. We wanted them to come on Thursday or Friday. Not when we were in the middle of writing our stories and so… but other than that we all got along fine the best I can remember. It’s just…yeah. I don’t know I want to get into… there’s lots I could tell you, but we don’t need to have that on a public interview. EY: Did any particular events define your time or a period of time at the Sylva Herald? LH: There were things that kept coming around and around and around. That was the strangest thing. It’s like parking… downtown parking. It’d be a huge deal. Sylva board would talk about it. They wanted to pass ordinances. They’d go door to door and nothing would ever really change until they finally got a parking lot. They leased the parking lot at the end of Main… It was mainly that downtown employers were parking and there weren’t any place for customers to park. But look at the opposite. There’s not place for people who work there to park. So… but then I found an article from the 1924, ‘26 Jackson County Journal and they were talking about the same thing. Same problems. It was so funny. And I had a really great reporter for a couple years and I can’t… she had somehow found the Sylva Herald online… this was probably 2003 or so. And she was intrigued by the part of our name that’s the Ruralite. That had been in the newspaper that the Herald grew from. So, she emailed us and said I want to be an intern. You don’t have to pay me. We were a little bit put off but once we met this kid, she was just too cool. So anyway, she left us to go to journalism school at Columbia in New York City and her first… one of the first class projects you know was on community journalism or whatever… class. They assigned each kid in the class to a different borough in New York or a different community. Apparently, it’s like… Lynn Hotaling 14 New York City is like a bunch of little towns and they all have little neighborhood groups or actual councils or whatever. Well anyway. Her group… she goes to the first meeting and what are they talking about? Parking. Now that was funny. The Dillsboro dam was a big thing. That drug on for a long time. It generated a lot of passion on both sides. The commissioners decided to oppose it. Spent all kinds of money for no reason in my opinion opposing it when it was pretty much inevitable. There was one… was another one. The library getting the… putting the library where it ended up being up there next to the old courthouse. That had… that was something the newspaper really advocated for and finally two of the commissioners got on board and convinced the others because for some reason the county manager at the time was just totally opposed to that. He wouldn’t even talk about it. So that was. We wrote a lot of stories about that. There was a big deal in 2000 when you know how the shooting at Columbine High happened in 1999. We just heard about the 20th anniversary of that. Well, when that happened it’s like state legislatures all over the country… they like… they did everything they could to you know… increase penalties for any kind of weapons on campus and stuff like that. So, these kids were seniors at Smoky Mountain. Went out to the site of where Scott’s Creek School is now, and they tried to build a pipe bomb. They tried to blow up an outhouse. Call them variously “the potty bombers” or whatever but because they had pulled their prank on school property it made it a much bigger deal than if they had tried to make a little bomb in… you know… gone out and found an actually old outhouse or old shed or something and had blown it up. Cause it was some kind of… it was a bigger crime because it had happened on school property. Well, one of these kids was slated to be the valedictorian and somehow the school board decided in a closed session that they were just going to do away with valedictorian that year. They did. And they said they weren’t going to have a valedictorian or a salutatorian. And they did this in closed session, and nobody knew about that which according to our newspaper lawyer that was not really legal because… I mean they can’t talk about individual students you know in open session but whether you’re going to have a position or an office or an honoree. You’re not saying who it is we felt like that should be in open session but we only found out about it because the parents of the boy… the number two boy who was not going… their view was that if the valedictorian has been kicked out of school for this prank then their son should move up. But failing that at least people should know that he’d earned the rank of salutatorian. So that became a huge deal and that was weird for me because the girl who would have been the valedictorian had been one of my daughter’s best friends but my daughter thank God was at Science and Math when all that happened so she wasn’t involved in whatever was going on. But anyway, that was just kind of an interesting story that was because of national events became more than just more than just a high school prank I guess because the fact that it had been on school property. EY: That’s really interesting actually (laughter). LH: You can go back and read it all. Actually, no it’s probably not online. We probably didn’t have everything online in 2000. Shame. Oh, and there was the Judy Wolfe trial but that was… That was a principal at the high school who somehow crossed… At the time the superintendent had a brother and a sister who were on the faculty at the high school. Somehow all we could ever figure, because the superintendent had hired this principal, but she seemed to get on the outs with some of the faculty including