Hugh Morton's favorite photograph of Charlotte, as seen from near the Mile High Swinging Bridge on Grandfather Mountain approximately 87 air miles away. Morton made the photograph in mid-December after a cold front had cleared the air, providing some very rare visibility.
Last week, the city of Charlotte was the “front and center” of the American political scene as it hosted the 2012 Democratic National Convention. As the event approached, I had the natural inclination to turn to Hugh Morton’s coverage of past Democratic conventions for a timely blog post . . . but quickly remembered that we had already done that shortly after the party selected Charlotte.
If you find yourself wanting more Democratic convention politics now that the show has left town, you may want to revisit previous posts on the topic here at A View to Hugh. For starters, try Rob Christensen’s essay “Hugh Morton Among the Movers and Shakers” for an overview of Hugh Morton’s role in North Carolina’s political scene. Then choose from any or all of these offerings related to the Democratic National Convention:
A Spark of Greatness is a four-part narrative that recounts the events leading up to John F. Kennedy’s campaign tour through North Carolina in 1960, including connections to the national conventions in 1956 and 1960. (Links to Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)
The previous post on A View to Hugh features a Hugh Morton photograph of Grandfather Mountain, published without credit on the cover of the 8 March 1941 issue of The State. As the blog post revealed, I suspect the photograph dates from 1940 or earlier, which is relatively early in Morton’s career as a photographer. January of that year saw Morton beginning his second semester as a freshman at UNC. His camera had been stolen shortly after arriving on campus in the autumn of 1939, and it was not until sometime around January or February 1940 that he bought his next camera. So, I wondered, “How early in his career would that have been?” Today’s exploration unravels an uncertainty and mystery that I didn’t even have until two days ago. This is an important photograph in Morton’s career. At the time he made it, Morton was a UNC student with a summertime job as the photography counselor at Camp Yonahnoka. Here’s one of his accounts about the photograph, quoted from the preface of his 2003 book Hugh Morton’s North Carolina:
In 1940, at nearby Linville, a fourteen-year-old kid from Tarboro named Harvie Ward embarrassed a lot of adults by winning the prestigious Linville Men’s Golf Tournament. Burke Davis, sports editor of the Charlotte News, contacted the Linville Club for a photograph of Harvie Ward, and I was called to come up from camp to carry out what was my first photo assignment for a daily newspaper. Davis liked my Harvie Ward pictures, and this led to many photo assignments for the Charlotte News during my college years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Because this assignment helped launch Hugh Morton’s career as a news photographer, and the early view of Grandfather Mountain was also likely made in 1940, I wanted to know when the Charlotte News published the Ward photograph(s) (two negatives are extant in the Morton collection) relative to publication of the early Grandfather Mountain view in The State. I searched the Web for information on the Linville golf tournament and Harvie Ward for 1940, but only found a few bits and pieces—and nothing that said when they played the tournament. So . . . off to the microfilm room.
I scanned through issues of the Charlotte News, Tarboro’s Daily Southerner, and Rocky Mount’s Evening Telegram published during the “golf-able” summer months through mid September, by which time Morton would have returned to Chapel Hill from Camp Yonahnoka and Ward would have already returned to Tarboro in time for their classes. Nothing . . . at least not that mentioned Harvie Ward winning the tournament in 1940.
I turned next to Morton’s booklet, Sixty Years with a Camera published in 1996, which I recalled also included the portrait of Ward. As The Jetsons cartoon dog Astro would say, “Ruh Roh . . . .”
The first picture I took on assignment for a newspaper (the Charlotte News) was of Harvie Ward when he won the 1941 Linville Men’s Golf Tournament. This was a very competitive event, and it was a surprise to everybody that a 15-year-old kid from Tarboro would win it.
Two different statements of fact. What to do? Well, I turned to a different newspaper, the Charlotte Observer and here’s what I found: Harvie Ward didn’t win the Linville Men’s Invitational Tournament in 1939, 1940, 1941, nor 1942. (I didn’t go further, because Morton was in the army in 1943). A detailed listing of the entrants in the Charlotte Observer revealed that Ward didn’t enter the 1940 tournament; he did, however, defeat Ed Gravell of Roaring Gap to win the “second flight” of the 1941 tournament. I also found a congratulatory paragraph in the Daily Southerner on August 4, 1941 “for taking first place in second flight in Linville invitational golf tournament. Harvie is having great time knocking off the little fellows.” [For golf historians, Sam Perry emerged victorious in 1939, Charles Dudley won the championship flight in 1940, Hub Covington won the 1941 tournament, and Billy Ireland won the event in 1942.]
To be thorough, I searched for both years (1940 and 1941) through mid September. There are no photographs of Ward in the Charlotte News. I now even wonder if the newspaper ever published one of these portraits of Ward by Morton.
