CRESCENT People: From Reporter to Author. John Boyanoski Turns Over a New Leaf.

There comes a time in a lot of people’s lives when they face that proverbial fork in the road.

Which one would you take? Would you go stay on your same route, with a general idea of your destination and what you’ll face along the way, or would you veer off to the other road, the one you’ve always wanted to take but didn’t because the uncertainty made you a little nervous?

John Boyanoski decided to take the scenic route. When the native Pennsylvanian made South Carolina his home in the late 90s, he took his Syracuse University journalism studies and found a home at the Herald-Journal in Spartanburg before moving on to The Greenville News and The Greenville Journal.

Then, that fork in the road presented itself. He left the world of news reporting for a life on the other side of the tape recorder – a life in public relations.

Somewhere along the way, he also decided to write three books that cemented his dedication to his adopted South Carolina.  

You went from newspaper reporter to author – from writing articles to writing books. You’re up to three of them now. How’d you get to this point?

I’m from Pennsylvania originally, grew up hearing ghost stories, listening to ghost stories. My family told them.

When I started moving, went away to college, got my first few jobs out of college, I always picked up the local ghost stories. It was just something that was natural to do.

So I moved to South Carolina in 1999, and of course, I picked up South Carolina ghost books. They were really good, fascinating stories, but they were all Lowcountry.  It was always ghosts in South Carolina, but everything was Charleston, Beaufort, Mt. Pleasant.  Gray Man of Pawleys and Alice of The Hermitage in every book, and there would be one or two Upstate stories, but I was living in Greenville/Spartanburg, and I was wanting to know about that area.

I started researching, talking to people who had heard things, some little stories.  In 2004, I was working at Greenville News. We were doing a big Halloween package, and I volunteered and ended up writing three Upstate ghost legend stories, and I was very proud of this.  I called my mother and said, “Hey, I wrote some ghost stories.”

It was kind of funny. I was covering crime and some politics at the time, so it was a little bit of a different thing for me.  It just so happened, a man who was from Charleston, had worked for University of Kentucky Press doing their ghost books, had just moved to Greenville.  He was a Furman graduate, and he was going to form his own publishing house, and the first book he wanted to do was Ghost Stories of the Upstate.

He grew up in Charleston, so he grew up with those stories and when he went to Furman for his undergrad, he wondered, “Well, where are the Upstate ghost stories?”  He literally had just moved to town a week or two before, saw the article, contacted me and said, “Hey, can you do a forty thousand word book on ghost stories in the Upstate?”  I thought, “Sure, why not?”  And I thought, “Forty thousand words…I write about a thousand words a day at the Greenville News for various things….uh, give me a month and a half, and I’ll have you a book.”

It’s a little bit tougher writing a book.   I quickly learned, for one thing, people don’t like talking about ghost stories in the Upstate.

It’s always been business-centric, the economic hub, that’s (ghost stories are) a Lowcountry thing.  “We’re too sophisticated, we’re too this, we’re too that,” so it took about eighteen months to write the first book.  And that was also learning to write a book.  You know, being a newspaper writer, I wrote in a very systematic, choppy way.

Where are the documents? Where is this? Where is that? Everything had to have an “according to” or “document said.”  A ghost is something that really doesn’t leave a paper trail, believe it or not.  They’re not saying “I, Thaddeus G. Ghost, will haunt this house for five years starting October 1^st, 2003 to 2008.  I will take a $500 payoff from the landlords to move away.”  They don’t have a paper trail, so it made it interesting.

I wrote the first book and I swore, “I’m never doing that again.  I’m not going to write another book.  It was too tough, it was too hard.  No one is ever going to read this thing,” and my friends were like, “Man, you’re a newspaper reporter. You just ruined your career.  People are going to think you’re crazy.”  We went out and we did our first book signing in Greenville County.  The book came out in 2006.  I vividly remember walking to the book store and there was a line of people. Already there was a line of people.  It wasn’t out the door, but there were five or six people already waiting in line holding copies of the book.  I thought, “That’s interesting.”  And everyone said “We love your book because somebody finally wanted to talk about ghosts in the Upstate.”  Every one of them had a ghost story they wanted to tell me and it dawned on me at that point that I had touched on something, so I took all their names and numbers down, put them in a file…

So you already had the basis for number two?

