NY Times gives thumbs up to Charlotte museum

This is the first paragraph of the New York Times’ lengthy appreciation of the Levine Museum of the New South:

“CHARLOTTE, N.C. — It is unlikely that anything resembling the impressive Levine Museum of the New South would exist anywhere else. A museum of the New North or the New East would be merely peculiar, but here the term “New South” has a venerable heritage, recalling unrealized hopes and great expectations. There is also much at stake in trying to understand just what the term really means.”

The Greensboro Historical Museum, by contrast, comes across — fairly or not — as an out-of-touch vestige of the Old South, notable mainly for “what may be the world’s largest collection of Confederate firearms.”

I’m having linkage problems, but you can find the story in the Arts section of today’s Times.

Nordel Hill, Raleigh, NC

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This real photo postcard from ca. 1904-1918 shows Nordel Hill, the log home owned by Dr. Elizabeth “Delia” Dixon-Carroll and her husband, Dr. Norwood G. Carroll.   ‘Nordel’ was a portmanteau of the couple’s first names, Delia and Norwood.

Nordel Hill was located in the Bloomsbury section of Raleigh, both Dr. Dixon-Carroll and her husband worked in Raleigh.  Dr. Dixon-Carroll was the first physician at Meredith College and the first practicing female medical praticioner in Raleigh, and her husband was a dentist.

Elizabeth’s older brother Thomas Dixon, Jr. wrote The Clansman in 1905, which was adapted into the movie The Birth of a Nation in 1915.

Fan-tastic!

What qualifies a person as a die-hard fan? For some of us in Chapel Hill, it’s hanging in with our team for what looks to be a disappointing ACC basketball season. But we have nothing on Jack Hege, who is profiled in an article in yesterday’s New York Times. Mr. Hege, 83, has been at all of the Daytona 500 races. That’s 51 races and counting. He’s seen it all–the racing on the sand that preceded the 500, aggressive bumping, flying fenders, and a few bad crashes. It sounds like he’s had fun. Mr. Hege’s story is included in The Weekend Starts on Wednesday: True Stories of Remarkable NASCAR Fans, just published by Motorbooks.

This time, bully ended up sadder Budweiser

“Typically, the inequality of economic power between corporation and parodist determines who prevails in trademark infringement lawsuits…. The weaker party — the parodist — is effectively censored and denied due process.

“An unlikely victor against a trademark bully was Michael Berard, who in 1987 was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Berard had designed a T-shirt [depicting] a beer can with a red, white and blue label — think Budweiser — but instead of grandiose references to great hops and barley, Berard substituted…   ‘Myrtle Beach Contains the Choicest Surf, Sun and Sand.’ Instead of ‘This Bud’s for You,’ the T-shirt read ‘This Beach is for You.’

“On appeal the judges found no likelihood consumers would falsely believe Bud had sanctioned the T-shirts…. Anheuser-Busch lost. But if Berard had known about the ‘Mutant of Omaha’ ruling [squelching a 1983 T-shirt protesting the nuclear arms race], he might never have dared to produce his innocuous T-shirt.”

— From “Brand Name Bullies” (2005) by David Bollier

Clarence Whitefield Memorabilia Collection

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Any clue as to what this button means? I’ve got a guess, but I’m not positive.

The button is found in the Clarence Whitefield Memorabilia Collection, which was recently received by the North Carolina Collection Gallery. The majority of the items are related to UNC—football game buttons, UNC ties, General Alumni Association pins, ticket stubs, etc.–which is appropriate since Mr. Whitefield (UNC Class of 1944) led the University’s General Alumni Association from 1970 to 1982. We’ll share more of the collection from time to time, but in the mean time…any guesses on the pin above?

There’s running, and then there’s running

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On this day in 1962: In a meet at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Charlotte-reared Jim Beatty, a UNC Chapel Hill alumnus, runs the mile in 3 minutes, 58.9 seconds — the first time the 4-minute barrier has been broken on an indoor track.

Pictured: A pinback button promoting Beatty’s candidacy for the N.C. House, where he represented Mecklenburg County for six years.

OUR slavery? What about YOUR witch trials?

“The day after [John] Brown’s execution in Virginia, [the Raleigh Register] warned Virginia governor Henry Wise to burn the gallows, lest some enterprising man remove it and ship it north, since ‘The Yankees have no objection to mingling money-making with their grief.’  The idea of memorial services and ‘mock funerals’ rumored in the North irritated the same editor enough to make him suggest that if Northerners were looking for public entertainment, ‘It is a pity they haven’t a witch or two to drown or burn’…

“Angered by [Massachusetts Rep.] Horace Mann’s comments condemning  slavery, [Rep. Abraham Venable of North Carolina] lashed out: ‘Let him blush when he speaks of the sins and crimes of any people on earth… no southern calendar of crime can afford such cases as the Salem murders.’ ”

— From “The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America” (2008) by  Gretchen A. Adams

Duke’s prospectus: MDs first, then poets

“A distinguished company of U. S. educators traveled last week to a long clearing in a fragrant pine forest in North Carolina. There stood the most prodigious new educational project in the land this century — Duke University, now nearly complete though little grass yet grows on its sandy campus, no ivy on its neo-Gothic walls of soft-colored fieldstone.

“The central ceremony was the dedication of Duke’s medical school and hospital, which seem bound to reach maturity and fame before the institution’s other branches. Money can get results faster in medicine than in the less scientific fields of culture. The $40,000,000 which the late tobacco and power Tycoon James Buchanan Duke gave to little Trinity College of Durham in return for taking his name will doubtless turn out many an able doctor before it polishes an important poet, will probably improve physically thousands of lives before it contributes much original thought on the way of life….

“Duke students are not yet distinguishable from their contemporaries at other inland institutions. They paint DUKE on their slickers, have ‘dates’ with the coeds, occasionally buy a fruit jar of corn liquor.”

–From Time magazine, April 27, 1931

Thomas Wolfe’s Yackety Yack

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The 1920 Yackety Yack, edited by Carolina’s best-known literary alumnus, Thomas Wolfe, is now available online. The energetic Wolfe appears throughout the volume, which includes his senior photo,
fraternity photo
, a description and picture from his play “The Third Night”, and one of his early literary works, the poem “1920 Says a Few Words to Carolina”.