side of the path,” pointing to the area where the plants tended to be in the seven to ten dollar range. “If you would like, you could pay with plants from that side,” pointing to the area where the new releases were growing. Newly released plants could be twenty-five to a hundred and fifty dollars each, and while I always marveled at them, I could not afford them.
“All right” he said, motioning to one off his workers, let’s give him a Holly Hill Sunset, and dig a couple of Festival Enos, and here, get him some…” and he sent me home with over three hundred and fifty dollars worth of plants.
I had sold my first sculpture. And I had gone from a gardener to a “collector of daylilies.” It was unbelievable.
When Chessworks came to town, Jim remained suspicious. He would stop by occasionally and tell stories and chat, and he kept abreast of the new work. But he was not a buyer in the early days.
Once he had me weld a child’s bicycle into a wheelie for a display he was working on, which I believe I did for free. And eventually he would pick up the odd piece here and there. When I had help, he would happily pay them to grind out posts or install art fencing for him. His own deer fence, which he has been building out of bicycles for about a decade, may yet prove too labor intensive to complete.
A turning point for Chessworks was an occasion when Jim indicated that if I would put a planter out in my full sun, cracked asphalt parking lot; he would fill it with plants. I ignored the idea until one day when I was at the scrap yard with Janice, who spotted a series of giant “bowl liners” made of manganese that looked liked giant coffee cups without handles. “Those could be planters,” she said, at which point I had the crane toss one into the back of my truck.
I dropped the “planter” in the parking lot, fetched two more. I positioned the three planters in the parking lot and let Jim know I was ready to go. He brought the dirt, and the plants, and before things were even in flower I came into work one day with a note slipped under the door, asking for a price.
I was immediately in the planter business, and Chessworks has been shipping bowl liners ever since.
While the planter business has contributed nicely to the financial success of Chessworks, it was the plants that made the statement. In later years I built a giant planter in front of the shop. I fished the original bowls out and plunked a two thousand pound chess pawn in the middle, bearing a shiny stainless steel flag that read “Art for Sale.”
Jim has furnished that expanse of cracked asphalt with banana plants and giant thistles with bright blue blooms the size of baseballs, and lantana, and whatever else has triggered his imagination. I was so inspired by Jim’s plantings that I started my own honeysuckle collection. Jim dropped a wisteria into the mix, with cautious instructions that it be pruned just so. His garden contributions have transformed a non-descript building on the edge of a forgotten highway into a showpiece that demands that drivers hit the brakes and investigate this fecund roadside attraction.
In my latter years at Chessworks I routinely had visitors who stopped for seeds, or cuttings, and couldn’t have cared less about the art.
Perhaps Jim is a customer. Or perhaps he is a partner. Over the years I have driven traffic to his farm. And over the years he has driven customers to me. When he added garden art to his annual sales event, I sold every piece I delivered, and he did not take the usual percentage cut.
I suppose that if someone were keeping a ledger of our transactions, I would be ahead. He has fed my boys popsicles, and he has donated plant material to the biodiesel co-op, and more importantly, he has inspired me to push on.
Once when I was shipping a giant chess set I had all of the pawns lined up such that they were peering over the edge of the truck. Jim popped in and suggested that they looked like “The Moncure Boy choir.” I liked it. I made a piece called the Mon-cure Boy Choir, which consisted of twelve singing choirboys on a riser. It sold to a collector at a show in Maplewood, New Jersey. And it led to the fabrication of the Greensboro Boy Choir for a garden shop in downtown Greensboro. And it led to the production of the Sanford Boy Choir.
At the height of Chessworks, when I was shipping big chess boards throughout the region, and competing in sculpture competitions near and far, and staging openings with fair regularity, I brushed up against Don and Clyde.
Don was a lawyer turned artisan who ran a successful pottery with his partner Kenny. Clyde was a former district attorney turned real estate mogul who owned a big chunk of downtown Sanford. Together they were staging a pottery festival, which was an enormous undertaking.
They had television advertisements and potters from throughout the region, and they had decided to do with pottery in Sanford what I had been attempting to do with metal sculpture in Moncure. We were a good fit. They had an eye on economic development.
And I had been at it for a while.
Clyde hired me to create some enormous sculptures for his buildings and install them downtown. My crew and I put the Sanford Boy Choir atop a three story building on Steele Street. And we made a series of giant toys that adorned the face of one of his buildings. One year those toys made the phone book jacket, as a defining Sanford landmark.
But Clyde’s brilliance wasn’t merely in commissioning substantial pieces of art. The deal he struck with me was that I would spend the money he paid in Sanford.
Which I was delighted to do. During those years, I took my crew to lunch in Sanford. My family rented videos in Sanford. I became a well-known customer at the scrap yard, and the local welding store.
I traded sculptures for large lunch tabs that could sustain a handful of us dining in style every day. When it was time for a fancy dinner on the town, I would book the window of the Italian place downtown and fill it with my family of six.
The deals Clyde and I struck made me a member of the local business community, involved me in the artistic revitalization effort, and caused me to re-circulate my money in the effort.
Mac and Jan opened an art gallery downtown and sold my work. We headed to Sanford for plays at the remarkable Temple Theatre, and we spent summer nights in front of the band shell kicking a soccer ball with the kids and listening to the local bands.
It was a wonderful and heady time. I was making a living as an artist, and playing the role in Sanford, and Sanford was thriving.
But the pottery festival never managed to surpass its big first year. Part of the problem was structural. Sanford built its convention center on the edge of town, rather than downtown where the revitalization was in full swing. Don and Clyde were successful at attracting thousands of out of town guests to Sanford, but they came to the edge of town, and left again, without spilling into the shops and restaurants and other venues.
Dollars collected at the festival itself left town the moment the potters closed their booths. And the event never went on to become the economic anchor that it was intended to be.
The five-star restaurant closed, and Mac and Jan folded up shop. A deathblow to the cause came when the city leaders closed Depot Park in the heart of things, for a two-year renovation. Clyde sold some of his buildings, and the giant toys came down, and Sanford slipped back into Sanford as usual — which is an industrial town with an amazing scrap yard, and a vast amount of abandoned brick buildings.
The renaissance never really took, and Sanford — like Moncure — never really went on to become an artistic Mecca.
Nowadays