Pretty much.  I had five stories that first night, and over the next three months of my first book tour, everywhere I went in the Upstate, they would come in and say, “I loved your book.  I read about it in the local newspaper.  Here’s a story for you.”  Or “Hey, the story you had about this haunted place in Abbeville? Here’s an addition to it.”  Or “Here’s what I saw when I was at Converse College.” Or, “I’m so glad somebody wrote about this.”  And I had one older lady call me one time because we had a story about her family home, her childhood home.  She called me up and she said who she was, and I thought she was going to rip into me and yell at me.  She said, “I want to thank you because we saw that ghost when we were kids and no one would believe when we were children.  There’s an old lady who lives in our house. There’s a ghost in our house.  Our parents never believed us.  They thought we were crazy.  I called my brother. He’s ninety-seven in an old persons’ home in Georgia. I said, ‘Look, we were right. We’re weren’t crazy as little kids.  Someone else saw the ghost and they wrote about it.’”   So that was kind of a fun thing.

So we did the second book, and to this day, I get people always coming up with ghost stories, but the fun thing that has happened, for me and for South Carolina, is…  It’s not just me, I wrote the ghost book but, at the same time, we had those national TV shows on like SyFy and Discovery, all the Ghost Hunters and Paranormal Witness shows. It really sparked an interest, so now, two other people have written ghost books about the Upstate since I’ve written mine.  There are ghost stories from three counties in the Upstate, so all of a sudden, people have kind of realized “Hey, it’s a fun, little different thing…”

So now, this leads into my third book.

Because high school football has so much to do with hunting ghosts.

It does, it does.  The great ghost stories of the past, you know? But how I came about, again from being a newcomer to the state, I vividly remember when I moved here in 1999, I was working at the newspaper in Spartanburg, and a good friend of mine was our cops reporter and he said, “Do you like high school football?”  I said, “Yeah. I watch it. I played it in Pennsylvania, and it’s interesting.”  “Have you ever seen a good high school football game?”  I said, “I’m from Pennsylvania.  We’ve had some pretty good football players come out of that state.”  He goes, “No. You haven’t seen it until you’ve been in South Carolina.”  I said, “What do you mean?  Like, who are your great players and…”  He’s like, “No, it’s not the players, it’s the fans.”

I didn’t quite understand, so they dragged me out to Wofford College to see Spartanburg and Dorman at their big, annual rivalry game, and there were ten thousand people packed into that stadium.  I mean, more than they got for Wofford games, more than who showed up for Carolina Panthers summer practice.  Wow. This is interesting. This is what high school ball is all about, and over the years I just saw it.  All the love, the pandemonium, the people talking like, in Greenville County, the old Parker/Greenville High game.  How that was the event of the season.  And so I started wondering. I covered high school football for a while so I started wondering, “Where did it all start, how it all began and how has it changed?”

Every year you always hear somebody talk, “Well, this is the greatest team ever.”  Or “This is the greatest player ever.”  So, you know, who were the great players of the past?  Who were the great guys who caught the imaginations.  Was Byrnes better than the Spartanburg teams of the 90s?  Was that better than Summerville’s team in the 80s?  Was that better than the Spring Valley teams in the 70s, and so on and so forth?

Yes, so that’s how it came about.  You started seeing these stories. I see all these people at my book signing wearing these Spartanburg and Dorman items of clothing.  I said, “Why not a book on high school football?  Trace it back,” so I started doing that.  I picked up a publisher relatively quickly, and I thought when I went into it, “OK, I’m going to go through microfilm, I’m going to get the stories of all the great coaches, great teams, the guys with the NFL, the Art Shells, the Harry Carses, the Stephen Davises, the Fred Solomons.”  I thought, “OK, that’s going to be the book.  It’s going to be this kind of love affair of how great high school football is,” but the fascinating thing, the really fascinating thing to me was when I started going through it, going through the records, you started seeing names I knew as a political reports and crime reporter and everything.

For example, Pug Ravanel.  People know him from the 70s, long-time political leader in the state.  He was an all-state quarterback at Bishop-England in the 50s.  He went 18-1 as a starter and was essentially MVP of the state his senior year.  There’s no inkling of who Pug Ravanel is going to become.  It doesn’t say, “Pug Ravanel, future leader.”  It’s like, “Star prep quarterback for Bishop-England.”  Governor Dick Riley was captain of the team at Greenville High. Johnny Mack Brown, the long-time sheriff of Greenville and US Marshall was an all-state defensive end for Greenville High, actually a two-way player.  Caught a touchdown pass in the first televised high school footballs game in South Carolina history.  All of a sudden, it was kind of fun seeing these guys.  “Wait a minute, I know a Rick Timmons.”

Or like a Mike Fair over at Parker?

Mike Fair, you can tell a story and a half about Mike Fair.