So in all likelihood, Hugh Morton had it right the first time in the 1996 booklet: the Harvie Ward, Jr. photographs probably date from 1941. And here’s some supporting evidence: photographs began appearing in the Charlotte News sports section’s “Pigskin Review” articles with the credit line “News Photos by Hugh Morton” in mid September 1941, which is in agreement with Morton’s statement that the Ward pictures “led to many assignments.” Morton photographed members of the 1941 football teams of UNC (published September 12th), Duke, (September 13th), NC State (September 15th), and Wake Forest (September 24th), plus two photographs made during and after UNC’s season opener on September 20th against Lenor-Rhyne that featured UNC’s standout running back Hugh Cox. By comparison, there are no photographs in the newspaper credited to Morton in late summer or early autumn of 1940.
My conclusion? So far, the earliest Morton photograph that I’ve discovered to be published in a non-UNC publication is the early view of Grandfather Mountain. Now, please tell me why I believe the story probably doesn’t end there?!
It’s been quiet at A View to Hugh of late, as research for a news photography exhibit opening October 6th has become my primary focus the past several weeks. There will most definitely be Morton photographs in that exhibit, but I’ve been digging into the 1920s and early 1930s which mostly predates Morton. One item of interest for the exhibit that overlaps with Hugh Morton’s career, however, is The State, a weekly magazine launched by Carl Goersch on 3 June 1933. Jack Hilliard and I will be writing about The State next year on the magazine’s 80th anniversary, which readers today know as Our State.
As I have explored Morton’s early career, I have looked at each issue of The State—page by page—from 1945 up to early 1963 (thus far). I chose 1945 as the starting point because it marks Morton’s return from the South Pacific during World War II. We have referred often in past blog posts to the Morton images that appeared in The State, and I’ve updated many images in the online collection as I’ve discovered them in the magazine.
Researching for the news photography exhibit, I jumped back to volume one, issue one, again looking at every page to see what I could learn about the magazine’s role in the development of news photography in North Carolina. When I got to the 8 March 1941 issue, I saw what felt like a familiar Morton image on the cover, shown above. The photograph is uncredited, so I searched the online Morton collection, but did not find it. I then dove into the negatives for Grandfather Mountain . . . Bingo!
Read carefully the caption on the magazine cover. Note again the date of the magazine, plus the leaves on the trees (and their tonalities) and the lack of snow! All those clues suggest to me that Morton made this negative in the autumn of 1940 (or earlier) and not early March 1941. If my deduction is correct, it’s one of Morton’s earliest published images.
This photograph also appears (again uncredited) in the 27 February 1943 issue of The State as an illustration to the article “Grandfather Mountain” written by Lula M. Weir. In a prescient statement, Weir wrote “That the Grandfather-Linville area may be acquired for a state park someday is now regarded as a certainty.” That “someday” did come true. Grandfather Mountain officially became a state park in 2009.
This is part two of A View to Hugh contributor Jack Hilliard’s personal look back at two of Carolina’s NCAA basketball championships. The Tar Heels championship aspirations for 2012 fell short, with a loss in its “Elite Eight” match-up against Kansas last week. Thirty years ago today, the Tar Heel squad made it all the way to the top.
A dear coworker of mine, Bill Richards, passed away on March 18th while watching the Tar Heels play their “Sweet Sixteen” game against Creighton in the NCAA tournament. In addition to being an avid UNC football and basketball fan, Bill was the senior digitization technician in the Carolina Digital Library and Archives. His knowledge and skills with scanning technologies, Photoshop, and high-end inkjet printing were formidable, and he taught me most of what little (by comparison) that I know on those topics. In 1982, Bill was the Chief Photographer for the Chapel Hill Newspaper, In 1988, he began working as a photographer and graphic designer in the UNC Office of Sports information. He began working in the Library Photographic Service in 1998, but continued working for Sports information into the 2000s. This post is dedication to one of the best colleagues with whom I have ever worked. 1982 NCAA trophy and the UNC Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower
Twenty five years after Frank McGuire’s 1957 miracle, the University of North Carolina was in position to win another NCAA championship. Like the 1957 team, the 1982 team won 30 games going into the final four. The only difference: the ’57 team hadn’t lost, while the ’82 team had lost twice. Unlike 1957 championship game, however, Hugh Morton was there.
On the night of March 29, 1982 many Tar Heel fans will remember hearing Woody Durham, the voice of the Tar Heels, exclaim:
“The Tar Heels are going to win the National Championship.”
Those words triggered a Franklin Street celebration of epic proportions. 30,000 fans and alumni came out to celebrate. The party had been 25 years in the making. I recall working that night at WFMY-TV and we had our microwave truck on Franklin Street. News 2 Anchor Sybil Robson reported as the celebration surrounded her. It was good TV. Eddie Marks, writing in the Greensboro Daily News, on March 30th described the celebration:
“Pandemonium, hysteria, fireworks and beer. This is the stuff national championships are made of.”
The celebration finally ended about 4:00 a.m. University of North Carolina men's basketball head coach Dean Smith on sidelines, with Assistant Coach Roy Williams and Assistant Coach Eddie Fogler sitting on bench in background. (Cropped by the editor.)
