[soft music] - Coming up on "Best of Our State," we'll visit the home of one of the 20th century's most significant poets.

- [Carl] "The sea moves always, the wind moves always.

"What they sing is the song of the people."

- And a legendary "Washington Post" news photographer shares the stories behind some of his most iconic photographs.

- [Matthew] Newspapers only want one photograph.

They don't need two or three, they want one photograph's gonna tell the story.

This is a biggie.

- That's next on "Best of Our State."

We dip into treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

Hello, I'm Elizabeth Hudson, editor-in-chief of "Our State" magazine, and your host.

Known, as the poet of the people, Carl Sandburg left an indelible mark on American literature in the 20th century.

We explored the Henderson County home and National Historic Site of this literary icon.

- [Narrator] In the North Carolina mountains, there is a snapshot frozen in time.

[soft music] It is Connemara, the home of a renowned poet, writer, musician, and man about the country.

He was so famous in his time and now that we most often still speak of him simply as Sandburg.

- [Carl] "The sea moves always, the wind moves always.

"They want and want and there is no end to their wanting.

"What they sing is the song of the people."

Connemara is now the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site.

It is alive with memories of this famous, yet down to earth man who lived here with his family and his times from their 1945 arrival at this 246 acre farm in Flat Rock, to July of 1967, when the man known most as the preeminent biographer of Lincoln, passed away.

Their home is rich with reflections of lives well learned and well lived.

For young Charles A. Sandburg, a life of letters that began essentially, with his travels around the country, starting at age 19, in 1897.

An experience that stretched over many years and informed a lifetime of writing.

- There was something inside him that made him want to write from the time he was just a youngster.

- [Narrator] If you can imagine a little girl tagging along with her famous grandfather through their comfortable home and farm, this would be Sandburg's granddaughter, Paula.

- I was just two and a half when I came here, and all I really remember of those very earliest years, is just the wonderful freedom of this place.

We had the entire outdoors to explore, and much of our time was spent down at the barn or up on the mountainside.

My grandfather would be up here working on the rocks at the back of the house, and I had a little moss garden that I developed near him and would come up here and play beside him often.

And I remember the scents from the kitchen and from the gardens and the canning and the pies and the cakes, and just all the wonderful things that one associates with farm life.

- [Narrator] But before Connemara, before all the accolades and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, before Sandburg had matured as a writer, there was time spent drinking in the landscape of the early 20th century, getting to know its people and experimenting with verse on his own.

♪ I'm going away for a stay a little while ♪ ♪ But I'm coming back if I go 10,000 miles ♪ - [Narrator] There were over two decades as a newspaperman, and a romantic interest, 24-year-old Lillian Steichen, a Latin teacher.

The attraction was immediate.

♪ Love oh love oh careless love ♪ - [Paula] They had both met at a social Democratic party rally in 1908.

♪ The love oh love oh careless love ♪ ♪ You see what love has done to me ♪ - [Narrator] The future poet and Pulitzer Prize winner showed his gifts early.

- He wrote to her, "Light and air and food and love, "and some work are enough.

"In the varying phases of these cheap and common things, "the great lives have found their joy."

And here at Connemara, we really lived those words out.

- [Narrator] They didn't have to name Connemara.

The previous owner had done that for them, but they did have to make a decision back in 1945, whether to stay in Michigan or move south.

- My grandmother wanted a milder climate to raise the goats and to continue the farming, and my grandfather was very agreeable to whatever she wanted, as long as he had peace and quiet and could work.

He was game for making the move.

And when he saw Connemara and got up on the porch and looked out at the view, and he was sold, [soft music] - [Narrator] The tempo of each day was dictated by the demands of a working farm, where Lily attended her prize-winning goats, and by Carl's writing, which he said was 95% perspiration and only 5% inspiration.

- [Carl] "To work hard, to live hard, to die hard "and then go to hell after all, would be too damned hard."

- [Paula] My grandfather had very different habits than the rest of the family, usually worked upstairs in his loft-like rooms.

He often worked into the night and just as he would be finishing up his work in the morning, the rest of the family would be waking up and sometimes he would even wave to us from his bedroom window up above, as we would be setting out for the barn.

- [Narrator] Those barns were busy.

Lillian's mission was to get the best milk production possible from her herd, and she kept meticulous records, filling file cabinets and bulletin boards in the farm office with details of her champions' births and lives.

