Month: April 2015

Scientific Optician, Watchmaker and Jeweler

EEHightOpticianWatchakerJeweler

GWRabyDruggistOptician

Before the regulation of optometry in North Carolina, the practice took place in a number of surprising settings. E.E. Hight, of Henderson, practiced optometry alongside jewelry and watchmaking. Dr. G.W. Raby, of Blowing Rock, was an optician and a druggist. See these ads in the May 23, 1907 issue of the Henderson Gold Leaf and the January 7, 1904 issue of the Watauga Democrat.

Minnesota passed the first state optometry laws in 1901, and in 1909, legislators in North Carolina approved regulations governing optometry. North Carolina’s laws called for the creation of a board of examiners and required an examination for all new practitioners. Existing practitioners could register with the board in lieu of taking the examination.

In the March 14, 1918 issue of the Watauga Democrat, Dr. Alfred W. Dula advertises that he “voluntarily took the full examination before the State Board” and proclaims himself “licensed and pronounced competent to test eyes and fit glasses by three State Boards, N.C., S.C. and Tennessee.”

 

Schooner’s crew massacred off Cape Fear

“On the morning of October 10, 1905, thirty miles off Cape Fear, gunfire erupted in the engine room of the schooner Harry A. Berwin, bound to Philadelphia from Mobile, Alabama. The gunman, a black sailor, methodically shot all of the ship’s white crew members and calmly threw the dead and dying men overboard. Then he ordered the surviving members of the crew to sail the ship toward Cape Fear.

“The violence aboard the Berwin was the most notable act of shipboard violence committed by blacks upon whites in American maritime history….”

— From “Washed Down in Blood: Murder on the Schooner Harry A. Berwin” by Vann Newkirk in  the North Carolina Historical Review (January 2014)

And that’s just the beginning! The story [digitally available at Pardon Power] also comes to include Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft; H.B. Warner, the actor who played the drunken druggist in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and — in a very loosely adapted 1958 movie version — James Mason, Dorothy Dandridge and Broderick Crawford.

 

Charlotte welcomes ‘intrepid air flier of the night skies’

On this day in 1930: A throng estimated at 30,000 to 50,000 is on hand for Charlotte’s first air mail delivery. The carrier is Eastern Air Transport, later to be Eastern Air Lines.

The story in the next day’s Observer begins: “Roaring out of the darkness of the south, Gene Brown, intrepid air flier of the night skies. . . . “