— Lakers vs. Celtics, old school. Old, old school. Check out this game program coverboy.
— Sea Level’s loss is Staten Island’s gain.
— The House that 4-H Peanuts Built has been relocated to a former camp for German POWs.
Lew Powell
A prayer for judgment reversed
“[Rev. J. William Jones, a Virginia Baptist] was the most influential and well-known clergyman in the cult of the Lost Cause.
“When the Charlotte, North Carolina, school board adopted a book by a Northern author, Jones gave speeches and organized protests by veterans’ groups. He called the book ‘utterly untruthful,’ written with ‘all of the prejudices and stupendous ignorance of a conceited Yankee’….
“While Jones was a chaplain at the University of North Carolina [around 1900], he gave the following prayer:
” ‘Lord… We acknowledge Thou had a divine plan when Thou made the rattlesnake, as well as the song bird, and this was without help from Charles Darwin. But we believe Thou will admit the grave mistake in giving the decision to the wrong side in 1865.’ ”
— “From “Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920” by Charles Reagan Wilson (1983)
‘Poster child’ concept originated in Hickory
“In 1944 polio swept through defenseless communities…. The worst epidemic, near Hickory, North Carolina, would provide the first real test for the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.
“The foundation agreed to equip and staff a makeshift polio hospital…. Like most polio epidemics, the one in Hickory faded with the cooling winds of fall. The hospital had treated 454 patients. All told, the foundation spent about $400,000 during the epidemic…..
“The publicity was priceless. ‘The Miracle of Hickory’ became a staple in future fund-raising efforts. Photographs of smiling victims were distributed nationwide. The caption read: ‘These are some of the Children your Dimes and Dollars Helped.’…Here were the first poster children….
“In 1946 the [National Foundation’s] March of Dimes introduced its first ‘official’ polio poster child. The idea was controversial….How did one portray a polio victim? As cheerful and optimistic or frightened and sad? … Guided by the ‘Miracle of Hickory’ campaign, the foundation chose option No. 1….”
–From “Polio: An American Story” (2005) by David M. Oshinsky
Weekend link dump: Diversity, rarity, notoriety
— Is adding diversity to the Capitol monument community “baldly racist, sexist, and classically Marxist”?
— Just how rare is that “rare” photo of two slave children found at a Charlotte yard sale?
— Will a forthcoming book of Salisbury photos include a well-known sign on N.C. 150?
Dad went to jail, but son stayed in school
“Even in maturity, long-legged (6 ft. 6 in.) Clarence E. McVey, 49, a carpenter of Graham, N.C. (pop. 5,000) could not forget the misery of his schooldays. He had grown so fast that he towered above all his classmates, was so gangling and awkward that he became the butt of their jokes. He swore that his five-year-old son David, already over four feet tall, would never have to suffer from the family curse of being ‘too big for his age.’
“He decided last fall to start David in school a year early, even though North Carolina law forbids pupils to enter before they are six. At first, no one was the wiser, and David became one of the best pupils in the first grade. Then one day someone told David’s dreadful secret.
“The teacher asked Clarence McVey to take David out of school. McVey flatly refused. A few weeks later, the county school board made the same request, but McVey still refused. Last week, when he ignored a formal order from North Carolina’s Tenth District Superior Court to keep David at home, he was hauled off to jail. Said McVey: ‘I’ll stay here and rot before I take little David out of school.’ This week, there he stayed — and David stayed in school.”
— From Time magazine, April 9, 1951
Two weeks later Time reported Judge Leo Carr’s decision: Since David had nearly finished the school year, he could stay on and be promoted with his class. But father McVey would have to pay a $150 fine or [serve] another 20 days in jail for contempt of court.
Time dropped the story at that point, but the Burlington Times News reported (hat tip to Lisa Kobrin at May Memorial Library) that McVey chose the 20 days.