[goats bleating] There are still goats around the place, descendants of Lillian's prize-winning herd.

They remain one of the farm's most popular attractions, especially for Connemara's younger visitors.

[children conversing] Back at the house, Sandburg would arise after some satisfactory amount of sleep, and work surrounded by the tens of thousands of books and magazines that cluttered the place.

[soft music] But he would always head back downstairs to join the family at dinner time.

- [Paula] We always had dinner together.

Often he would read whatever he had been working on that day, which was sometimes difficult for a small child to sit through, but sometimes it was a lot of fun.

- [Carl] "Blessed are they who expect nothing "for they shall not be disappointed."

- And he did indeed have a great sense of humor and a great sense of fun with nonsense and just whimsicality.

- [Carl] "He was quiet as a wooden-legged man "on a tin roof, and busy as a one-armed paper hanger "with the hives."

- One of them, favorite of mine is, "I am James Jones.

"Oh, you are?

"Take a chair.

"I am the son of James Throckmorton Jones.

"Ooh, is that possible?

"Take two chairs."

But always, politics and international affairs were of enormous importance to my grandparents.

- [Narrator] So therefore, it was important, not only to read the paper, at least six different leading newspapers a day, - [Radio Announcer] The pilot came back and announced that something was wrong with the deicing apparatus on his windshield.

- [Narrator] And to listen to the news, particularly the broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow.

- [Edward] A Frenchman sitting opposite me, leaned over and said a most philosophic statement, really, the basis of the cold war.

The deicing equipment is faulty and no one can see where they're going.

This is Ed Morrow reporting from London.

[soft music] - [Narrator] It was at Connemara where Sandburg kept a Brady Daguerreotype type of Lincoln beside his bed, that he tackled the enormous job of distilling his six volumes on Lincoln into one.

And it was at Connemara that Sandburg seems to have realized several of his life's goals.

- [Paula] One was to eat regular, one was to stay out of jail, have what he wrote published, be appreciated, and have some love across the American landscape, and sing every day.

♪ The farmer take the bollweevil ♪ ♪ And he put him in the hot sand ♪ ♪ The weevil say this is mighty hot ♪ ♪ But I'll stay in it like a man ♪ ♪ It is my home this'll be my home.

♪ - [Narrator] There are said to have been three people Carl Sandburg credited with great influence on his life.

One was a college professor, another was his wife, and the third was his brother-in-law, a man noted then and now for his fine, evocative photographic images, some of which graced the walls of their home.

Edward Steichen.

- [Paula] They seemed to have an instant bond when they met.

My grandfather said that the photographs that Uncle Ed took of him gave glimpses into his soul that no one else even guessed were there.

The montage photographs were taken after the final editing of the Lincoln books were put to bed in New York.

So there is a great feeling of relief on his face and of release as well.

It's a beautiful series of photographs.

- [Narrator] In 1968, Mrs. Sandberg sold their land to the National Park Service and donated the contents of their home and barn for preservation as the Carl Sandberg Home National Historic Site.

- So when we walk through this door, you're going to see the house as if the Sandburgs are simply taking a walker in the garden.

It's like a time capsule.

We hear many visitors say, "I look around the house "and this could be my grandparents' house, "I feel really comfortable here."

The comfy chairs, the orange crate with the typewriter on it, and especially looking in the kitchen, all the appliances.

It's a snapshot, a window of the 1950s.

[birds chirping] - Really here at Connemara, to a certain extent, he found the peace and quiet that I think he sought, particularly at that time of life.

He said, "A man must find time for himself.

"Time is what we spend our lives with.

"If we are not careful, we find others spending it for us.

"It is necessary now and then for a man "to go away by himself and experience loneliness, "to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, "who am I, and where have I been and, where am I going?

"If one is not careful, one allows diversions "to take up one's time, the stuff of life."

And I think here at Connemara, he very much found the peace to reflect and decide what he wanted for the remainder of his life.

[soft music] - During the transformative decades of the 1960s and seventies, Pulitzer Prize winner, Matthew Lewis, wielded his camera lens as a witness to one of our nation's most defining eras.

He generously unveils the narratives behind some of his most iconic photographs.

- That's what photography's all about to me, and it's been all my life, putting emotion on film.

