This is Mom’s Southern Charm Legacy — a trail of Greensboro grit and grace, passed down from her and her hometown pride and her mother, Grace, who embodied it.

I created Childress Courtside in her honor–a tribute to the sparkle, wit, and not-so-quiet power of the Southern woman who shaped my story.

Some women marry legends. Others raise them. My mom saved them.

Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, my mom, Sondra Childress Cunningham, had the kind of Southern charm legacy that didn’t whisper—it sparkled.

She never needed a journal. Grace had taught her only daughter, a towhead tomboy, how to be a true Southern belle. But Mom found her own way of doing things.

Instead of diaries, Mom saved handwritten notes, cards, and letters above her kitchen desk.

Newspaper clippings, snapshots with her own captions, Life Magazine special editions, circus tickets, report cards, anything worth saving, found their way into the two filing cabinets in Dad’s office.

And beside the cabinet? The unabridged dictionary — perfect for pressing flowers, just like Grace taught her.

She wanted to remember every detail — not just of Dad’s life and career, but of ours. And when she wasn’t documenting memories, she was collecting new ones.

She Turns Strangers Into Stories

She’d come home from the supermarket with three bags of groceries and just as many names and stories.

(Meanwhile, Dad had mastered the art of mumbling so convincingly, strangers believed he knew theirs.)

There were no strangers when Mom started talking.

Her North Carolina drawl–she’d correct you if you called it Southern, thank you –thickened on cue, especially if she was getting pulled over for speeding.

Oh, she sped, but she came by that honestly. Her mom, Grace, was also an “ole hot-rod Nelly.” (No idea where “Nelly” came from. Possibly a horse. But somehow, all of Mom’s cars got the name, too.)

And every Nelly became “Ole Nelly.”

Mom had a knack for nicknames. If she didn’t think your name suited you, she gave you a new one. But mispronounce hers, call her Sandra instead of Sondra, and she’d set you straight.

There were no nicknames for this Greensboro girl. Not until she married one: The Kangaroo Kid, The Kid, Kang, Ham — Dad had them all. And she embraced them, just like she embraced his world.

She was his greatest sideline supporter. And early on, she’d started jotting commentary in the margins — literally.

Southern Cinderella Story

As a kid, I’d ask Mom to retell the story of how she met Dad, as if it were my favorite fairy tale. When I went to UNC-Chapel Hill, I secretly hoped I’d meet my Prince Charming, too.

(My prince didn’t come from the court — more of an air dare. We met on an airplane.)

But this is Mom’s story. Her Southern charm legacy starts with a Carolina Cinderella moment.

March 2, 1963 — the day after Carolina lost to Wake Forest in the ACC Tournament. Dad was a sophomore. Mom, a junior.

His team had just played their last game. Morale was low. But it was a party weekend.

Dad says, “We were crying in our beer, but we needed dates.”

Mom says, “He was gonna ask the first pretty girl he saw.”

She was that girl, though Dad called her a lady. And when he asked her out, she said yes.

There was just one problem: she had to be back by midnight, and he forgot her last name.

(“Childress,” we’d all be screaming if this were a rom-com.)

He only remembered Sondra. Thankfully, fate intervened at the Carolina Grill, and there she was again. He learned her last name, and they didn’t stop dating after that.

The Early Sidelines

Even in college, Mom was already staking her claim on the sidelines — not as someone fading into the background, but as someone to be reckoned with.

Flip through the 1963 yearbook and you’ll see her notes: Guess who? Scrawled next to her beauty contest photo. “Bill’s headquarters for three years,” beside his dorm listing.

Then there’s the photo of Dean Smith and Captain Billy Cunningham — my Dad’s head is missing and so is half of Dean’s face. One of us kids must have needed a photo. Mom didn’t care: “Dad didn’t mind. Besides, I wasn’t there that year.”

This wasn’t scrapbooking yet. But the instinct was there. Greensboro grit met Southern elegance — with a pen already preserving magic before she knew how much it would matter.

Before albums, there were boxes. Before acid-free pages, there were scraps and scribbles. She was decoding our world with envelopes labeled SAVE!, notes in the margins, and the kind of commentary only she could deliver.

Greensboro Grace

Long before she was Mrs. C,” she was Miss Sondra Childress — gracious, witty, and full of opinions about names.

That was Greensboro Grace: her way of remembering people, noticing details, giving others nicknames they didn’t know they needed, and keeping what mattered.

But grace alone didn’t make her unforgettable — grit did. That not-so-quiet Southern force beneath the lace. She didn’t just remember people, she made sure they remembered her. In every nickname, every note in the margins, every sparkle in her drawl, she let you know exactly who you were dealing with.

Between the manila envelopes and the 1963 yearbook, her role was taking shape.

She wasn’t a scrapbooker yet. But she was becoming the one who would save everything. Not just the headlines — but the handwritten notes, the flowers pressed between dictionary pages, the names of every bag boy at the store.

This is her Southern charm legacy — where Greensboro grace met golden grit, and a girl with a drawl and a debutant dress started saving stories that made us who we are.

You can take the girl out of Greensboro, but you can’t take the Greensboro out of the girl. Not when she’s got sparkle in her drawl and grit in her bones.

That’s my mom.