Whether `stringing' or `looping,' tobacco is the tie that binds many North Carolina farm families

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — When Sophie Sunday told her schoolmates she was taking off halfway through the school day, they couldn’t wait to find out why.“`I’m going to loop tobacco at the fair,’” the seventh grader told them. “And they’re, like, `What?’ They don’t have a clue.”To be fair, most people don’t.At 12, Sophie was the youngest contestant in the North Carolina State Fair’s annual tobacco stringing contest, which pays homage to a way of life that was already largely past when her parents were kids.Traditionally, tobacco was harvested by hand, hung in a log barn and cured to a golden-brown with a wood fire that had to be stoked day and night. But before it could go into the barn, the green tobacco had to be strung on long wooden sticks.What you called this practice depended on what part of the state you lived in. Because the fairgrounds are in the capital, Raleigh, they call it a stringing contest.“Where I grew up, in the middle of the state, we call it stringing,” said Pat Short, sup