- [Narrator] Matthew Lewis scouts the edge of a Thomasville parade for that perfect shot.

Seeking images in the crowd as he did 50 years ago in our nation's capitol, long before he even knew he'd become known as one of America's greatest news photographers.

His father and his father before him had been photographers.

Photographers prove themselves, not so much with technology, but with their ability to convert what they see into an arresting image.

You have to sense at what precise moment to take the shot, and what will happen when you do, something Matthew learned during his years of shooting events at Morgan State College in Baltimore.

- I photographed all the football games, all the track meets, I worked so hard, so passionate about photography, that's how I learned.

- And people took notice, including Gordon Parks, the celebrated staff photographer and writer for "Life" magazine, who gave the young man with all the promise, a few words of advice.

- He said, "Your lenses, your wide angles, "your telephotos, your 50, "each one is like your adjectives and adverbs.

"Each one will tell a different story, "will give a different impact."

I said, "Gordon, I'm 33," and before I could get another word, he points his finger and smiles, "It's never too late, it's never too late."

- [Narrator] Soon, Matthew was freelancing for the Baltimore "Afro American."

- I got my 35-millimeter camera, and I'm really going big guns.

Anytime, any importance happened in Baltimore or even Washington DC, I was there.

- [Narrator] On August 28th, 1963, the paper sent him to cover one of the largest political rallies for human rights in U.S. history, a march on Washington.

For young Matthew Lewis, it became much more than an assignment.

- When Dr. King starts that "I Have a Dream" speech, I couldn't, I was so galvanized, I couldn't hardly walk, I couldn't, I couldn't hardly take pictures.

And so I'm looking, looking, I spot this guy like, on a little mound or something.

That face is so proud and then behind him is an American flag.

I'm waiting until that flag, I think was in the right position, click.

And I kept walking, all of a sudden, I spied this lady, you just see the hope, the hope in her face, the hope it's there.

And just prayer.

You see it and you just react to it.

I move on a little further, then all of a sudden, I see this, a group of guys.

There's Burt Lancaster, then next to him is Harry Belafonte, next to him is Brando, next to him is a great producer, John Mankiewicz, and next to him is the great writer James Baldwin, next to him, Sidney Poitier.

And I'm overwhelmed.

- [Narrator] Later in 1963, the nation and the world was shocked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

- Dr. Carl Murphy said, I want you to cover JFK's funeral.

I find my way up to the Rotunda, all these flags, all these hundreds of people, there's a young black girl, and she pulls outta handkerchief up to her face while she's walking.

Boom, click, one picture, that's it.

When they come out of the Capitol building, I picked the best part I think I can have.

I didn't know how they were gonna do it, I've never covered anything like this before.

I looked, there's a leaf kind of curled up, and the wind's blowing it.

Zip, zip a little leaf, I heard it.

I know I took a picture of it, I know I did, I couldn't help myself.

But anyhow, I started concentrating on Jackie.

I could see she's about to break down and cry.

You know, it really, really hurt, touched you.

- [Narrator] The civil rights issue continued making news into the late sixties and beyond, despite the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin.

Not all hearts were changed, but some were.

- This was the first day of school in Baltimore, Maryland, just walking into the building, and lo and behold, this was the first photograph, first photograph situation I saw when, what more better picture can you come across?

Here was an elderly White teacher, hugging a young Black child about to break down in tears.

Pure emotion.

That's what photography is, and it can be that powerful.

- [Narrator] Some of Matthew's shots were just plain sad, evidenced in this 1968 photo of a confrontation between the Capitol police chief and demonstrators following establishment of a camp called Resurrection City on the mall in DC.

- [Matthew] They started in Mississippi, and also they had a mule train come through the South, bringing hundreds of African Americans to the nation's capital.

Bob Mays and I covered it for 14 days.

They had so many thousands of thousands of people, and they started having quite a few disturbances.

They're holding their hands out, and they're pleading not to throw the tear gas canister.

And Jerry Wilson is telling them to go back to Resurrection City.

People told me this is a powerful shot.

It is, but I wasn't happy taking it.

- [Narrator] The impact of one shot, of which Matthew has many, thousands perhaps, each image stored in his treasure trove of a basement in Thomasville, where his wife, Jeannine's family hailed from a time capsule of sorts.

