History@Hand—Events

Events

April 15-May 30, 2007—The Family Store Exhibit at Pack Place Gallery. The Family Store exhibit will be in Pack Place Gallery for the entire month of May, which has been declared Preservation Month by The National Trust for Historic Preservation. Hours of Pack Place are Tuesday through Saturday, 10-5 and Sunday 1-5.

May 6, 2007—Opening of the Family Store Exhibit with speaker Brenda Lilly, Pack Place Forum, 2:00
Asheville’s Own Hollywood Producer, Brenda Lunsford Lilly, To Talk of GROWING UP IN ASHEVILLE and Its Influence On Interfaith Elements in Her TV Show, State of Grace, for Opening of Jewish Exhibit.

Asheville native Brenda Lunsford Lilly will be the featured speaker at the re-opening of The Family Store: A History of The Jewish Businesses of Downtown Asheville, 1880-1990 on Sunday, May 6, at 2 p.m. at Pack Place. Mrs. Lilly was the co-creator and writer and the executive producer of “State of Grace,” a family drama on the ABC Family Channel for two seasons from November, 2001, through December, 2002.

For a total of 39 episodes, viewers were treated to the story of Hannah Rayburn, a Jewish girl from suburban Chicago, and Grace McKee, a southern girl from Ashmore, North Carolina, who met at Ashmore’s The Pines, a private school run by nuns. Those from Asheville recognize St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines school, and many who attended St. Genevieve’s have spent hours debating just who Hannah and Grace were in real life.

Mrs. Lilly will answer that question, along with others, after talking about her 1960s upbringing in Asheville, which included close Jewish friends and parents who grew up in Asheville during the early twentieth century whose close friends were also part of Asheville’s Jewish community. Her talk will be supplemented with clips from the television show.

Mrs. Lilly’s presentation represents an element that the developers of The Family Store exhibit stressed in their project. “I’m glad Brenda will be talking about her experiences,” said Jan Schochet, Family Store historian. “We went to St. Genevieve’s together, and I watched the show eagerly each week, familiar with the interfaith connections Brenda included in Hannah and Grace’s lives. It was common growing up in the sixties in Asheville to have friends from all walks of life.

” “Elements that we stress in The Family Store encompassed a large part of downtown Asheville and growing up in Asheville until the downtown demise of the early 1970s,” said Sharon Fahrer, Family Store project director. “Brenda Lilly is a perfect person to talk about issues we’ve tried to address in our exhibit, such as the broad outreach of the Jewish merchants into the larger community. Her show refers to that.”

June 1 thru October 31—In June, The Family Store exhibit will again go up throughout downtown Asheville, as it did last fall, with the twelve exhibit panels in different storefronts around town. A map showing the locations of the panels will be included in the exhibit brochure (see below), which will be available in June at Pack Place and other downtown locations. Brochures allow a self guided tour.

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