"Men to Match Our Mountains," LOLOL!

They changed it to take the gender out of it.   Pissonthem.   I like it the way it was.  In Rutherford County the Mennonite women walked 10' or so behind the men.   This I saw many times downtown and at the airport.   Some of those women dressed in bonnets and long prairie dresses and their hair pulled up in funny-looking elevated shocks were so beautiful they had the faces of angels.  Amen.     But creepy dishonest politicians such as a procession of crooked sheriffs, ran the Mennonites out of Rutherford County.   They all sold out and left and went far away.  I still grieve about it.

We have a Mennonite population here in Buncombe but you don't see much of them.  And most of them have fled the county in disgust.

Women started campaigning for powerful offices in droves in the 60's and 70's.  I was chairman of the Buncombe County Board of Elections in the 70's, and our executive secretary, Sonya Friedrich, had obsessive political ambitions...but an abrasive tongue and not enough charisma.  She fizzled.   There were plenty of women who didn't and got on the bandwagons.  Even then our city council was owned by women, and not one man there to keep them under surveillance.

Then along came Wilma Sherrill whose ambitions stopped at nothing.  She got herself into the General Assembly and knew how to work the media to her advantage.  On the UNCA campus the most dramatic edifice is named after her.  That girl had her fingers in all the cakes.   She called me over to her office one day to complain about my role at the elections board.   She even accused me of making passes at the women in our office.   She had heard some false gossip.   I went away wondering who th I had just tangled with.  And I hadn't forgotten how she owned a people-peddling company called 'Accelerated Personnel' and had coerced me into hiring someone who was so incompetent she bombed out her first week.

Wilma knew how to flaunt her clout too.   I was driving east down Old Fort Mountain when she passed me (75 in a 55) in one of those huge luxury Chryslers.  She was at this time in the NC Senate and making waves.   She had all the ads on the car too, including a gaudy license tag.   "The NC SHP will bust her," I thought.   I kept a safe speed and when I reached him sitting over in his regular nook crouched to pounce, it was obvious he had let the platinum blonde speeder pass on by.  She had a title of nobility and immunity.