The 1981-82 UNC Tar Heel team was head coach Dean Smith’s 21st team, and was his best to date. The semifinal win over Houston and the national championship victory over Coach John Thompson’s Georgetown Hoyas marked Smith’s 467th and 468th wins. It was his first National Championship. (Smith would go on to win a second NCAA championship in 1993 and would win a total 879 games before his retirement on October 9, 1997.) Wide-angle shot of the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans, site of UNC's NCAA men's National Championship games, March 27-29, 1982
The 1982 NCAA final game was played before 61,612 fans in the Louisiana Superdome. It was the 44th NCAA tournament final and it marked the first game to be televised by CBS Sports under a new NCAA contract. That contract is still in effect, and CBS marks the 31st anniversary of NCAA championships this month. (NBC had carried the championship game since 1969.) But on this night in ‘82 Gary Bender and Billy Packer brought the game to fans across the country.
With 32 seconds left and trailing by one, Coach Smith called a time out, set a play, and told Michael Jordan to “knock it down.” Jordan did just that, providing the margin for the 63-62 victory. University of North Carolina Tar Heels men's basketball player Michael Jordan cutting basketball net after winning the 1982 NCAA championship.
Morton remembered the confusion after the game as the security folks tried to get Coach Smith and his team off the court. Morton said Smith grabbed him by the arm and said, “Stick with me.” He then turned to the security guard, pointed at Morton and said, “He’s with us.” This provided Hugh Morton a unique opportunity for some fantastic pictures. Former UNC Head Coach Frank McGuire (right) congratulates Head Coach Dean Smith after winning the 1982 NCAA championship.
Frank McGuire was one of the first to congratulate Coach Smith and Morton got the shot. In the aftermath of the victory hugs and smiles, there were some tears. Georgetown All America Eric “Sleepy” Floyd could not hold back his emotions. His 18-point effort simply had not been enough. He congratulated his friend and fellow Gastonian Tar Heel All America James Worthy. Again, Morton captured the emotion of the moment. James Worthy and Eric "Sleepy" Floyd. Coach Dean Smith looks on. (P081_NTBR2_002047_22; cropped by editor.)
The headline in the Greensboro Daily News on Wednesday, March 31st described the Tar Heel Tuesday afternoon welcome back to Chapel Hill as a “Blue Frenzy.” 20,000 cheering fans packed the north side of Kenan Stadium long before the scheduled 3:00 p.m. celebration. There were T-shirt vendors selling souvenirs from the back of station wagons parked at the Stadium gate. A Franklin Street bakery was set up selling Carolina blue gingerbread men.
The official party began when “Voice of the Tar Heels” Woody Durham ran onto the field and yelled, “How ‘bout them Heels!” Then the team bus arrived from Raleigh-Durham Airport and each team member spoke to the delight of the crowd.
As the homecoming celebration began to wrap up, Sky 2, Sky 5 and Chopper 11, helicopters from three of North Carolina’s TV stations jockeyed for position overhead, trying to get that perfect aerial crowd shot for the evening news. That too was good TV.
The “Sweet Sixteen” round of March Madness begins today, so A View to Hugh contributor Jack Hilliard takes a personal look back at a very special time in Carolina basketball history—1957— in part one of a two-part series. Part two will recall UNC’s 1982 championship.
Update on 3/28/2012: Working on part two today, I discovered that I inadvertently omitted a dedication request by the author when I was constructing this post. The post is dedicated to the 1957 team manager, Joel Fleishman, who passed away earlier this month. As a News-Record.com news brief put it, “Joel Fleishman was the manager of the 1957 North Carolina Tar Heels until the day he died.”
UNC-Chapel Hill men’s basketball coach Frank McGuire posing with basketball hoop, net, and signed ball commemorating 1957 NCAA Championship win.
It was 55 years ago . . . March 23, 1957, that we heard this call from WPTF radio play-by-play announcer Jim Reid:
. . . we win 54 to 53. North Carolina did it . . . Great day in the morning.
This radio broadcast has become a classic, but the television coverage of that championship game played a significant role in television sports history as well.
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Friday, March 15, 1957 was career day at Asheboro High School. Representing careers in television was Jack Markham a producer/director from WFMY-TV in Greensboro. I remember how excited he was that his station was going to carry Carolina’s Eastern Regional game that night against Canisius from the Palestra in Philadelphia. Many of us at Asheboro High had seen the ’57 Tar Heels when they came to town to play the McCrary Eagles in an exhibition game on December 1, 1956—a game that Carolina won but did not become part of the 32 and 0 season.
The day before, on March 14th, WFMY’s general manager Gaines Kelley had announced the station would follow Carolina in both its East regional games. (In those days the first-round loser played a consolation game the next day.) Said Kelley: “We at WFMY-TV are as proud of the Tar Heels as anybody else, and we are happy to be able to give fans in our coverage area a chance to see the game on live television.” The Greensboro station had a special interest in carrying the UNC games because WFMY-TV produced the weekly Frank McGuire Show.
