Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
Whatever your opinion of the long-disputed Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, this bronze-clad sculpture of deliveryman Captain James Jack is quite a piece of advocacy art.
I can think of two other examples of equestrian statues in North Carolina: Gen. Nathanael Greene in Greensboro and R. J. Reynolds in Winston-Salem. Are there more?
“[My arrival in Robbinsville] became a news flash, received about the way a raiding party from outer space would be.
“Most perplexing was the number of people I tried to tell about my walk across America who wouldn’t believe me. Most thought it was a clever city-boy trick to cover up drug dealing…. Now I understood how people felt in Russia. Around every corner and behind every window, I was being watched.
“I should have stopped looking for a job and moved on. But I decided to be stubborn.”
— From “A Walk Across America” by Peter Jenkins (1979)
Jenkins’ resolve soon succumbed to the threat of lynching: “I was guilty for the crime of being a stranger,” he said later. “A couple of law enforcement officers informed me that I needed to get out town by sundown or I would find myself hanging from a pine tree…. I got out of town.” (Jenkins had a better experience — much better — in Murphy, where he enjoyed a months-long stay with a black family who saw his arrival as God’s way of testing their hospitality.)
“The year in Raleigh [1930, playing in the Class C Piedmont League] was an experience. At first I didn’t fit in. I encountered more curiosity than hostility. My teammates were a bunch of farm boys, and I was a big, ungainly kid from the city. One day I was standing on the field when I became aware of a teammate walking slowly around me, staring.
” ‘I’ve never seen a Jew before,’ he said. ‘I’m just looking…. I don’t understand it. You look just like anybody else.’
” ‘Thanks,’ I said.”
— From “Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life” (1989)
The Bronx-born Greenberg went on to become the first Jewish superstar. For most of his career he played first base for the Detroit Tigers. In 1938 he hit 58 home runs, threatening Babe Ruth’s record.
I’ll go with Greenberg’s autobiography, but for the record I’ve also seen this anecdote placed in Beaumont, Texas, in the 1932 season.
Death noted: Asheville native Jim Leeson, civil-rights-era journalist, May 3 in Franklin, Tenn. He was 79.
The New York Times obit centers on his historically-invaluable taping of a 1951 radio broadcast describing the scene at a black man’s public execution in Laurel, Miss., but a fuller account of Leeson’s life can be found at A Man in Full: Jim Leeson, 1930-2010.
Hat tip to blogger Tom Wood for verifying his friend’s Buncombe County roots.
On this day in 1953: Fred Chappell, a junior at Canton High School, hitchhikes 250 miles to Duke University to hear his hero, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
Chappell will soon enroll at Duke and study under writing professor William Blackburn, whose students over the years also include Reynolds Price, William Styron, Josephine Humphreys and Anne Tyler.
Later, as a professor at UNC-Greensboro and the state’s poet laureate, Chappell recalls Thomas’ reading: “They poured him on stage over at Page Auditorium. And you thought, ‘Oh geez. This is not going to happen.’ And he gave a magnificent reading. An impossible reading. And then they poured him off stage.”
“It was in the textile mills of North Carolina [in 1934 that Martha Gellhorn, a 25-year-old investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration] found the writing voice she had been looking for. It was clear and simple, a careful selection of scenes and quotes…. What made it her own was the tone, the barely contained fury and indignation…..
“Returning from a mill town where those fortunate enough to still have jobs were forced to pay half again as much for their food at the company store, she added: ‘It is probable — and to be hoped — that one day the owners of this place will get shot and lynched.’
“In Gastonia, among those who had lost everything, she at last had her subject. For the next 60 years, in wars, in slums, in refugee camps, she used this voice again and again…. It became her hallmark.”
— From “Gellhorn: A 20th Century Life” by Caroline Moorehead (2003)
Martha Gellhorn’s celebrated career as a foreign correspondent stretched from the Spanish Civil War to the invasion of Panama, although she is perhaps more widely remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s third wife — a distinction she abhorred.
“[In 1961 Patsy Cline] was invited to appear on the Grand Ole Opry at Carnegie Hall, the first full-fledged country production at that cultural bastion….
“Dorothy Kilgallen, who wrote the syndicated ‘Voice of Broadway’ column for the Journal-American and was featured on CBS’s ‘What’s My Line?’, took cheap shots almost daily at the coming of the ‘Carnegie Hallbillies.’
“On stage in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Patsy had a few words for Kilgallen: ‘We’re gonna be in high cotton next week — Carnegie Hall. That ole Dorothy Kilgallen wrote, “Everybody should get out of town because the hillbillies are coming!” At least we ain’t standing on New York street corners with itty-bitty cans in our hands collecting coins to keep up the opera and symphonies.’ ”
— From “Honky Tonk Angel: The Intimate Story of Patsy Cline” (1993) by Ellis Nassour
“In 1955 an offer came [to Satchel Paige, at age 49] to pitch for the Greensboro Patriots of the Carolina League. The team’s first black player, he was scheduled to pitch at home against Reidsville, a Phillies farm team. But the Phillies’ farm director protested the Paige appearance as ‘a travesty of the game’ and ‘a farce.’
“The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues ruled that Greensboro could use Paige only in exhibition games, [not in the already sold-out game against Reidsville]. When Hurricane Diane deluged the Carolinas, washing away the game, the Patriots decided not to press the case and released him before he had thrown a pitch….
“In 1966 Paige pitched one game, without protest, for the Carolina League’s Peninsula Pilots of Hampton, Va. — against the same Greensboro Patriots who had been forced to release him in 1955. Attracting over 3,000 fans to Hampton’s War Memorial Stadium, he gave up two runs in the first inning, threw a scoreless second and then left organized baseball, never to return as a player.”
— From “Don’t Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball” by Mark Ribowsky (1994)
In 1971 Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige became the first Negro League player inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame. He died in 1982.
“The University of North Carolina is noted for being one of the two oldest State universities in the U. S., for having on its faculty George Bernard Shaw’s biographer Archibald Henderson, for the leisurely atmosphere of its green old campus at Chapel Hill.
“Athletically it is notable because the members of its teams, instead of naming themselves after wild animals, are quite content to be called ‘tar heels’; and because its tennis team in the last four years has won 62 consecutive matches.”
— From Time magazine, May 22, 1933