his brother and sister and all of a sudden she got fired. So that was a big deal and then later on there was a trial that was kind of a big deal. That was even before the whole valedictorian thing. Late nineties, I think. But you were going to ask something else. Lynn Hotaling 15 EY: I was going to ask about… you mentioned that the Sylva Herald and we were like that speaking of the Ruralite, the Ruralite, I know that you have previously worked on or currently work on the “Ruralite Café.” I was wondering if you could tell me about that. LH: That was just what we came up with as a name for the column because columns usually have names and I think it was kind of inspired. NPR has a random music show where they will call it World Café and that gives them cover. Any kind of music that appeals to them that week they can feature or have whatever recording of it. You know they’re not a country music show. They’re not a classical music show. They’re not rock. It’s just any kind of music and so that name sort of appealed to us because we had no idea what would end up in that space in any given week. When we started it some of the other people in the newsroom took turns writing it so we needed a more general title. So, we thought of the café part from that. (cough) You should turn off your recorder when I do that. Anyway, we thought of the café part from the eclectic nature of it and then Ruralite just seemed like… what the heck. That’s our name lets go with it. EY: Nice. What is or was your favorite part about working at the Herald? LH: All of it really. That’s the other thing that appealed to me because it was different. You know you might go out and talk to somebody in their house that lived way back in the woods. You might call somebody up like… we’re talking about music. I personally like the bluegrassy country, country… the more progressive bluegrass. And so one somebody I really like is a mandolin player named Sam Bush which is just incredibly cool. Well hey, Sam Bush was going to be playing at Lake Toxaway. Some random person called me up and said, if you want to write about Sam Bush he’ll talk to you on the phone. Wanna write about that…why not? I get to talk to Sam Bush on the telephone. I got to talk to Roy… you don’t know. You don’t know who Roy Clark was probably but when I was your age there was a show on television called Hee Haw which was… everybody watched it because there wasn’t that much on. It was just really funny. They’d tell jokes and they’d do old country songs or bluegrass songs and Roy Clark was going to come to Western and I got to talk to him on the telephone and that was just great. He was real forth… I couldn’t get him off the phone. I needed to write the column (laughter). But that was cool. So, there’d be things like that. Kind of sort of celebrity things and then there would be… you’d go… before they built that development that’s on Bear Lake there was a family that had lived on that land for generations and they never owned it. And when it was owned by whoever owned it before it got bought to become that development they had lived…anyway, they had lived there for generations basically and they were going to have to leave because they were going to turn it into a development. And that was probably 19… it was way up in the nineties. They still didn’t have running water or electricity. I remember trying to take pictures. It was… we went up there in January or February and so we were inside because it was cold but there was no light. Just a little bitty light coming in from the window and I didn’t get much of a picture. So, you know that would be kind of the… We could range from any of that or talking to anybody in between or finding some random thing like . . . Well the other development Balsam Mountain Preserve there’s a ruby mine. There used to be a functioning ruby mine where they are… Well find out they’re going to develop that. Then you find out there used to a mine and then you can look in the Jackson County history book and you can read about the mine and you can write a column about that. There’s just… you just kind of… I like meeting different people and then you’d know everybody that was in local government because you’d go sit at their three- or four-hour meetings. You’d know people around town. It was kind of nice. Lynn Hotaling 16 EY: What did you learn from working at the Herald? LH: Well I learned a lot about Jackson County history. I met a lot of people. I learned… I guess, really how important the newspaper is to people. When… I live out on Cullowhee Mountain or Cullowhee Mountain Road and occasionally the Speedwell General Store that used to be out there and it was kind of a hub for the community and occasionally they couldn’t come to town and get their papers and they’d ask me to bring them on my way home. So, I would, and I would drive up and there’d be people standing there on Wednesday afternoon waiting for their newspaper. They’d see me, I guess. Charlie Stallings who used to run it I guess he’d said, they’d come in looking for their papers and he said, well Lynn’s going to bring them in a little while and they’d see me come and they’d come over to the car. They’d be opening the backseat door unloading the papers before I could even get out. I mean that was kind of neat to know that people cared that much about what you worked on. You know. So that was good. EY: So, I know you wrote a book about Sylva. How was that different than you know writing newspaper articles about Sylva? LH: Well as it turned out a lot of it wasn’t that different. It was constraining because you… The way that came about there’s this