This regional NCAA network had been set up by station WPFH-TV in Wilmington, Delaware with Matt Guokas, a former Philadelphia Warrior NBA star, doing the play-by-play. Of course the NCAA was in full control of the telecasts with their man, Castleman D. Chesley, leading the broadcast team. Other North Carolina TV stations on the network included WBTV in Charlotte, and WTVD in Durham.
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The undefeated Tar Heels were 28-0 and Coach Frank McGuire, upon arrival in Philadelphia, told the press, “This is a road club . . . winning 21 games on the road.” The coach was then reminded that it was really only 20 road games. McGuire added: “But I still count McCrary as a game because nobody can tell me that we didn’t have a really tough night down there in Asheboro.”
Road wins continued as the Tar Heels beat Canisius that Friday night and then beat Syracuse the following night. It was on to Kansas City, Missouri for the final four (although it wasn’t called “The Final Four” in those days.) Carolina was 30 and 0 going into Kansas City, but it hadn’t always been easy. There had been close overtime games at South Carolina and Maryland—and then there was Murray Greason’s Wake Forest Demon Deacons. The Tar Heels and Deacons had met four times during the 1956-57 season and each one had been close. Two regular season games, a game in the Dixie Classic, and a two-point game in the ACC Tournament. Coach Frank McGuire had great respect for Wake and he often spoke of it in interviews.
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Before the games in Philadelphia started, C.D. Chesley was already working on a NCAA network for Kansas City. On Wednesday, March 20, WFMY General Manager Kelley made another announcement. Again Chesley had put together a network of five North Carolina TV stations for the games in Kansas City, and WFMY, WBTV, and WTVD would be a part of it. He added that his Sports Director Charlie Harville and his Chief Photographer Buddy Moore would be traveling with the Tar Heels. Kelley also liked to plug his game sponsors which were Carolina Steel, Guilford Dairy, and Security National Bank.
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Hugh Morton didn’t travel to Kansas City for the championship weekend, but when he heard that the games were going to be on TV, and since the coverage area didn’t extend to the North Carolina coast, he and wife Julia headed to Raleigh, checked into the Sir Walter Hotel and watched the games there.
Both the National Semifinal with Michigan State and the National Final with 7-foot, 2-inch Wilt Chamberlain and Kansas in Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium turned out to be classics. Triple overtimes each night, with UNC Center Joe Quigg hitting two foul shots with six seconds remaining in the final overtime against Dick Harp’s Kansas Jayhawks to win the National Championship. The telecast had some other memorable moments. At halftime, WFMY-TV Sports Director Charlie Harville interviewed North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges, who predicted a Carolina win. Hodges had flown in along with his private secretary Ed Rankin, Lt. Governor Luther Barnhardt, and several other members of the NC legislature. Their flight, on a DC-3 owned by Burlington Industries, left Raleigh-Durham Airport at nine o’clock on Saturday morning. A police escort met the Governor’s party at the Mid-Continent International Airport and took them to a Tar Heel gathering at Hotel Continental in downtown Kansas City. Then it was off to Municipal Auditorium where they joined 10,500 other fans.
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Back in the WFMY-TV studios in Greensboro, staff announcer Lee Kinard, who had been with the station less than a year, prepared to do his live Guilford Dairy commercial. Kinard recalls the sponsor wanted the commercial to feature ice cream, but under the hot TV lights, ice cream didn’t hold up very well, and since there were no TV-times-outs in those days, the Greensboro crew didn’t know when the commercial was going to come. Said Kinard, “We kept putting out fresh ice cream and it just kept melting during those three overtimes.”
Lee Kinard would go on to become a legendary hall of fame broadcaster with a career spanning more than 45 years.
Following the broadcasts, both radio and TV, a celebration broke out on Franklin Street with thousands of students and alumni.
Chapel Hill author and historian Roland Giduz writing a special report for the Greensboro Daily News described what he saw along Franklin Street:
A zany bedlam enveloped this usually quiet college community shortly past the stroke of midnight…The celebration was the biggest in Chapel Hill since the night before—following the Tar Heels’ triple-overtime win over Michigan State. And the latter was the wildest spontaneous rally local officials could recall since V-J night 12 years ago.
Crowd at Raleigh Durham Airport awaiting the UNC men’s basketball team after winning the NCAA championship (P081_PRBP5_006878).
The celebration in Chapel Hill wasn’t close to the size of the one at Raleigh-Durham Airport. About 2:10 p.m. on Sunday, March 24, 1957, Eastern Airlines Flight 527 was on final approach to RDU when the pilots got a message from the tower: “Go around while the police clear the runway.” About 15,000 Tar Heel well-wishers had gathered to welcome the 32 and 0 Tar Heels home. Among the 15,000 was photographer Hugh Morton with camera in hand. About 15 minutes later the Lockheed Constellation carrying the victorious Tar Heels landed to thunderous cheers. Coach McGuire and team captain Lennie Rosenbluth were not part of the celebration. Rosenbluth was headed to New York as a member of the Look magazine All America team, which was scheduled to be on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that night. Coach McGuire had been on the “Sullivan Show” the Sunday before as the United Press national coach of the year. This weekend he stayed in Kansas City to coach in the All-Star game with his old buddy, Navy Head Coach Ben Carnevale, as his assistant. (Carnevale was UNC’s Head Basketball Coach from 1944 to 1946.) Rosenbluth was to fly back in time for the Monday night All-Star game.
