Category: Just A Bite

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….”

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

Without their language, who are Cherokee?

“Tom Belt, elder-in-residence in the Cherokee studies program at Western Carolina University, said there are approximately 300 native speakers among the 14,000 members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee.

” ‘Herein lies the crux of the problem,’ he said. ‘How do we get more spoken? We’re at such a low ebb…. And that’s why we’re here [at a  conference in Philadelphia on preserving Native American languages].’

“Why is preserving the language so important?

” ‘The language not only validates but embodies the idea of being something…’ Belt said. ‘Without it we can’t be who we are. All language is the way we interpret the world — any language is….  And if we have to interpret our world with the language with which another people interpret the world, then it is no longer our world.

” ‘We’re not that people. We’re something, but we’re not what we say we are. So in order to be Cherokee…  we have to say that, we have to speak that, we have to think that.’ ”

— From “Trying to save vanishing languages” in the Philadelphia Inquirer, June 1, 2010

Dennis Hopper on Wilmington: ‘a little weird’

“Dennis Hopper spent several years in Wilmington after filming ‘Blue Velvet’ (1986). He was largely responsible for the restoration of the Masonic Temple building at 17-21 N. Front St., Wilmington — now home to the City Stage theater — and he directed the 1994 feature ‘Chasers’ here…. Hopper hasn’t visited in a few years, but he reportedly still owns real estate in New Hanover County.”

— From StarNewsOnline.com, Aug. 14, 2009

” ‘It was a nightmare, very honestly, that movie [“Super Mario Bros” 1993]…. I was supposed to go down there [to Wilmington] for five weeks, and I was there for 17. It was so over budget. But I bought a couple buildings down there… and I started painting. I made an art studio out of one.’ ”

— From an interview with Dennis Hopper, avclub.com, Dec. 2, 2008

“This isn’t the sleepiest burg in the world…. But walking the streets on a steamy day, you wonder what a guy like Dennis Hopper could find here to keep himself interested.

“Still, here he is, climbing out the window of his newly renovated downtown loft apartment and onto the roof of a five-story, 61,000-square-foot behemoth he owns that was once a Masonic temple….

“He looked out over the Cape Fear River, on which the U.S.S. North Carolina…  interrupts the panorama as inelegantly as a gorilla in the living room.

” ‘I agree it’s a little weird, but I like it here,’  he said.”

— From The New York Times, Sept. 8, 1994

Hopper died today in Los Angeles. He was 74.

George Washington Hill, a man with a brand

“If [George Washington Hill, president of American Tobacco, 1925-1946]  did not invent the hard sell, he nonetheless drove it to new heights. Selling Lucky Strikes became his obsession. Packages dangled on strings in the windows of his Rolls Royce, which had the Lucky Strike logo emblazoned on its taillights. Hill named his pet dachshunds Lucky and Strike and grew tobacco in the garden of his Hudson River estate.

“Even Albert Lasker, his adman, found Hill’s excesses notable: ‘The only purpose in life to him was to wake up, to eat and to sleep so  that he’d have the strength to sell more Lucky Strikes.’ ”

— From “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America” (2007) by Allan M. Brandt

Silent-movie cowboy had no bigger fan

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“As a young boy, Ed Wyatt had been one of the hundreds of thousands who faithfully followed [silent-movie star] Fred Thomson and his horse Silver King, and Ed waited for Fred to be given what he considered his proper place in film history. At the age of 65, Ed finally tired of waiting and personally financed 10 years of research for, and the ensuing publication of, his own tribute to Fred, ‘More Than a Cowboy.’

“When we met in Raleigh, North Carolina, I was amazed that Ed simply handed me boxes of photos and notes [about Thomson, who had been married to Oscar-winning screenwriter Frances Marion].  His attitude… was that he had done what he could and now it was my turn.”

— From “Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood” (1996) by Cari Beauchamp

Ed Wyatt died in 1999 at age 82. According to his obituary in the News & Observer, “Wyatt was co-founder of Wyatt-Quarles Seed Co., which in 1955 took over the downtown Raleigh space left empty when his family’s longtime business, Job P. Wyatt & Sons, moved to larger quarters.”

fredthomson

Pictured: Pinback buttons from the Raleigh chapter (later the Ed Wyatt chapter) of the Western Film Preservation Society.

Lost in the ’50s in Rutherfordton

“Most of the community events in my home town of Rutherfordton are inexplicably saddled with ’50s themes. All the men put grease in their hair, all the women wear poodle skirts — in case you’re wondering, those are long, poofy skirts made out of small French dogs; the barking at the sock hop is extraordinary — and the four or five guys in town who own cars manufactured when Eisenhower was president drive them up and down Main Street while the sound system on the courthouse lawn blasts the theme song from ‘Happy Days’ over and over again.

“That we do this at least once a year suggests that we have reached some kind of joyful, communal consensus that the ’50s were as good as it ever got in Rutherfordton, North Carolina.”

— From novelist Tony Earley’s destined-to-go-viral commencement address at his alma mater, Warren Wilson College

Welcome to Robbinsville….Just Move Along

“[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.)

 

‘You look just like anybody else’ (!)

“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.