- [Matthew] People come down here and they're, they're flabbergasted.

- [Narrator] Many of the pictures were taken during his days at "The Washington Post" and "The Afro-American."

- Admiral Zumwalt, This is Hugh Hefner, 1972 Bunnies of the Year contest.

Oh, Lana Turner and Alexis Smith on assignment in New York City, President Nixon with the Thanksgiving turkey.

That's the very distinction between a news photographer and another photographer, is we have to focus on just that one image, that one picture that "The Washington Post" wants.

You can't think in terms of two or three, newspapers only have room for one photograph.

That's all they want.

You attune yourself to really lose yourself, focus on getting that image to tell the story as best you know how.

- [Narrator] Setting, impact, emotion, all wrapped into a single powerful and memorable image.

- The telephone rang.

"King's been shot."

They sent me to 4th and U, because they knew the riots gonna break out.

Well, all hell really broke loose.

When I raised my camera up, boy, I'm telling you, I had a hard time pressing the shutter.

I took the photograph, but that's, I really hesitated there.

But I'm a news photographer and I took it.

And those are the things that's mind boggling, that you never, never forget.

Never forget.

You come back to "The Post," you go to the dark room, make a 8x10 print.

I feel really great when I see that picture come up.

They put a little caption sheet on it, who, what, where, and why, and you go to your next assignment.

Everything done at "The Washington Post" is boom, boom, boom, you know.

I used to wonder why people like Bob Woodward and Sally Quinn, you'd see each other crossing the newsroom and they wouldn't say anything.

Well, heck, I, that's fine with me.

I don't need to say anything anyhow.

Now I know what that's all about.

They're totally focused on what they're doing.

Synergy, man, you could feel it.

Nobody had to even talk to you.

I'd go to work and they say, go enterprise.

That happened quite a few times.

Go, enterprise, go find something.

So you're riding and you're looking, you're looking for anything.

You don't know what's going to happen.

But they want a photograph for the next day's newspaper.

I'm driving through Rock Creek Park and all of a sudden I see these two girls, they're on the swing.

And you wait, and you wait until everything's just right.

The smiles get better and the blonde hair is flowing out, and they're at the right angle.

You go boom!

You're working on the next assignment.

And a couple days later, I started getting this mail at "The Washington Post," I mean, dozens of letters on this one photograph.

That's what photography's all about to me, and it's been all my life, is that capturing that emotion, that genuine emotion is an emotion of joy.

But more important to me, it's a young Black girl and a young White girl.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Later, Matthew shot photo essays for "Potomac," "The Post's" Sunday magazine.

One of his more memorable assignments, was photographing chicken entrepreneur, Frank Perdue in a hen house.

- It struck me that he looked like a chicken.

So I said, would you pick up a chicken and place it on his lap?

He, gracefully, yeah, I'll do that.

And a lot of people liked it, I liked it too.

And I like, I like Frank Perdue.

- [Narrator] After so many years of great photography and a Pulitzer Prize, it's not surprising that one Matthew Lewis image sticks in his mind.

- This is a biggie.

I'm at "The Washington Post," and I go to work one day, and it's, "Oh, Reverend King is speaking "at a Vernon Avenue Baptist Church, "and we need a photograph."

This was six weeks before he was assassinated.

When I opened the doors, I walk in my heart skips a beat.

And man the light was shining.

It was like electricity.

White lines going vertical, and this way and that way.

And when he started speaking, the light cast went around his mouth and around his eye sockets and up, and when he pointed his arm and it went straight up to his finger and he opened his mouth and boom, that was it.

I could give a rat's behind whether "The Post" ever used it or anybody ever used it.

This picture I saw in front of me was for Matthew Lewis Jr, you know?

- [Narrator] Spoken like a true artist, like a man with a heart for his work and his subjects.

So what does a retired gentleman do with his time?

Sorts through his prints and his memories, and picks up the camera from time to time.

Ever vigilant for that perfect shot.

You gotta do it.

You can't help yourself.

That's been my life, it still is today.

You focus on that one photograph.

Boom, just like that.

[soft music] - Thank you for joining us for "Best of Our State."

We have enjoyed sharing North Carolina stories with you.

See you next time.

[soft music] [soft music continues] [upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] - [Narrator] More information about "Our State" magazine is available at OurState.com or 1-800-948-1409.