His senior year…actually going back to his junior year, he was a fast running, sprint-out quarterback.  A lot of kids were like that at that time.  You had running offenses, but Mike Fair could probably throw the ball sixty yards on a dime, which no one could do at the time and no one had ever seen before, so he had these passing stats.  You’d see them like in the Greenville Piedmont and Greenville News like 9 for 11, 300 yards.  Literally, what was going on was the guy would just run deep and they’d go, “No one can throw that far,” and he’s throw a 60-yard touchdown and they’d go, “What just happened?”  Literally, every team in the league…they weren’t a very good team at the time…so his senior year, everyone was just created defenses to stop Mike Fair.  They’d have 7 guys on the line and 4 guys just back.  “OK, try to get up the middle on us.   If we can stop you up front or keep you from going 60 yards” was everyone’s defense.

He was so ballyhooed because he played at Parker, and the big game was Greenville-Parker. The week going in to it, at practice, they were quoting Mike Fair asking, “What’s going to happen?  Your last game…your last game ever in Greenville County?” He’s talking about the excitement they create, and it comes out the day of the game that he’d broken his knee pretty much the first day of practice, and they’d kept it hidden.

At the time, people gambled on high school games, so they didn’t want to affect the line of a game Mike Fair was playing. He couldn’t run, couldn’t move the day of the game.  They put their backup sophomore in and fell behind like 24-0 and, in desperation, they put Fair in in the third quarter just to see if anything would happen.  He couldn’t run, and he rallied Parker to make the game close, at least.  They still lost, but, playing on one leg, he threw three touchdown passes in the second half and almost rallied Parker with almost sheer will alone. Like it said in the newspaper, using sheer will alone.  He couldn’t move, he was just dropping back and throwing as far as he could trying to do anything to generate offense.

Then he went and played in the Shrine Bowl.  His knee was still gimpy, and it was funny because he scored 23 points and his jersey was 23 and he was actually quoted coming off the sidelines, “We had 23. That was all we needed.”  Classic Mike Fair, but it was so funny, you see Mike Fair, I’ve known him as a state senator my entire career.  You have Mike Fair the all-state quarterback, the pride of Parker High and the hyperbole was hilarious.

There was one time he was playing and there was a big fireworks show afterwards.  It was called the Lions Bowl and they said, “The fireworks started in the second quarter and Mike Fair threw two touchdown passes and made the game unreachable.  Then they had a fireworks show afterwards.”  It is stuff like that. It is funny because his first year, when he first became a star, Parker was not a good program at the time.  Their…even the Greenville News/Greenville Piedmont, they get the little write-up.  By the time he was a senior, it had gone from little two paragraph articles about Parker High to three or four page spreads about Mike Fair every week in the paper.  It was just interesting watching that progression.

And there are other really great stories that I picked up, especially during segregation. Forced segregation in 1970, but the first school to integrate was Woodruff High in 1966.

What happened was, the black school in lower Spartanburg County burned down and there was a big thing at the school board level.  “Where are we going to send these kids?  What are we going to do?  We have no school for them.”  The football coach at Woodruff, Willie Varner, a Hall-of-Famer, who, when he retired was the winningest coach in high school football history pretty much just took it on the chin.

He said, “We’re going to integrate.”  And he told his team, “This is it.  You’re not going to say anything to these guys.  You’re teammates now.  End of story.”  But there are no great speeches other than “OK, they’re your teammates.  I don’t want to hear a damn thing out of you.”  I talked to some of the players.  They said, “Yeah, there was nothing weird because Willie Varner said it’s not going to be an issue.”  So when Woodruff integrated in ‘66, there was no problem.  In ‘70, you had major problems throughout the state.

It was funny, just one coach saying, just laying down the law saying, “We’re not going to have an issue.  These kids are here.  They’re here now. They’re Woodruff Wolverines just like you.  They’re your classmates, your teammates.  You’re going to respect them just like any other teammate,” and it was no issue.  So it’s kind of an interesting thing, talking about the power of high school football in this state.

Literally, one coach changed a school district overnight just by him saying, “We’re going to do something.”  So it kind of tells you, it goes beyond just the gridiron, some of the interesting stories and the fascinating things that happened.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sumter native “Fabulous” Freddie Solomon lost his nine month battle with cancer on Monday, February 13, 2012 – the day this piece was published. He was 59 years old.

In 1970, in what many consider the greatest performance in Shrine Bowl history, he rushed for a record 197 yards and scored three touchdowns in the annual South Carolina/North Carolina showdown.

After college, beginning as a 1975 second round draft pick by the Miami Dolphins, Solomon enjoyed an NFL career that spanned 11 years – the first three in Miami and the last eight with the San Francisco 49ers where he won two Super Bowls (Super Bowl XVI over Cincinnati and Super Bowl XIX over Miami). During his professional career as a receiver, Solomon had 371 receptions for 5,846 yards and 48 touchdowns in 371 games.

Freddie Solomon was a leader on and off the field, and on behalf of the staff at CRESCENT, our prayers are with the Solomon family.