On this day in 1950: Charlotte hires the state’s first meter maids. Dubbed the “Skirt Squad” or “Petticoat Patrol,” their only duty is to issue parking citations. It will be 1967 before the city hires its first women as sworn police officers.
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Lew Powell
Death noted: UNC grad Alice Denham, author and Playmate
Wonder how many other entries in the Southern Historical Collection catalog include the notation “unpublished photographs…. including a Playboy centerfold”….
Alice Denham was a 1949 UNC graduate, but Chapel Hill seems not to have provided her most vivid memories.
From her 2006 memoir, “Sleeping with Bad Boys: A 1956 Playboy Model’s Escapades with James Dean, Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer and the famous writers of the 1950’s beat generation”:
“For my senior year, I cut my hair, worked three campus jobs, refused to go out with Beau, switched my major to English, drove to the woods with Beau every Sunday noon when I couldn’t hold out any longer, retaught myself to type in a week, made Phi Beta Kappa, got a scholarship to graduate school at University of Rochester and decided to be a writer if it killed me.”
N.C. justice, 1827: ‘Allowed to keep his Ears’
“In Davidson County, North Carolina, a drunken young mountaineer named William Tippett had bitten off a large piece of old Arthur Newsome’s chin, almost plucked out his left eye and grasped Newsome’s right eye with his other hand…..
“The old man was left with just one, badly injured, eye when the right one popped out some days later.
“The little community was in an uproar when the judge sentenced Tippett to lose his ears as punishment for the mayhem. A long, half-literate petition from Tippett’s kinsmen for remission of the penalty quickly circulated. Newsome, they argued, was an old rogue whom nobody liked. Tippett, on the the hand, was a man in the prime of life.
“The governor [Hutchins Gordon Burton], recognizing that the will of the people should be heard, showed becoming mercy, writing on the back of the memorial, ‘Allowed to keep his Ears, 1827.’ ”
–– From “Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South” by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (2007)
Given North Carolinians’ widely-known affinity for gouging — the NFL of its time? — the only surprise in this account is that Tippett even had to go to court.
Coca-Cola was the real thing…. Rheumacide wasn’t
“Dear Sir:
“Coca-Cola has had a big run at my fountain, and is gaining in popularity all the time.
“A line of soda drinks is incomplete without it.
“Coca-Cola has come to stay!”
— From an 1892 letter to Coca-Cola from Raleigh pharmacist J. H[al] Bobbitt
Four years later, Bobbitt moved to Baltimore to manufacture a “general blood purifier” called Rheumacide.
In 1915 Bobbitt Chemical Co. was found guilty of violating the Food and Drugs Act for selling a product that “contains no ingredient or combination of ingredients capable of producing the therapeutic effects which were claimed.”
Hate for Confederacy didn’t ensure love for Union
“In North Carolina there is a great deal of something that calls itself Unionism; but… it is a cheat, a Will-o’-the-wisp; and any man who trusts it will meet with overthrow.
“Its quality is shown in a hundred ways. An old farmer came into Raleigh to sell a little corn. I had some talk with him. He claimed that he had been a Union man from the beginning of the war, but he refused to take ‘greenback money’ for his corn. In a town in the western part of the State I found a merchant who prided himself on the fact that he had always prophesied the downfall of the so-called Confederacy and had always desired the success of the Union arms; yet when I asked him why he did not vote in the election for delegates to the Convention, he answered, sneeringly — ‘I shall not vote till you take away the military.’
“The State Convention declared by a vote of 94 to 19 that the Secession ordinance had always been null and void; and then faced squarely about, and, before the Presidential instructions were received, impliedly declared, by a vote of fifty-seven to fifty-three, in favor of paying the war debt incurred in supporting that ordinance! This action on these two points exactly exemplifies the quality of North Carolina Unionism. There may be in it the seed of loyalty, but woe to him who mistakes the germ for the ripened fruit!”
— From “Three Months Among the Reconstructionists” by Sidney Andrews in The Atlantic (February 1866)
Andrews was among the most acerbic of Northern reporters visiting postbellum North Carolina. Here’s how he viewed “the native North Carolinian.”
A blue wedding dress that transcended white
“In 1875, R.J. Reynolds founded his tobacco company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and in 1905, at age 55, he married 25-year-old Mary Katharine Smith in her nearby hometown of Mount Airy….
“Her navy dress was a departure from the normative practices of the class into which she was marrying.
“But a white wedding dress would not have been a practical choice…. Immediately after the ceremony, the Reynoldses took a train to Greensboro and then boarded another train to New York City, where the Baltic awaited them, an ocean liner owned by the White Star Line that would late commission the Titanic. They landed in Liverpool, traveled to London, and began a tour of Europe’s great cities….
“Her navy dress was also a sign she could afford more than a white gown: She could afford Europe in the form of the ‘Grand Tour,’ a required undertaking from the nineteenth century for wealthy Americans…. It was a kind of ‘finishing.’
“Navy blue signified not her pristine and protected removal from the world, as white would have, but her status as a traveler. It stood for a geographic mobility that mirrored her social mobility…. The Grand Tour was a sign of the elite position she would claim on their return.”
— From “A Navy Wedding Dress and a Voyage” by Susan Harlan in Deep South (May 2015)
Brenau threatens end to speculation about Dare Stones
“Brenau [University] President Ed Schrader… has begun to assemble a team of experts in various disciplines—archaeology, geology, history and the study of Elizabethan writing—to re-examine the quartz stone. Sometime in this year or next, he wants to launch an expedition to the Chowan River near Edenton, N.C., where the first [Dare Stone] is believed to have been found, to search for more evidence.
“ ‘If it is real, it is the most important pre-colonial artifact by Europeans in the Americas,’ the 64-year-old says, softly placing is fingers on the stone. ‘The speculation’s gone on long enough.’ ”
— From “Is This Stone Linked to the Lost Colony of Roanoke?” by Cameron McWhirter in the Wall Street Journal (Jan. 21)
In legalizing ex-slave marriages, timing was crucial
“…In North Carolina the legal status of slave unions was among the first issues on the agenda of the 1865 constitutional convention. The final act declared all unions of ex-slaves who ‘now cohabit together in relation of husband and wife’ to be lawful marriages from ‘the time of commencement of such cohabitation.’
“As [Duke] historian Laura Edwards argues, the date of commencement was important: ‘If the date had been set at either emancipation or the ratification of the act, then all children born in slavery would have been illegitimate and their maintenance could have fallen to the state.’ ”
— From “American Marriage: A Political Institution” by Priscilla Yamin (2012)
The rise and fall of ‘a long time between drinks’
“Mr. Edison’s phonograph preserves a conversation for 100 years. But conversations can be preserved that long without a phonograph. For instance, there is the celebrated conversation between the Governor of North Carolina and the Governor of South Carolina….”
— From Daily Alta California, Dec. 26, 1887 (via Louisville Courier-Journal)
How many people today would recognize this once world-famous expression, much less any of its numerous origin stories?
Not many, the Google Ngram Viewer suggests.
A light bulb goes on (belatedly) at Thomas Wolfe house
“We have had a few folks get to the end of our 50-minute tour of the old boardinghouse before they realize we are not talking about the guy in the white suit…. As a tour guide it is rewarding for us anytime we see the light bulb going on and someone finally making connections… but you do have to wonder where they were over the last 45 minutes.”
— Tom Muir, historic site manager at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville, quoted by Tyler Malone at Full Stop (April 14, 2015)
“The guy in the white suit” tells George Plimpton his thoughts about the first Tom Wolfe.