press called Arcadia that’s big into local history and they… I guess they pretty much look at a map and think, oh we don’t have a book about that town, and they were looking for somebody to write a book about Sylva. And as it turned out I don’t know how they usually go about finding somebody but as it turned out there was a girl, young woman now, who was my second daughter’s age that I knew and somehow she had taken a job with that company in Charleston or somewhere. And they… maybe she pitched it I don’t know. Maybe she said you want a book by Sylva you should get this person. She works at the newspaper. So, they approached me and I agreed because I thought it would be a good thing for the town and I thought it would be a good thing. I just thought it would be good to get the information down but a lot of it… a lot of what you’ll find in a smaller community… people know stuff but it’s not well documented so a lot of that was just finding pictures and finding people who knew enough about the picture to help you write a caption because if you’ve looked at the book that’s all it is, pictures and captions. But Arcadia has like this template and you can’t vary and the whole thing has to be. . . I don’t remember, but there’s a word limit like for the whole thing including the introduction and all the captions. There’s a fixed number of pages. There’s a number of photographs you can have. There’s all this stuff. That was a little annoying. For one example, we wanted… I think most people send them a random bunch of pictures and a random bunch of words and they do it, but I wasn’t into that so we had made… we had made ourselves a template. The guy at the Herald who was helping me. And there’s a program we used called InDesign which is a great thing because you can write in it and you can also manipulate text and pictures and stuff. So anyway, we had ourselves a template pretty much exactly like their page and we put our stuff on it. We put our things and we had it all perfect and then we get ready to turn it in and they said okay well you need to send us the scans numbered in the order they appear in the book and you need to send us all the text in a word document. I’m like, ok why? And they said that’s how it is. So, we do all that. They send us back proofs. Guess what it is. InDesign pages (laughter). They look almost exactly like what we had taken apart except the pictures weren’t cropped as good. So anyway, on a couple of them I did go ahead and send them mine because I wanted them. I had to get a variance. It’s like going before the town board to get a variance on a building. Like there was one thing I really wanted to do. I had these three... I had like four things that could go across the center line… be like panorama shots and I had these three things and Lynn Hotaling 17 they were so skinny. I wanted to put them all on one page, so I had to beg to get them to do that, so I did send them that picture. They still messed it up though. That’s all right. They asked me to do it but to get back to how it was different or the same as the newspaper. It was working with more fixed numbers of words. You know, in most newspaper writing I could do what I wanted as long as I could make it fit on the page. So, I’d write it and I’d look at it if I needed to. If it just wouldn’t go, then I’d go back and condense. But with them I had to do that to start with and that was a little harder. But a lot of it was ask somebody for a picture and then talk to them and then find out about that picture and then look up anywhere I could and verify as much as possible the information that… It wasn’t that different, I guess. I had to do it like in between. I did it a lot of Saturdays because I knew better than to make it a long drawn out project and they said when do you want to have it done… this was January… I said March (laughter). Because I knew if I put it off it was never going to happen, so we got that done. EY: Can you elaborate on your process of writing the book and the pictures in it? I mean who did you ask? How did you figure out? LH: I had help. I had some people from the genealogy society who knew a lot and… but mostly it just came down to finding enough good representative pictures or you’d get kind of intrigued by a picture and you’d want that in there and then you’d finally track down the information for it. I didn’t have a lot of

Lynn Hotaling is interviewed by a Smoky Mountain High School student as a part of Mountain People, Mountain Lives: A Student Led Oral History Project. Hotaling moved to Jackson County in 1970 to attend Western Carolina University. She shares stories and thoughts about her time at Western, working at various jobs including a Christmas tree farm, and talks about how she ended up working for the Sylva Herald. She discusses her various roles at the newspaper and her experience writing the Arcadia Press books, Sylva and Jackson County.

• Creator
  • Hotaling, Lynn
• Contributor
  • Yang, Emily
• Format
  • Sound recordings
  • Transcripts
  • Interviews
• Type
  • Sound
  • Text
• Date
  • Date interview: 2019-05-29
• Extent
  • Duration: 1:26:20
  • Pages: 19
• Subject - Topic
  • Hotaling, Lynn -- Interviews
  • Newspaper editors -- North Carolina
  • Newspapers -- North Carolina, Western
  • Western Carolina University -- Students -- Social life and customs
  • Women authors -- North Carolina, Western
• Source institution
  • Western Carolina University
• Source Collection
  • WCU Oral History Collection - Mountain People, Mountain Lives
• Identifier
  • HL_MPML_Yang_Hotaling_2019-05-29
• Repository
  • Western Carolina University Hunter Library