Charlotte changes its mind about Lindbergh
On this day in 1941: Reacting to Charles Lindbergh’s opposition to United States involvement in the war against Germany, Charlotte City Council changes the name of Lindbergh Drive to Avon Terrace.
A property owner had complained to the city that “judging from the man’s stand in regard to his country, he does not deserve to have a street in Charlotte named for him.”
Betty Smith, inventor of the ‘beat cop’?
“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 vintage…. My research [finally] took me to Hollywood, where I think I found our missing beat officer. His name was Officer McShane. He walked a foot beat in the 1945 movie ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.’ Officer McShane knew the problems of the people on his beat intimately. He was around day and night, and he looked after the neighbors on his beat, including the family with the alcoholic father and exasperated wife and two adorable little girls. Eventually and predictably, the father dies from his affliction and Officer McShane is there to ease the widow’s pain….
“Yes, I found the beat officer, or should I say, I found the myth…. It is the job of every police officer and every police chief to help make the myth a reality, or at least make the ideal a goal.”
— From “Beat Cop to Top Cop” by John F. Timoney (2010)
Perfectly cast as McShane in the movie version of Betty Smith’s novel: Lloyd Nolan (no relation to the protagonistic Nolans).
Tip o’ the Miscellany mortarboard to delanceyplace.com
Fewest foreign-born? Let’s not brag about it
“[In 1952] Senator Willis Smith hailed ‘the people of Greek ancestry’ who had come to North Carolina and ‘conducted themselves in a businesslike way.’ Smith was sure there were ‘no better citizens’ of his state. But, of course, their successful absorption reflected the fact that ‘the percentage of foreign-born in my state is the smallest of any state in the union.’ ”
— From “American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century” (2001) by Gary Gerstle
Fifteen years earlier, Dr. Frederick Hanes of Duke University, appointed by the General Assembly to head a committee on mental illness, brought back a message legislators may not have expected: “There is considerable pride in this ‘100 percent American stock,’ but it is possible that some new stock, especially from northern European countries, would have been beneficial….These population facts have a direct relation to the incidence of mental illness….”
Weekend link dump: from horses to thieves
— In the Pilot of Southern Pines, Stephen Smith finds a silver lining in the theft of the historical marker identifying the Weymouth Center as the former home of novelist James Boyd.
— Volunteers in Eden retrieve a sunken 40-foot bateau replica from the Dan River.
— Ben Steelman answers a reader’s question about the checkered tenancy of downtown Wilmington’s old Masonic Temple, aka St. John’s hall.
— Is North Carolina’s official state horse really unAmerican?
UNC soph gets into swing of Long Island society
” ‘Some Harvard gymnasts had been doing stunts,’ said Sophomore Eaton Brooks of the University of North Carolina, nervously fingering his smartly striped tie. ‘The gentleman from Harvard who was on the other gentleman’s shoulders was swinging the chandelier back and forth. I was up on the mantelpiece, watching people crawl on the rafters. One of the other boys up there swung to the floor on the chandelier, and about ten minutes later I guess I wanted to be a gymnast, too.’ That was when the chandelier collapsed and dumped Tarzan Brooks on the floor.
“Suffolk County [Long Island] Court House was hearing a repeat of one of society’s best late late shows: the house-wrecking escapade of some 65 young bloods after the Southampton coming-out party of Philadelphia Debutante Fernanda Wanamaker Wetherill. Seven veterans of the after-party brawl were charged with causing $6,000 in damage to a beach house Fernanda’s stepfather had rented to put up a bunch of the boys for the weekend.
“All seven were released because of legal technicalities and insufficient evidence — such as lack of proof that the chandelier had been damaged ‘consciously and deliberately with a wrongful intent.’
“Chandelier-swinger Brooks said he was ‘not ashamed of what I did,’ went on to explain. ‘We had been drinking for two straight days, with no sleep…. We weren’t the same people we are today. I agree that someone has a moral obligation about this damage, but I don’t know who is responsible for the atmosphere that caused what happened….’ ”
— From Time magazine, April 24, 1964