Auction Crimps Cline Supporters’ Plan to Buy Home

By: Stephanie M. Mangino
The Winchester Star

Patsy Cline’s devotees have a simple wish, but they have not been able to make it come true by the end of this year.

Celebrating Patsy Cline submitted the winning bids for three items of Cline’s clothing in a Christie’s auction last month, and the approximately $25,000 expense crimped the group’s plans to purchase the home at 608 S. Kent St., where the singer of “Crazy” and “Walkin’ After Midnight” lived as her career developed.

“We ran into, I guess, a little detour with that auction,” CPC President Jim Stutzman said Monday.

On the March 5 observance of the 40th anniversary of Cline’s death, Stutzman said he hoped the group would own the home by the end of the year.

  1. “Folsom Prison Blues” - Johnny Cash, 14.5%
  2. “Crazy” - Patsy Cline, 13.7%
  3. “Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness” - Nanci Griffith, 9.5%
  4. “He'll Have To Go” - Jim Reeves, 8%
  5. “Blue Eyes Crying in The Rain” - Willie Nelson, 7.65%
  6. “Stand By Your Man” - Tammy Wynette, 6.25%
  7. “I`m So Lonesome I Could Cry” - Hank Williams, 5.3%
  8. “Jolene” - Dolly Parton, 4.9%
  9. “Guitar Town” - Steve Earle, 4.5%
10. “Past The Point of Rescue” - Hal Ketchum, 4.1%
11. “Sing Me Back Home” - Merle Haggard, 4%
12. “Hickory Wind” - Gram Parsons, 3.15%
13. “Guitars, Cadillacs” - Dwight Yoakam, 3%
14. “The Most Beautiful Girl” - Charlie Rich, 2.8%
15. “He Stopped Loving Her Today” - George Jones, 2.4%
16. “Sweet Dreams” - Emmylou Harris, 1.8%
17. “Coal Miner`s Daughter” - Loretta Lynn, 1.7%
17. “When You Say Nothing at All” - Alison Krauss, 1.7%
19. “Man of Constant Sorrow” - Stanley Brothers, 1.45%
20. “Desperados Waiting For A Train” - Guy Clark, 1.25%

Stepp-Coughlin Outlines Tourism Board’s Fiscal Goals

By: Stephanie M. Mangino
The Winchester Star

The Winchester-Frederick County Tourism Board wants the local recognition of the 2004 National Tourism Week to be something special.

Executive Director Melanie Stepp-Coughlin said the board hopes to cap the week of May 8-16 with an awards ceremony that would honor outstanding service in all of the tourism industry’s forms, from outstanding restaurant employee to an exemplary attraction and recognizing something that made a “big impact on a little budget.”

Stepp-Coughlin said at Thursday’s meeting of the Tourism Board that she also hopes 150 people will attend the event, for which sponsors will be sought.

The money raised likely would be used to build on a $1,000 scholarship established in Ruth Deskins’ name, she said. Deskins was the board’s executive director at the time of her death from cancer in July.

Teddy of The Wilburn Brothers Dies At 71

By: CRAIG HAVIGHURST
Staff Writer

Teddy Wilburn, half of a country duo that excelled in both music and the music business from the 1950s through the 1970s, died yesterday from congestive heart failure after a battle with a rare form of Parkinson's disease at Southern Hills Medical Center. He was less than a week shy of his 72nd birthday.

The Wilburn Brothers, Teddy and Doyle, sang close harmony on such hits as Hurt Her Once for Me, and wrote songs such as Somebody's Back in Town and Let Me Be The First To Know.

They also founded publishing and booking companies that aided the careers of Loretta Lynn, Jean Shepard, Sonny James, the Osborne Brothers and others. Doyle died in 1982.

Patsy Cline’s Clothing Attracts High Bidders
Local Group Buys 3 Items

By: Stephanie M. Mangino
The Winchester Star

Patsy Cline’s legacy fetched a high price Tuesday, 40 years after her death.

Sixteen clothing items placed on the auction block netted $123,919, according to a spokesperson for Christie’s auction house in New York, which handled the midtown Manhattan sale.

Every item up for bid sold, according to Christie’s.

The pieces owned by the legendary pop and country music singer came from the estate of Cline’s mother, Hilda V. Hensley of Winchester, who designed and sewed many of her daughter’s outfits.

Cline died on March 5, 1963, at the age of 30, in a Tennessee airplane crash. Her mother died in 1998 in Winchester.

Since 2001, Hensley’s surviving children, Sylvia M. Wilt and Samuel L. Hensley, have battled over pieces of their mother’s estate.

'Sweet Dreams' Songwriter, Artist Don Gibson Dies

By: PETER COOPER
Staff Writer

Country Music Hall of Famer Don Gibson, a hit artist and songwriter who penned the classics Sweet Dreams, I Can't Stop Loving You and Oh Lonesome Me, died yesterday of natural causes at Baptist Hospital in Nashville. He was 75.

“He sang very well, and I go back to the great songs he wrote,” said fellow Hall of Famer Eddy Arnold. “Golly Bill, those were monsters that he wrote.”

Born Donald Eugene Gibson, the singer credited Arnold and Red Foley as two of his prime vocal influences, and his sonorous, uptown singing style echoed those two greats. In the 1940s, he began singing on WHOS, a radio station in his native Shelby, N.C., with a band called the Sons of the Soil.

Feb. 2, 1950

Last summer, I had the pleasure of meeting Ruth Grim Wingfield at the rollicking reunion put on by the 1953 graduates of the Winchester Memorial Hospital School of Nursing. Since then, she has mailed me a couple of interesting packets — fodder for Valley Pike — dealing with, among other things, her great-grandfather and her friendship with Patsy Cline.

As a girl growing up in Stephens City, Ruth says she did not truly appreciate the history of her homeplace. But, after moving around the country — she has lived in Louisiana for the past 37 years — her memories of the sweet rhythms of Valley life have grown more dear.

Ruth’s great-grandpa, a former Union cavalryman named Samuel Bates who made Stephens City his post-war home, is worth a column unto himself. But for the purposes of this Valley Pike, I will concentrate on Ruth’s acquaintance with Patsy and one of those magical nights at Handley High School when the latter lit up the local stage with her talent.