Emily Jack – Page 5 – NC Miscellany

Artifacts of the Month: Summer camp letters and memorabilia

If the arrival of hot, sticky weather has you reminiscing about your days at summer camp, our June Artifacts of the Month are here to feed your nostalgia.

This set of items from Camp Pinnacle in Hendersonville was skillfully acquired at a flea market by valued donor and NC Miscellany contributor Lew Powell. It includes a Camp Pinnacle newsletter, three letters home from a camp-goer named Barron, and three camp ribbons, dated 1940 to 1942.

In one letter to his mom, Barron offers a few polite introductory sentences and then gets to his real point:

Dear Mother
Last night we had a banquet last night. How are you. I am fine. Please send me a knife. Write me.
Love Barron

The newsletter, “Pinnacle Pep,” tells of horse shows and swim meets, girls at neighboring camps, and the camp orchestra.

But while these American boys were making belts, learning to swim, and begging their moms to send them the funnies, their slightly older countrymen were fighting in a world war half a world away. Even amidst the summer revelry, that conflict looms in the background, as evidenced by the last page of “Pinnacle Pep.” It’s a news-brief-style rundown of all the Pinnacle happenings, with the header “Can you imagine that?”

We can only guess at what most of these sentences mean (“‘Smoochy’ Stewart had quite a time the other night…”)

But some are crystal clear, including this brief excerpt:

And this one, which wraps up the camp news with an ominous prediction:

With their lighthearted references to army enlistment casually sandwiched between playful inside jokes, these artifacts show us the tension between the unfettered joy of kids at summer camp and the uncertainty of boys coming of age during wartime.

What are your summer camp memories?

Artifact of the month: Commencement marshal’s baton, ca. 1915

UNC’s 2013 graduating class enjoyed a beautiful day for its commencement. In honor of those students, our artifact of the month is a commencement marshal’s baton, used at UNC’s commencement ball around 1915 or 1916.

This baton was carried by William B. Umstead, a graduate of the Class of 1916 who later went on to become a U.S. senator and the 63rd governor of North Carolina.

Carolina keepsakes

The baton is one of several pieces of academic regalia featured in the NCC Gallery’s Carolina Keepsakes digital collection. The collection shows some of the highlights of the Gallery’s holdings related to UNC history. From the cornerstone plaque laid when the first building was established to a caricature of the 1977 basketball team, Carolina Keepsakes tells the story of the University in artifacts from its beginning to the present day.

We hope you’ll visit the digital collection, and we hope you share our best wishes for the Class of 2013!

Strutting with some barbecue

Fifty-nine years ago today, Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars wowed an audience at UNC’s Memorial Hall with this tune.

Thanks to our friends at the State Archives for bringing this to our attention!

Wikipedia edit-a-thon: Filling in the holes

NC Mutual Life Insurance Company — Employees of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company

One hundred fourteen years ago, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company opened for business in Durham. As this article by Harry McKown explains, North Carolina Mutual grew to become the largest African American managed financial institution in the United States — no small feat for a company whose founders included a man born into slavery.

And yet, Wikipedia, one of the web’s largest reference sites, contains no entry for North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company.

An event in Wilson Library on Sunday, April 14, will seek to remedy this and other Wikipedia oversights related to African American history in North Carolina. The event, UNC’s first Wikipedia edit-a-thon, will be hosted by the North Carolina Collection and sponsored by student groups at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science.

Participants will create, expand, and improve Wikipedia articles about African American history, culture, people, events, and institutions in North Carolina. No special topical knowledge or Wikipedia experience is needed. Bring a laptop and we’ll help you do the rest!

For more details and to RSVP, see the event page or email edit.a.thon@unc.edu.

Artifacts of the Month: 1960s UNC Cheerleading mementos

Last month we did what so many do this time of year: We devoted our attention to college basketball.

This month we turn our focus to another group of athletic students who are equally agile but far too often unsung: cheerleaders. This month we bring you not just one but three artifacts, all of them from a UNC cheerleader who graduated in 1968.

This sweater, a bit darker than the Carolina blue we see these days, features a very realistic-looking Rameses (the UNC mascot).

In this framed program from a UNC-Duke football game, two cheerleaders accompany the real live Rameses into the stadium. The cheerleader on the left is Jack Betts, the donor of these artifacts and the sweater’s former owner. Betts followed in the footsteps of his uncle Henry Betts, who had been a cheerleader at UNC in the early 1930s.

Our third artifact is this megaphone, which is about two-and-a-half feet long and, as the photo shows, in less-than-great shape. Betts explains that members of the squad would beat on their megaphones to generate noise during games — the reason for the wear and tear.