In the middle of the crowd at RDU was UNC Chancellor Robert B. House who had a speech prepared, but wasn’t able to give it because of the noise. About thirty minutes later, the Hodges’ group landed. Said the Governor: “It was great but I don’t think I could take another game like that one.”
While Coach Frank McGuire was in Philadelphia for the Eastern Regional, he had received a special telegram from back home. He read it to his team before the Eastern Regional final with Syracuse. He then put it in his jacket pocket. He carried it with him to Kansas City and decided to read it again before the NCAA final game with Kansas.
The telegram read:
Best wishes and all the luck in the world. You proved it to us; now prove it to the nation.
It was signed by each member of the Wake Forest basketball team, Head Coach Murray Greason and Assistant Coach Bones McKinney. In the early morning hours of Sunday, March 24th, the victory bell in the old Wake Forest administration building rang out celebrating the Tar Heel win.
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And, as for Jack Markham and that career day at ASH . . . well six years later Markham had risen to program director and production manager and in January of 1963 he hired a young UNC grad as a production assistant at WFMY-TV. I would work there for 42 years.
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For more photographs from the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives of the UNC 1956-1957 basketball season, visit the webpage McGuire’s Miracle.
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Correction: on 13 June 2014, the type of plane that brought the UNC team to RDU was changed to “Lockheed Constellation,” which was previously described as a DC-7. See http://pages.suddenlink.net/w4ydy/unc1957.html for color slides made at the event, which clearly show the aircraft.
Correction: on 3 March 2017, corrected the misspelling of the name Matt Guokas, which was incorrectly spelled as Koukas.
Today’s post is the third and final on the 1942 Southern Conference Basketball Tournament, which we have been featuring on its seventieth anniversary in conjunction with the fifty-ninth annual Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament taking place March 8th through 11th, 2012.
Some of the photographs shown below are not available in the online collection of Hugh Morton’s photographs at the time of this posting. They will be added to the collection in the future. Those images that are available in the collection can be seen without cropping by clicking on the image.
Many of the people portrayed in these photographs are unidentified. If you can provide any identifications please leave a comment!
Duke bench during games versus Washington and Lee, March 5th, 1942. Members of the Duke University men's basketball team and head coach Edmund "Eddie" Cameron seated on sideline. Labeled "For 2003 reprint book." A similar photograph of Cameron with different players appears in the March 6, 1942 issue of THE CHARLOTTE NEWS, so the event is likely the Southern Conference basketball tournament game versus Washington and Lee at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium played on March 5th. UNC bench during game against Wake Forest, March 5th, 1942. UNC men's basketball players and coach Bill Lange on sidelines during basketball game, probably 1942 Southern Conference tournament game versus Wake Forest at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, NC. (Identification of location based upon the above similar photograph of Duke's bench made from same vantage point.) North Carolina Sate versus University of South Carolina, March 5th, 1942. Action from the North Carolina State versus University of South Carolina game, March 5th, 1942. (P081_NTBS3_006368) College of William and Mary versus George Washington University, March 5th 1942. A struggle for possession during the William and Mary versus George Washington University opening round game played on March 5th 1942. Bench photographs of unidentified teams, players, or coaches
William and Mary players and coach (P081_NTBS3_006370). Note the photographer (perhaps!) on the right side of the image, seated next to what looks to be a camera with mounted flash unit.
Unidentified team and coach (P081_NTBS3_006371). George Washington University players and coach during 1942 Southern Conference Tournament (P081_NTBS3_006369). Duke versus Wake Forest, March 6th, 1942. Scene from the Wake Forest College vs. Duke University game. Morton's photograph (cropped to show only three players on left) appears in the 8 March 1942 edition of the WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL AND SENTINEL with caption, "Gantt on the Lose—Big Bob Gantt, one of those five flaming Duke sophs, is shown here breaking down the court during the Wake Forest game Friday night. He had just taken the ball off the Wake backboard and is en route to his as Jim Bonds, deacon forward, partially blocks his way. Garland Loftis of Duke is the other player. Duke won 54–45." North Carolina State versus William and Mary, March 7th, 1942. This photograph captures Horace "Bones" McKinney on floor with towel during N.C. State University game versus William and Mary in the tournament semifinal. This photograph (or one made within a split second) is similarly cropped as it appeared in the CHARLOTTE NEWS with the caption, "WEARY BONES McKINNEY was glad to stretch out on the floor during a time out last night as his N. C. State ball club fought off a last-minute rally by William and Mary and came out with a 53-52 victory that sent the Terrors into the tourney title-round for the first time since it was moved to Raleigh in 1933." Click on the image to see the full negative.
