Brits awed by giant mutant peanuts from N.C.

“In March 1959, scientists, government officials and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party at the Royal Commonwealth Society, London.
“Unbeknownst to them, one course was a strange strain of American peanuts: ‘NC 4x… North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed’ peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units.
“The irradiated peanuts were big as almonds, outshowing the British groundnuts served alongside. Their inventor, Walter C. Gregory of North Carolina State College, had sent them to Muriel Howorth, enthusiast for all things atomic.
“Disappointed that her guests were less than appreciative of the great scientific achievement present at table, Muriel afterwards ‘began inspecting [the] uncooked nuts wondering what to do with them all…I had the idea to…pop an irradiated peanut in the sandy loam to see how this mutant grew.’
“The ‘Muriel Howorth’ peanut (for she had already named it after herself) germinated in four days and was soon 2 feet high.
“Almost immediately there were interviews and television appearances and sightseers peering into the glasshouse to get a look.
“Garden writer Beverley Nichols came to call:
” ‘Yesterday I held in my hands the most sensational plant in Britain.
It holds in its green leaves the promise of victory over famine.
” ‘It is the first “atomic” peanut.’ “
— From “Atomic Gardens” at the Garden History Girl blog (Dec. 2, 2010)

Not enough of Gordon Gray to go around?

“In his five years as president of the University of North Carolina, shy, hardworking Gordon Gray, 46, won both the respect and the admiration of his three campuses. He carried on a $47 million building program, launched new four-year schools of medicine, dentistry and nursing, earnestly tried to make his university ‘the brain, the nerve center, the heart and the conscience and the will of the state.’
“But he was a man too much in demand: he was called so often to Washington — as special assistant to President Truman on foreign aid, director of the Psychological Strategy Board, chairman of the board that judged the Oppenheimer case, and now as Assistant Secretary of Defense — that for much of the time he was an absentee landlord. Too few of his colleagues got to know him well, and Gray himself realized the awkwardness of his position.
“Last week his trustees regretfully accepted his decision to leave for full-time duty with the Government.”
— From Time magazine, November 28, 1955

Behind ‘the excessive rate of mortality’ at Salisbury prison

On this day in 1865: Confederate inspector T.A. Hall reports to Richmond on conditions at Salisbury prison: “The excessive rate of mortality among the prisoners merits attention. Since the 21st of October 3,479 have been buried. Pneumonia and diseases of the bowels are the prevalent diseases. The prisoners appear to die, however, more from exposure and exhaustion than from actual disease.”

 

Symphony Stories: Remembering the NC Symphony Children’s Concerts

Cover of Symphony Stories

The real Carnegie Hall audience was in the schools. On Symphony Day the children knew what they were hearing, singing and playing. They had read about the music in Adeline McCall’s Symphony Stories, their teachers had attended her workshops where she not only demonstrated children’s instruments to blow, tap and shake, but got the teachers on their toes to sway with free movement to the music. As supervisor in Chapel Hill’s elementary schools, Adeline filled her music room with crafts and drums from other lands and wore colorful earrings and Mexican patterns in her clothing; they danced and finger-painted to the recordings; they created puppets and plays, and used hand-made xylophones, auto harps, and bells as they sang folk tunes thousands of other children would know on Symphony Day.

Our Children’s Concert Division was a working triangle with Ben, Adeline, the children’s division director and I, coordinator with the schools….Year after year, Adeline and I went through a laborious search of music for the Little and Full Symphony programs. We ‘borrowed’ the latest Boston Pops recordings from the Intimate Bookstore, and listened far into the night at her house.I judged selections for their mass appeal and effect in a large hall, and Adeline considered the teaching and learning possibilities….

Ben studied our proposed programs. Later he pointed out instrumentation too large for the size of the orchestra, a wind part too stressful for a player with two concerts a day, or music rental beyond our budget….Together our working trio created a 59 minute program geared to a child’s attention span that was just right for the orchestra. The full symphony played large scores with high rentals so that children could hear selections from Copland’s Rodeo and Billy the Kid, Grofe’s Hudson River and Mississippi Suites, Stravinsky’s Firebird, and Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite as well as the basics: Haydn, Handel, Mozart, earlier composers, and the three B’s. Children and adults were captivated by arrangements of ‘Old Joe Clark,’ ‘Cripple Creek,’ ‘Old Gray Mule,’ ‘Dixie,’ and ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head.’

-Maxine Swalin, in her book An Ear to Myself, recalling the long-running children’s music programs of the North Carolina Symphony. Swalin and her husband, Benjamin, were instrumental in leading the North Carolina Symphony through its early days. Benjamin Swalin served as the Symphony’s conductor from 1939-1972 and Maxine served as coordinator of programs for many of those years. The two collaborated with Adeline McCall to provide N.C. Symphony concerts for school children around the state. One staple of the concerts was Symphony Stories, a booklet that provided young attendees with background on the musical pieces they would hear and the individuals who composed them. The publications were rich with information and often had beautiful covers.

