Lew Powell

Tribute to an ‘attractive Indian princess’

Indera Mills was incorporated in Winston-Salem in 1914. According to the company’s Web site,  founder Francis Henry Fries took the name Indera from “an attractive Indian princess…whom he met while on vacation with his family in Egypt in 1907.”

In the beginning, Indera produced knitted slips and vests, union suits, knee warmers, and bathing suits. Today it specializes in thermal underwear.

In 1997, Indera Mills began outsourcing sewing to Monterrey, Mexico, and closed its factory in downtown Winston-Salem. The remaining work is done in Yadkinville.

This celluloid advertising piece, about 6 inches wide, was intended for display at store counters.

Raleigh sees the light (and doesn’t like it)

“In 1932 the Junior Chamber of Commerce proposed that Raleigh adopt daylight saving time. A hearing was held, supporters attended in force and city commissioners voted unanimously in favor of DST — to take effect only two days later. No other locality south of Baltimore had taken this step.”

“State government, however, rejected DST outright. Federal offices also remained on standard time, as did colleges, hotels, trains, airlines, and other enterprises catering to people from out of town. The News & Observer declared the city had been ‘two-timed.'”

“Confusion mounted, protests were raised, and commissioners quickly ordered another hearing. This time the preponderance of speakers called for repeal. Commissioners switched back to standard time that very night at midnight, only four days after daylight saving had begun.”

–Condensed from “Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious History of Daylight Saving Time” by David Prerau

Dare Stone revisited: Not a hoax after all?

“In 1937 a stone with several lines of inscription carved into it was found by Louis Hammond, who said he was just a tourist from California. While looking for hickory nuts off U.S. 17, he had found the stone in the woods near Edenton, not far from the Chowan River, about 65 miles west of Roanoke Island. Seemingly carved at the behest of Eleanor White Dare, daughter of Governor White, it told of a horrific Indian attack in 1591 that wiped out most of the Lost Colony, including Virginia Dare, first English child born in North America.

“Scholars have dismissed the stone as a forgery, but a closer look shows it might well be what it purports to be: a last message from Eleanor Dare and the Lost Colony…. It tells a credible story that coincides with the sources left about the Lost Colony.”

— Condensed from “The 1937 Chowan River ‘Dare Stone’: A Re-evaluation” by David La Vere, professor of history at UNC Wilmington, in the North Carolina Historical Review (July 2009).

R.I.P, newsprint? How great a loss?

“It made me furious, it filled me with both hatred and pity, and it made me ashamed. Some one of us should have been there with her! I dawdled in Europe for nearly yet another year, held by my private life and my attempt to finish a novel, but it was on that bright afternoon that I knew I was leaving…

“I could, simply, no longer sit around in Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.”

—Writer James Baldwin, recalling his reaction to seeing in the news kiosks along Boulevard Saint-Germain the image of Dorothy Counts being spat on as she entered Harding High School in Charlotte in 1957. (Observer photographer Don Sturkey’s negatives from that day belong to the North Carolina Collection.)

As someone who began work for newspapers in the lead-type era, I have to wonder: Would Baldwin have been so viscerally moved by seeing Counts’ image online?

The spy who would be governor

Among the many curious characters depicted in the newly published Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America is Mary Price, a Rockingham County native and UNC-Chapel Hill graduate (journalism, ’31) who used her employment as secretary to columnist Walter Lippmann in the early 1940s to pass along information from his files to the Soviet Union.

In 1945 Price returned from Washington to organize the state chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and in 1948 ran for governor on the Progressive Party ticket. She was not only North Carolina’s first female gubernatorial candidate, but also the first one accused—by a Communist defector—of espionage. On a campaign swing through the state, Price and Progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace were met with heckling, eggs and tomatoes.

“In Charlotte,” Rob Christensen writes in The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics, “Wallace noted that Price was wearing a pin of an eagle on her dress. ‘That eagle there is an American eagle and it has a left wing and right wing. That is the way of American politics. It has left and right wings.’ Minutes later, someone in the crowd ripped the eagle pin off her dress.” (Now there’s a “memorabilia moment.”)

After her predictably overwhelming defeat, Price moved back to Washington, where she worked first for the Czech embassy, then for the National Council of Churches. Until her death in California in 1980, she continued to deny having spied for the Soviets. Later, however, her role would be extensively described in the decoded Venona papers.

1947: A Sahara of the food arts?

Stephen Fletcher’s mention (A View to Hugh, July 2) of Holiday magazine’s October 1947 cover story on North Carolina set me to foraging through my file boxes.

This is a remarkable piece of travel journalism by soon-to-be News & Observer editor Jonathan Daniels—lengthy (10,000 words!), insightful, far-ranging, opinionated and still quite readable if now unavoidably dated. Did I say opinionated?

About the tourism industry’s Variety Vacationland pitch: “Inevitable and slightly nauseous alliteration.”

About Charlotte: “The self-appointed moral center of the state…also the homicide capital of the United States, with a murder rate never equaled even in Chicago.”

But Daniels is at his most acerbic when bemoaning the native cuisine: “The least attractive aspect of a plain people is that…their food may range from plain to poison.”

“No restaurant in the state [is] really worth celebrating…The best food obtainable in the state’s capital is in a chain cafeteria….”

For backup Daniels cites the postbellum lament of Civil War general (and U.S. senator) Thomas Clingman: “Within 10 years, as many people have died prematurely in the state from bad cooking as were slain in war.”

Welcome to Variety Vacationland! (Did you remember to pack the Pepto?)

Did Dr. Leuchtenburg just say “Eureka!”?

“I was doing research at a Florida library in the papers of a former United States senator. The papers were on microfilm, and I cranked the machine wheel hour after hour to find that apparently every extant document had been faithfully filmed but that they consisted only of tedious transcript records of rivers and harbors legislation. Then, abruptly, I came upon a…note to the senator:  ‘If you don’t come across with the money, I’m telling your wife everything.'”

–William E. Leuchtenburg, Kenan professor emeritus of history at UNC Chapel Hill, recalling (in a 2003 address) a memorable moment of microfilm serendipity.

Watch Winston-Salem grow (sorry, Charlotte)

“The spirit of growth was so pervasive that the motto of Winston-Salem during the early years of the 1900s was ’50-15,’ or 50,000 inhabitants by 1915. That goal was nearly met, for by 1920 the population was 48,375—a 113 percent increase from the population of Winston and Salem in 1910…From about 1915 to 1930, Winston-Salem was the largest city in North Carolina.”

–From From Frontier to Factory: An Architectural History of Forsyth County by Gwynne Stephens Taylor (1981).

Bring your playbook, see you in the funnies

On this day in 1975: Brian Dowling, the former Yale star who inspired the “hit” B.D. character in Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury,” started at quarterback in the Charlotte Hornets’ World Football League opener.

The Hornets, formerly the struggling New York Stars, fled to Charlotte in the middle of the 1974 season and lasted until the league folded in the middle of the 1975 season. Dowling, who had been cut by three NFL teams, fared little better in the WFL, throwing for one touchdown in both ’74 (with five interceptions) and ’75 (with six interceptions).