“Clipping services were Googles for the mechanical age: paying clients submitted what would now be called search terms, and readers — often young women — would go through periodicals, line by line, looking for mentions of those terms. As Valerie Raleigh Yow notes in “Betty Smith,” her biography of the author, Smith herself worked for […]
Posts Tagged ‘a tree grows in brooklyn’
What Mark Zuckerberg could learn from Betty Smith
Posted in Just A Bite, tagged a tree grows in brooklyn, betty smith, mark zuckerburg, valerie raleigh yow on April 4, 2018 | Leave a Comment »
North Carolina meets Betty Smith’s Brooklyn
Posted in On This Day, tagged a tree grows in brooklyn, beat cop, betty smith on August 21, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
On this day in 1943: Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” destined to become one of the best-selling novels of all time, hits bookstore shelves across the state. The author is a former Brooklyn telephone operator who arrived in Chapel Hill on a bus with her two young daughters in 1938. She came only […]
A tree grew (and grew) in Betty Smith’s garden
Posted in History, Just A Bite, Literature, Tar Heelia, tagged a tree grows in brooklyn, ailanthus, betty smith, chapel hill nc, outer banks nc on April 28, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
“[The ailanthus tree] rarely lives more than 50 years, so any chance of finding [Betty] Smith’s original tree still growing in Brooklyn was out of the question. “But [Nancy] Pfeiffer told me about the ailanthus her mother planted in the walled-in garden behind her home in Chapel Hill, where Smith lived almost her entire life […]
A triumphant day for ‘No Day of Triumph’
Posted in Just A Bite, tagged a southerner discovers the south, a tree grows in brooklyn, betty smith, hampton institute, j. saunders redding, jonathan daniels, mayflower cup, no day of triumph on November 14, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
“In an event unprecedented in the South, a Negro last month won North Carolina’s Mayflower Cup, awarded annually by the North Carolina Society of Mayflower Descendants, for the best book by a resident of the State. This year’s winner is 37-year-old J. Saunders Redding, professor of English literature and creative writing at Virginia’s Hampton Institute […]
Betty Smith, inventor of the ‘beat cop’?
Posted in Just A Bite, Literature, tagged a tree grows in brooklyn, beat cop to top cop, betty smith, john f. timoney, lloyd nolan, officer mcshane on June 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
“Over the course of my career [as police chief in New York, Philadelphia and Miami, the lament I heard repeatedly from citizens was] ‘the only thing I really want is a cop on the beat, like the guy who patrolled the streets when I was growing up.’ “I found this lament was not of recent […]
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