The children’s concerts were still going strong in the early 1970s when I was in elementary school. Each year we learned a new song and a new instrument so that we could accompany the Symphony on one piece. Tonettes, recorders and auto-harps were some of the instruments we used. To this day I can’t hear “Old Joe Clark” without recalling a spring afternoon in 1972 when my 2nd grade classmates and I sang the folk classic while accompanied by the N.C. Symphony in UNC’s Memorial Hall. For some unknown reason I was struck by a vision of Symphony Stories yesterday (February 15). I was thrilled to discover that we’ve got a collection of the booklets (Seasons 1945/46-1981/82) in the North Carolina Collection. In an odd coincidence, it turns out that Adeline McCall died on February 15, 1989.

Did the Symphony visit your town?

Artifact of the Month: 1936 commencement marshal sash

This blue-and-white sash, the February Artifact of the Month, was worn by Nannie Louise Davis in UNC’s 1936 commencement exercises. Badges at the shoulder and hip ornament the sash and gold tassels hang from the ends, rendering it an appropriately regal piece of regalia.

Davis was a junior when she was elected marshal by her class in 1936. This page from the Yackety Yack shows her with her fellow marshals. If she stands out from her peers on this page, it’s with good reason: Louise was the first woman to hold the position.

Davis was born in Goldsboro in 19241914. She began her college career at Duke and transferred to UNC as a sponsored sophomore. As a UNC student, she lettered in basketball and graduated in 1937 with a B.S. in Commerce. The 1937 Yackety Yack also identifies Davis as the Secretary of the Woman’s Association, Treasurer of the Woman’s Athletic Association, President of the Co-ed Class, and a member of the Glee Club. With a résumé like that, it’s no surprise her classmates selected her for the honor of serving as a commencement marshal.

After graduating, Louise lived in Raleigh with her husband Otis Vance Jones Jr. They raised three children and, in 1950, started the Jones Brokerage Company. Louise died two years ago, on Feb. 16, 2010.

Alice Adams, come on down! The canon awaits

“With 36 million manuscripts and a million rare books, the Harry Ransom Center, on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, is a standout in the exclusive club of the world’s great museum-quality collections….

“The Ransom Center is on a buying binge, but not with the long-dead titans of literature in mind. Instead, the library is pursuing the private papers of contemporary authors [and] is out to play a role in literary-canon formation….

Alice Adams, the [Chapel Hill-reared] novelist and short-story writer, was a major acquisition in 2000 and now seems to be the subject of a subtle awareness campaign…. En route to the [David Foster] Wallace archive, one staffer pointed out the 27 boxes comprising the Adams collection. Later, another employee, while showing me [Don] DeLillo’s letters, offhandedly mentioned her love for Adams’s stories. ‘She really should be better-known,’ the woman said, looking up at me hopefully.”

— From “Canon Fodder” by Anne Trubek in The Atlantic

 

Tar Heels or Sandlappers: The NC-SC Dividing Line Settled Soon

From "North Carolina Boundary Disputes Involving Her Southern Line," 1941.

After 18 years of work and $980,000 in expense, officials expect to settle on the boundary between North Carolina and South Carolina later this year. Their agreement will mark the latest in a long simmering debate over the dividing line. Campbell University social scientist Marvin Lucian Skaggs suggested in North Carolina Boundary Disputes Involving Her Southern Line in 1941 that the debate was emblematic of more than just which flag flies over the territory or which governor to salute.

The dispute between North and South Carolina was one of the oldest and the most lengthy of all of those boundary controversies, and involved elements which were unique in their nature and character. The northern section of the province was settled by an immigration to a great degree alien in origin and race to that of the southern section and remained so throughout the period of their boundary bickerings. Physical, commercial, and social conditions played a great part in maintaining the ever-widening differences between the two sections, while an ungenerous attitude of superiority on the part of South Carolina tended to alienate the good will of North Carolina. All of these elements combined to cause the development of a spiritual division between the two sections which preceded and accompanied the agitation for and progress of the permanent division of Carolina.

Ralph Ellison to Greensboro blacks: Get moving

“…I was lecturing in North Carolina when your letter arrived  — which reminds me that some of the Negro leaders in Greensboro… are so timid that they are not accepting as fast the new responsibilities of freedom as they might, which of course they rationalize as the sole fault of white people. Fortunately, this is not true of all…. ”

— From a letter to a reader by Ralph Ellison, author of “Invisible Man,” on March 31, 1953. Quoted in “Letters from Black America” by Pamela Newkirk (2009)

Phillips Russell, advocate of roads less robotically traveled

“Not everyone was so enamored of the [Interstate highway] system’s unrelenting predictability. Critics had decried the sterile nature of high-speed roads since long before limited-access became a reality….

“Phillips Russell of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill Weekly wrote in 1930 that ‘as fast as improvements are perfected, highways constantly tend to become dull and uninteresting to travel over,’ lulling travelers into ‘a state of silent torpor, with no more animation than a box of hibernating terrapins.’ ”

— From “Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways” by Earl Swift (2011)

Phillips Russell was a year away from joining the faculty at UNC, where he first taught English, then journalism. I hadn’t realized — thank you, Dictionary of North Carolina Biography — that Russell helped popularize this still-useful  admonition to writers of slow-to-launch stories: “Bring on the bear.”