This Morton photograph appeared in the WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL AND SENTINEL with the caption “Clown Prince Gets Happy—Bones McKinney, tall N. C. State center, hoists Little Buckwheat Carvalho after the Terrors had beaten William and Mary in the semifinals of the conference tourney, 53-52. Bones was the top scorer in the loop this year with 300 points.” Little Buckwheat’s real first name was Paul. (P081_NTBS3_006374) Championship game, Duke versus North Carolina State, March 7th, 1942. Cropped view from the only surviving negative of an action shot made during the Duke versus North Carolina State championship game to be discovered thus far in the Morton Collection (P081_NTBS3_006375). The entire negative as shot can be seen below. See the previous blog post for Morton's published photograph of the Duke team and fans after receiving the tournament trophy.
Today’s post the first of a combined effort between Jack Hilliard and Stephen Fletcher to report on the 1942 Southern Conference Tournament, which coincides with this week’s Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament.
UNC and WWII during the winter of 1942: I’ve been living an on-again-off-again life in the winter of 1942 for some weeks now, researching images made by Hugh Morton before he enlisted in the United States Army in the early autumn later that year. This double-life springs from the post marking the seventieth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, which had a profound impact on the lives of Hugh Morton and his fellow students at UNC. A few posts have examined Morton’s photographs depicting activities on campus related to America’s entrance into the second world war, especially those appearing in The Daily Tar Heel (DTH) student newspaper, for which Morton was the staff photographer. The last post of this type focused on Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to UNC on January 31st, 1942.
With the exception of one photograph (identified just this week) no Morton photographs depicting war related activities or subjects appeared in the DTH. That photograph, an uncredited portrait of UNC business manager Livingston B. Rogerson in the February 15th issue, illustrated a front page article informing DTH readers that Rogerson was also serving as the Coordinator of the Office of Civilian Defense—a joint effort between the university and village of Chapel Hill. Nearly all of Morton’s photographs published in the DTH during this period were sports photographs. Basketball, 1942: A blog post in early February 2012 on the day of UNC men’s basketball game against Duke included a minimally identified negative. Investigations by two of our readers (thank you Jack and Jake!) led to more accurate identification for that image. In one comment during the online deliberation, Jack Hilliard noted that the other, unidentified photograph (made on 11 February 1942 at Woollen Gym) was in the 1979 book The Winning Tradition: A Pictorial History of Carolina Basketball. While I was looking for that photograph in the book, the above photograph on a different page caught my eye—or at least the author’s caption did:
This photograph is believed to be one of photographer Hugh Morton’s earliest action shots and captures all the excitement of Carolina basketball in the early 40s: a packed Woollen Gym, plenty of action underneath the boards and those crazy stripped [sic] socks. There was, however, one problem—our editors searched high and low for the identification of the players but came up empty handed.
I both hate and love seeing captions like that!
One morning while preparing this week’s post, I took a peek into the beginning of the book Hugh Morton’s North Carolina. On the first page, Morton stated that he had shot a lot of freelance work for the Charlotte News, especially sports, when he was a UNC student. That made me wonder if the newspaper might have published a Morton photograph of the 1942 Southern Conference tournament played at Raleigh Memorial Auditorium in early March. Some of the identification work I had been doing had led me to discover some photographs I suspected may have been made during that tournament.
The newspaper did indeed publish a few Morton photographs during that weekend, including the photograph above. For today’s featured photograph, here’s most of the caption written by the Charlotte News for the March 6th issue, which will immediately reveal why the The Winning Tradition editors couldn’t identify the UNC players:
IN A PRETTY GOOD STATE yesterday afternoon were the Terrors’ chance of winning a tourney title at Raleigh as they ousted South Carolina, 56-43. Photographer Hugh Morton’s camera caught this glimpse of a basketball ballet under the State basket in the first half with Buck Cavalho and Strayhorn of State; Brogden, Dunham and Westmoreland of South Carolina and Bernie Mock of State in a graceful array. . . .”
The Red Terrors was one of several nicknames used by North Carolina State University athletic teams before Wolfpack, and the photograph depicts a scene from the opening round game played on March 5, 1942. Tomorrow’s post: Jack Hilliard presents an historical background of the Southern Conference.
Tonight, the University of North Carolina and Duke University will take to the hardwood for the 233rd time. Their first contests took place in 1920, so its remarkable to think that when Hugh Morton photographed these two teams playing during his college years, today’s arch rivals had been playing against each other for “only” twenty years or so! UNC vs. Duke University men's basketball game at Woollen Gymnasium, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. Photograph (cropped) appears in the 11 February 1942 issue of THE DAILY TAR HEEL with caption, " SOME OF THE HEATED play in the first half of the Duke contest is seen in this action photo by cameraman Hugh Morton. Captain Bob Rose and Duke's Stark are on the floor trying to throw the ball in to teammates. George Paine and Clyde Allen are battling for possession of the elusive sphere while McCahan, (48), Reid Suggs, (17), and Rothbaum, (58), look on." Duke won the game 52-40.