Jack Betts attended UNC from the fall of 1964 to the spring of 1968. He fondly recalls being a cheerleader during the time when the basketball team moved from the much-smaller Woollen Gymnasium to Carmichael Arena, which seated just over 8,000 people. The thrill of being right on the court, of watching the games from such a short distance, he says, was dizzying.

The staff of the NCC Gallery will never know the excitement of standing on the court during a nail-biting game. But as far as we’re concerned, the thrill of adding these great artifacts to our collection is excitement enough.

Artifact of the Month: A piece of 1957 UNC basketball history

Zealous, maniacal, obsessed, rabid. There’s a reason why writers describing Tar Heel fans proceed directly to the extreme corners of the English language. The UNC men’s basketball team has earned every bit of its fans’ devotion, though, with a storied history of dramatic wins.

The team has enjoyed no prouder moment than its 1957 season, known fondly as McGuire’s Miracle (a reference to Coach Frank McGuire). That year the Tar Heels completed a perfect season, culminating in its first NCAA national championship.

Our February Artifact of the Month celebrates that exhilarating season:

This section of maple floor was salvaged from Woollen Gymnasium, the home court of the Tar Heel team until 1965. Affixed to this section of the historic floor are two metal plates, one featuring a photo of the 1957 championship team with Coach McGuire, and one bearing the signatures of the starting players: Pete Brennan, Bob Cunningham, Tommy Kearns, Lennie Rosenbluth, and Joe Quigg.

Those stellar players, who practiced and played on the old Woollen Gymnasium floor, attended the 2004 grand opening of the newly renovated Woollen, where these floor sections were offered as a fundraiser.

Fortunately, the Tar Heels’ winning mojo seems to live in the team itself, and not in that old Woollen floor: The UNC men’s basketball team has gone on to rack up four more NCAA championships after that first miraculous season, trailing only two other Division I teams in number of titles won. And any fan will tell you they’re not done counting.

North Carolina news photography exhibit closing soon

Hurricane Hazel photograph — 1954 photograph of Hurricane Hazel by Hugh Morton

If you haven’t yet had a chance to visit the North Carolina Collection Gallery’s news photography exhibit, consider this your last call. The exhibit, “Photographic Angles: News Photography in the North Carolina Collection,” will close on Feb. 3, 2013.

The description of the exhibit, from the Gallery’s website:

Events and images: two words destined for each other. Humans have visually documented events for thousands of years. The invention of photography, publicly announced in 1839, was an important milestone in our quest to capture moments in time pictorially. Technological achievements of the late nineteenth century made it possible to reproduce continuous tone images on paper and distribute them to large audiences in newspapers, magazines, and books.

News, at its most basic level, is the reporting of information about events. News photography, then, is the reporting of visual information. News photographs may stand on their own, conveying the immediacy of breaking “spot news,” or they may illustrate news, feature, or editorial articles. To tell those stories visually, photographers use angles — low camera angles, wide-angle lenses, and personal perspectives — to create compelling news photographs.

This exhibit brings together a selection of news photographs from the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives. Not every image shown here made it “to print,” but the photographers made them hoping that they would.

For details on visiting the Gallery, including hours, parking, and directions, see the Gallery’s visitor information page.

Artifact of the Month: Tobacco pouch

Our January Artifact of the Month follows in the tobacco-tinged footsteps of last month’s Artifact, although this one is quite a bit older and, one might argue, a little easier on the eyes than the Joe Camel holiday lighter.

This tobacco pouch once held Seal of North Carolina Plug Cut tobacco, a product of the Marburg Brothers company. The pouch came to us via a collection of materials donated to the Southern Historical Collection from a descendant of Wylie Becton Fort (1841-1926), a landowner from Wayne County who attended UNC before enlisting in the Confederate Navy. The collection consists mostly of manuscript materials related to Mr. Fort and his family. The tobacco pouch will be housed in the NCC Gallery to ensure its preservation according to museum standards.

If you’ve never seen a tobacco pouch before, you’ve probably correctly surmised that it was simply a pouch for carrying tobacco. But you may not know that sewing the drawstrings into these pouches was once a popular way for people — often women — in the South to earn extra income. If you’re curious, you can see letters and photos related to tobacco bag stringing in this online exhibit.

Selling “cool”

The advertising strategy of Seal of North Carolina Plug Cut Tobacco focused on associating the brand with the state of North Carolina, a state known for its superior tobacco. A great example can be found via this cigarette card, shared by Flickr user Harvey&Marie, which boasts of “old North Carolina leaf”:

It’s worth noting that the phrase “smokes cool” appears in the advertising language used for this tobacco, prefiguring the “smooth” and “cool” themes that featured so heavily in the Joe Camel ad campaign. Of course, “cool” had a different shade of meaning back in Mrs. Cleveland’s day.

