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This is my father. He loves the lake and motor powered objects.
This is my dad with one of his boats. He really likes to teach people to water ski. He taught me when I was four and so 26 years later one thing I can say with confidence… I am good at water-skiing.
And this is my dad with his gold corvette (the bat mobile.)
And this is his garage art.
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five hours at a high school football game….and not much to show for it…..other than this shot of the Byrnes’ visitor seating an hour before the game. I am going to another one tonight to try and do better.
BMW Z3 and Z4 Homecoming weekend. 500-600 cars return to their birth place with their owners.
This is one of the owners, Peter from Pennsylvania. He has been coming down for seven years for the BMW Homecoming weekend and is known as the guy with the hat. “It is a family event.”
This is Reall from Anderson, SC which is 1 hour and 17 minutes away from the BMW plant in Spartanburg. The Anderson Housing Authority thought the BMW Homecoming would be a fun outing for the community to go and look at people with cars that cost over $30,000.
From the BMW Homecoming I went to a local hunting club’s opening day of dove season.
A group of 15 men return each year for food, stories and hunting. “It’s like Christmas,” I was told.
And Sunday morning, back to Walker’s Chapel church for Sunday school and service. I was amazed by the condition of the well loved Bibles.
Then Monday with the Jones family. He works at BMW, she works at Reidville Elementary, Sam Jones is the Byrnes High School field goal kicker and Nick Jones is an aspiring minister and football star. They are the all star Reidville Family.
And this is the new Reidville family. They are moving from North Carolina to live here, in a subdivision that was once a peach orchard. The family includes five home-schooled children who are named after people in the Bible.
As you can see, I am having a tough time with focus but I am hoping all these encounters and adventures will come together in the end.
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Now that the majority of the textile mills have closed down, the mill houses, that once housed the workers, are being dressed up with paint and converted into trendy living spaces for young students and couples, like newly-weds Rube and Ellen.
Ellen has just started her master’s at the University of Georgia and she is thrilled to have found such a nice place to live.
Rube was an original member of The BlueBellies Band. Arann and Rube were happy to be reunited, if only for a night, so they could rekindle their music love. It was a complete coincidence that they dressed exactly alike on this day….or was it? -
“Family is everything.”
This is Sandra Gowan’s family. Sandra is the town clerk. Her husband is the town magistrate. Her mom worked a textile mill, the old industry, and her son works at the BMW plant, the new industry.
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Tim Brady is the Assistant Chief of the Reidville Fire Department. His wife Dolly makes missiles for the military. The lab Buddy retrieves doves when Tim takes him hunting and the chihuahua Hunter barks, at everything.
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“Football is like religion here.” And it is combined with religion here. Sam tells me that every Sunday the team goes to church together and every Wednesday the Coach has a prayer breakfast. Football is so big that the revival at a local church was reduced from 5 days to 3 days because no one comes on football nights.
This is Sam Jones, he is a senior at Byrnes High School. He is the field goal kicker on the varsity football team that is made up of 98 young men. This is his car he inherited from his grandmother and just finished remodeling after two years. He wants to be a PE coach.
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On the 25th of August at 5 pm, The Walker’s Chapel Presbyterian Church held the 1st Anniversary for the Daughter’s of Destiny.
The Daughters of Destiny is a dance ministry made up of young women who have come together as a team and have made great efforts to become one in Christ, so that people would see them as a pathway to Jesus. Arann and I went to photograph the celebration. It was my very first time in a black church.
To be honest I was nervous about how we would be received. I knew one person at the church and I proved that I did not know him very well, as I referred to him as Belton Wayne instead of his proper name Belton Lane.
The history of black and white relations, especially in this area of SC, is scarred from the years of injustice towards the black population. Physically we were reminded of the separation by the fact that this church is the ‘black’ presbyterian church and it sits 100 ft behind the ‘white’ presbyterian church. In conversation we were reminded of the tension by a lovely older woman who said, “If it weren’t for the Lord, my people would have been wiped out by the way we were treated.”
But despite all of our nervous, it was an incredible experience: the music, the praising, the energy, the stories, and the people who welcomed us without hesitation. I met some wonderful people, who I hope to talk with again, to hear their stories of picking cotton and peaches and growing up black in rural South Carolina.
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“91 years old and nothing aches.” A farmer all his life with nothing left to farm except the weeds. He still has 15o acres left over from the land grant that was given to his great grandfather by the King of England, and to the developers’ dismay, he is saving it for his kids.
The house in the painting is Holly Hill, his family lost it during the depression and the man who owns it now has added an Olympic size pool. The photo on top of the tv is of Walter and his wife, who passed away last Christmas. He said he knew he was going to marry her the minute he saw her and now he pulls weeds to keep his heart and mind busy. Walter watches Fox news, the stock market channel or the gospel choir everyday.
Walter has been sitting at the same end of the pew, in the third row, for all of his 91 years. He believes God saves fools and babies.
somewhere between a handshake and two kisses 