As the caption above describes, The Daily Tar Heel cropped Hugh Morton’s photograph shown above—it focused on the players and left out the referee (before the striped jersey era!) and the basket above the action. Without cropping, the full view gives a better sense of the atmosphere of Woollen Gymnasium.
Below is another photograph from a UNC–Duke basketball game, but this one is without a date. Is this a different game at a different location? Anybody want to try their hand at identifications? (Clicking on the photograph will take you to the online collection, where you can use the zoom tool.)
This photograph appeared in The Daily Tar Heel on February 1, 1942, captioned, "FIRST LADY OF THE LAND, Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, sits with University president Frank P. Graham, and Josephus Daniels, Ex-Ambassador to Mexico, at Dean Harriett Elliot's speech to delegates of the post-war planning conference yesterday afternoon." The photograph is shown here as published; a scan of the entire negative is shown below.
On January 31st, 1942 Eleanor Roosevelt visited North Carolina, primarily to attend sessions and speak at Memorial Hall on the second of a two-day, jointly sponsored Carolina Political Union–International Student Service Post-War Planning Conference held at the University of North Carolina. As Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in her syndicated column, “My Day“:
We had a delightful luncheon at Chapel Hill with President and Mrs. Frank Graham and their guests, heard Miss Harriet Elliott, Dean of the Woman’s College at Greensboro, make an excellent talk before the delegates of the 32 colleges, who had gathered at Chapel Hill under the auspices of the Carolina Political Union and the International Student Service for a two day conference. It was nice to find that both Miss Louise Morley, Conference Secretary of the I.S.S., and Miss Jane Seaver of OCD, had made real friends among so many students from various colleges, who spoke to me about them with real appreciation.
Jane Seaver and I attended one of the forum discussion groups in the afternoon. I saw an excellent civilian defense information service setup in the college library, a very good local defense council control center in the town, had tea at the Presbyterian Church parlor with a number of the delegates, dined in the college cafeteria and spoke and answered questions in the auditorium in the evening, at a meeting which Governor and Mrs. Broughton also attended.
Two uncredited photographs of Mrs. Roosevelt appeared in The Daily Tar Heel the following day, plus a photograph of a speaker from the previous day. There are eighteen negatives in the Morton collection related to Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit to UNC, including both of the images published in the DTH (which are are not currently in the online collection), so they are represented here in “A View to Hugh.” The lead photograph above is presented as published by the DTH. Here is the full view:
Below is the second Morton photograph of Mrs. Roosevelt published in the DTH, followed by the full negative: Hugh Morton photograph, shown as cropped in the 1 February 1942 issue of The Daily Tar Heel with the caption, "INTRODUCTION—An out-of-town delegate to the CPU-ISS conference is introduced to Mrs. Roosevelt by Ridley Whitaker, chairman of the CPU yesterday afternoon." Notice how the cropping almost entirely eliminates the woman walking behind Whitaker?
Some fans of “CBS News Sunday Morning” may not know that the television program began airing regularly on January 28th, 1979—thirty-three years ago this weekend—originally hosted by North Carolinian Charles Kuralt. Jack Hilliard present a profile of Kuralt and his long-time friendship with Hugh Morton.
It wasn’t unusual for Hugh Morton to get a call from a CBS News producer wanting to set up an interview with North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges during the Democratic National Convention in July, 1960. After all, Morton was the governor’s campaign publicity manager and Governor Hodges was leading the North Carolina delegation at the convention. When Morton and Hodges arrived at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, they met the youngest correspondent that CBS News had. Twenty-six-year-old Charles Kuralt would be doing the interview. Charles Kuralt (right) of CBS News interviewing North Carolina Governor Luther Hodges during the 1960 Democratic National Convention. Photographs cropped by the editor.
While Kuralt conducted the interview, Morton did what he liked to do—he took pictures. Hugh was impressed with Kuralt’s questions and his ability to handle himself during the interview. After the questions were all answered, Morton and Kuralt struck up their own conversation, and discovered that not only were they fellow Tar Heels from UNC, but were both born in Wilmington. Morton likely didn’t realize it at the time, but he and Kuralt would become close friends for the next 37 years.
Charles Bishop Kuralt had been with CBS News only three years when he was assigned to a 250-person staff of correspondents, news producers, reporters, directors and technicians for the 1960 conventions and election. In those days, the three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, each covered the national conventions and each competed for its share of the TV and radio audiences. CBS with anchorman Walter Cronkite, and NBC with anchors Chet Huntley and David Brinkley were fierce competitors.