Mrs. Cleveland, of course, is Frances Folsom Cleveland, the 27th first lady of the United States, making this yet another reflection of how much has changed in our cultural perceptions of tobacco use. And, for that matter, our cultural perceptions of first ladies.

We’re grateful to the donor for sharing this tobacco pouch; a seemingly empty bag that holds a good bit of history.

Artifact of the Month: Joe Camel holiday lighter

We reached into our tobacco ephemera collection in search of something seasonal and found our December artifact of the month, a holiday-edition “Joe Camel” lighter. On the lighter, Mr. Camel is smoking, naturally. He’s also jamming on a keyboard, wearing sunglasses and a red bowtie. Just off to the side, a red cocktail with a holly garnish stands at the ready.

Joe, the Camel cigarette advertising mascot, gallantly wishes “a smooth holiday season to all.”

A brief history of Joe Camel, for those not smooth enough to remember: Joe was born in 1974, first used to advertise Camel cigarettes in a French poster. He didn’t appear in the U.S. until 1987, when his image was used by Greensboro-based Trone Advertising to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Camel. In 1991, R.J. Reynolds boasted that Joe Camel’s line of merchandise brought in $40 million a year in advertising revenue.

In 1991, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that Camel didn’t consider very cool: The study found that there was no difference between the number of 6-year-olds who could match Joe Camel with cigarettes and the number who could match the Disney Channel logo with Mickey Mouse. Other studies followed. Things got litigious, with complaints and lawsuits between the Federal Trade Commission and R.J. Reynolds.

Eventually, in 1997, R.J. Reynolds voluntarily ended the use of Joe Camel in its advertising.

Is this really an important artifact?

This particular Joe Camel lighter is disposable, made of cheap plastic, designed to be discarded after lighting its last Camel. So why, then, has this bit of “junk” found a home in the NCC Gallery, along with Civil War artifacts and Chang Bunker’s rifle?

Our collection of tobacco ephemera provides a three-dimensional record of the tobacco industry’s public face, particularly as it’s changed over the years. Cigarette marketing and advertising give us a singular glimpse into the appeal and perception of tobacco use by the American public, as well as industry efforts to shape those perceptions.

Joe Camel hasn’t been gone for long but the cultural moment that allowed him to exist already seems like ancient times. We’re glad to have the lighter as a relic of that bygone era.

Artifact of the Month: World War II ration book

“If you don’t need it, DON’T BUY IT.”

It sounds like the advice of a frugal mother, but during World War II those words were issued from the federal government to all Americans on the home front. It was only seventy years ago that U.S. citizens were asked to be judicious in their shopping, driving, and eating habits in an effort to conserve resources and support the war effort.

The government managed rationing by providing Americans with ration books like this 1943 example, which is our November Artifact of the Month.

The cards here include an “A” gasoline ration, which entitled the holder to four gallons of fuel, and a “B” ration — a supplemental mileage ration issued to citizens whose work on the home front supported the war effort in some way.

The restrictions on driving were intended to conserve fuel, but more importantly they served to address a shortage of rubber. Most of the world’s rubber came from Southeast Asia, where rubber plantations were occupied by Japanese forces. Less driving meant less need to replace tires. In addition, Americans were asked to turn in any scrap of rubber they didn’t need, including old tires, raincoats, and garden hoses.

This ration book belonged to Albert McKinley Coates and Gladys Hall Coates, who established UNC’s Institute (now School) of Government in 1931. Mrs. Coates’ occupation is listed in the ration book as “housekeeper,” a title that belied her contributions both to the Institute of Government and to the study of UNC history. (Because of her research and writing on University-related topics, a University history lecture series bears her name.)

World War II at UNC-Chapel Hill

The ration book represents just one way in which World War II changed the lives of a nation and a town. This Sunday, the Chapel Hill Historical Society will present a talk that looks more deeply into the war as it played out locally.

In honor of Veterans Day, former UNC University Archivist Janis Holder will talk about the University’s contributions to the war effort and how WWII transformed the campus, particularly with the establishment of the Navy Pre-Flight School.

This free, public event takes place from 3:00 to 5:00 at the Society Office, 523 East Franklin Street (lower level of old Chapel Hill Museum building). A reception will follow the program. See the attached flyer (PDF) for more information, or call the Chapel Hill Historical Society at 919-929-1793.