Following the 1960 elections, in the spring of 1961, CBS assigned Kuralt to a Friday evening, prime time program called Eyewitness to History, an in-depth look at the top story of the week. One of his first programs was broadcast on Friday, May 5, 1961—the day America put its first man in space with Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital ride from Cape Canaveral, Florida. “Eyewitness” proved to be a popular program, and Kuralt called it “the best job I’ve ever had,” but a management change at CBS sent Kuralt to Latin America as a one-man bureau—not exactly what he had dreamed of doing. From there, Kuralt completed four tours in Vietnam and then it was back to the United States and the West Coast bureau. During these career changes, Kuralt and Morton stayed in touch and when he could get away, Kuralt would visit Grandfather Mountain, a place he dearly loved. Then, in 1967, Kuralt floated an idea to CBS News President Dick Salant about an “On the Road” series. Salant was willing to try it. So in October of 1967, Kuralt hit the road and as they say “the rest is history.” From Loafers’ Glory, North Carolina to Albertville, France and the ’92 Winter Olympics, Charles Kuralt picked up thirteen Emmy and three Peabody awards, was often compared to Edward R. Murrow, and was called by Time magazine “laureate of the common man.” In addition he returned each weekend to New York to anchor “CBS Sunday Morning.” Oh yes, he wrote six books also. Hugh Morton with Charles Kuralt at 40th anniversary of the Mile High Swinging Bridge on summit of Grandfather Mountain, NC. Cropped by the editor.
Kuralt continued to return to North Carolina when he could—sometimes to write and sometimes to just relax . . . and sometimes for special occasions. On September 2, 1992, he accepted Hugh Morton’s invitation to speak at the 40th anniversary of the Mile High Swinging Bridge. He had fun with his old friend. ” . . . the Mile High swinging bridge, which is NOT a mile high, is not swinging either. So, what we have here is the 80-foot-high, Tethered Bridge. Big Deal.”
On May 21, 1993, Kuralt returned to Chapel Hill for a reception and banquet honoring him on the occasion of his acceptance of the North Caroliniana Society Award. That Friday night at the Carolina Inn, Kuralt’s younger brother Wallace delivered the keynote speech. It was titled, “The Uncommon Laureate: Sketches in the Life of Charles Kuralt.” During his talk he recounted,
“Early on Charles exhibited a penchant for journalism and broadcasting . . . he would sit in the front yard and announce: They’re upto the line, and here’s the play. It’s Justice to Weiner, Justice to Weiner . . . down the sideline . . . TOUCHDOWN!”
On October 12, 1993, Charles Kuralt spoke at UNC’s bicentennial celebration:
“What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls or the crisp October nights. . . . No our love for this place is based upon the fact that it is as it was meant to be, The University of the People.”
Editor’s note: last week, the Daily Tar Heel ran an article accompanied by a photograph of students protesting proposed tuition increases. One of the protesters carried a sign bearing words from that very quotation, even crediting Kuralt on the placard. Charles Kuralt at Linville Bluffs overlook, with Grandfather Mountain peaks in background, May 28, 1994.
On April 3, 1994, after thirty-seven years at CBS, he did his last “Sunday Morning.” Charles Kuralt was ready to return home . . . this time for good:
Farewell, my friends. Farewell and hail.
I’m off to seek the Holy Grail.
I cannot tell you why.
Remember, please, when I am gone
‘Twas aspiration led me on.
Tiddly-widdly-toodle-oo.
All I want is to stay with you.
But, here I go. Goodbye.
Kuralt then spent much of his time researching and writing his final book, Charles Kuralt’s America.
On December 8, 1995, he spoke at Hugh and Julia Morton’s 50th wedding anniversary”:
We should thank them (Hugh & Julia) for bringing us (Duke and Carolina) together. There aren’t many things that bring us together, but Julia and Hugh can do it.
And on June 6, 1996, he paid tribute to his friend of thirty-six years as Hugh Morton accepted the 1996 North Caroliniana Society Award for his service to North Carolina:
Hugh Morton is North Carolina’s greatest promoter—always, however, of things that ought to be celebrated: the natural wonder of his mountain, the flaming beauty of Wilmington’s azaleas. Or of things that ought to be saved: the Battleship North Carolina, the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras. Or of things that ought to be changed: the laws which permitted disfiguring development on the mountain ridges, the laws which permit acid rain to fall, the constitution prohibition against our governors from succeeding themselves in office. Our famous promoter never promotes himself.
When Hugh Morton visited with Kuralt in June of 1997 at Belmont Abbey College, he was appalled at Kuralt’s weakened condition. He had been diagnosed with Lupus and the treatment had taken a severe toll. Morton begged him to come up to Grandfather and recover, but Kuralt said he had too much to do. Morton wasn’t surprised when the phone call from Kuralt’s assistant Karen Beckers came on July 4th telling him that “Charles is gone.” Charles Kuralt was only sixty-two years-old.
Following his death, the University of North Carolina commissioned a series of oral histories with Charles Kuralt’s friends. His dear friend Hugh Morton said this:
Charles really had the common touch. He was so genuine and sincere. I really believe he was the most loved, respected and trusted news personality in television.
Notice how the cropping almost entirely eliminates the woman walking behind Whitaker?
