Category: Tar Heelia

1. Of North Carolina’s 100 counties how many are named for women?

2. What well-known food processor is located at the corner of Cucumber and Vine streets?

3. True or false: Though now often associated with North Carolina, the term “Tobacco Road” was first used in reference to Georgia.

4. On the Monopoly game board, what color is North Carolina?

5. Nearly one-third of North Carolina’s Lumbee Indians have one of what two surnames?

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1. Three: Dare County, named for Virginia Dare, first child of English parents born in the New World; Wake County, named for Margaret Wake, wife of colonial Gov. William Tryon; Mecklenburg County, named for Princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III.

2. Mt. Olive Pickle Co., in Mount Olive. Mt. Olive ranks third, behind Vlasic and Claussen, as the best-selling brand in the country.

3. True. It was the Augusta-area address of Jeeter Lester in Erskine Caldwell’s scandalous 1932 novel by that name.

4. Green.

5. Oxendine and Locklear.

 

1. What N.C. county is 75 percent water?

2. Mexican Joe was the original name of what familiar tabletop condiment?

3. How do North Carolina, North Dakota and North Korea rank in area?

4. With which of these cities is Charlotte on nearly the same latitude?

A. Tokyo.

B. London.

C. Paris.

D. Rome.

5. What entertainers were born Milton Supman, Richard Fliehr and Randy Traywick?

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1. Dare County — 383 square miles of land and 1,179 square miles is water.

2. Texas Pete hot sauce, concocted by Thad W. Garner in 1929 and still manufactured in Winston-Salem.

3. North Dakota, 70,702 square miles; North Carolina, 52,669 square miles; North Korea, 46,540 square miles.

4. A. Tokyo. The European cities are all farther north.

5. Comedian Soupy Sales, a Franklinton native; wrestler Ric Flair, a longtime Charlotte resident; and country singer Randy Travis, a Marshville native.

 

1. Longtime character actor Murray Hamilton, who was born and died in Washington, N.C., played the husband of Anne Bancroft in what famous movie?

2. True or false: Though now known by its distinctive black and white stripes, the Cape Hatteras lighthouse was once painted red and white.

3. The Durham mansion at the center of the Michael Peterson murder trial was previously owned by what well-known writer and scholar?

4. What are North Carolina’s two hyphenated municipalities?

5. In 1970 a DC-9 returning to Huntington, W.Va., carrying 75 people, including 37 Marshall University football players, crashed while approaching the runway. All died — the worst toll in U.S. sports history. Where had the flight originated?

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1. “The Graduate” — they were Mr. and Mrs. Robinson. Hamilton is also remembered as the mayor in “Jaws.”

2. True. In 1871 the upper part of the tower was painted red, the lower part white. Two years later it was painted in spiral bands of alternating black and white.

3. Henry Louis Gates Jr., author of “Colored People” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man,” who taught at Duke University in the early 1990s.

4. Winston-Salem and Fuquay-Varina. Winston merged with Salem in 1913, Fuquay Springs with Varina in 1963.

5. Greenville, where the team had just played East Carolina.

 

1. “Sometimes into Asheville, sometimes Memphis town / The revenooers chased him, but they couldn’t run him down.” Who sang — and wrote — these lines from the 1958 pop hit “The Ballad of Thunder Road”?

2. Before Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, he first tried it out in what N.C. town?

3. Which one of these five structures has not been named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark: Dorton Arena in Raleigh, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Bank of America tower, the Bunker Hill Covered Bridge in Catawba County or the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse?

4. True or false: The population density of North Carolina is more than twice that of the United States.

5. True or false: When Strom Thurmond ran for president on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, he led the ballot in North Carolina.

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1. Robert Mitchum, who starred in “Thunder Road,” the Southern drive-in classic filmed in Asheville and Transylvania County.

2. Rocky Mount. Nine months before the March on Washington, King told nearly 2,000 people crowded into Booker T. Washington High School, “My friends of Rocky Mount, I have a dream tonight. It is a dream rooted deeply in the American dream I have a dream that one day right here in Rocky Mount, N.C., the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will meet at the table of brotherhood.”

3. The 60-story Bank of America Corporaste Center, tallest building between Atlanta and Philadelphia.

4. True. The national density is about 91 people per square mile. North Carolina’s is 206.

5. False. Harry Truman received 58 percent of the vote, Thomas Dewey 33 percent and Thurmond 9 percent.

 

1. What writer caused a furor in Chapel Hill in 1931 with his poem about the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers unjustly accused of rape in Alabama?

2. What are the four “-villes” among North Carolina’s 15 largest cities?

3. What N.C. airport has the longest commercial runway between Washington and Atlanta?

4. Advertising Age chose what cigarette as having the top icon of the 20th century? As having one of the top 10 jingles?

5. What British rock group took its name from two Carolinas blues musicians?

 

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1. Langston Hughes, whose “Christ in Alabama” appeared on the cover of the local but world-renowned literary journal Contempo just as he arrived on campus. Hughes spoke at the Playmakers Theatre while police stood guard outside. He later said he had had “a swell time” on his visit.

2. Fayetteville, Greenville, Asheville and Jacksonville.

 3. The little-used Global TransPark in Kinston.

4. Marlboro (the Marlboro Man). Winston (“Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”).

5. Pink Floyd, after Pink Anderson, born in Laurens, S.C., and Floyd Council, born in Chapel Hill.

 

1. “And I always remember that whatever I have done in the past or may do in the future Duke University is responsible in one way or another.” — Who spoke these words at a Greensboro campaign rally in 1960?

2. What crucial contribution to the tobacco industry was made by a slave in Caswell County?

3. True or false: Actor Robert De Niro once appeared as a beauty pageant emcee in a Duke Power television commercial.

4. What is the largest city in North Carolina not named for a person?

5. True or false: No football player at an N.C. college has ever won the Heisman Trophy.

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1. Duke law grad Richard Nixon.

2. Stephen Slade fell asleep while tending a fire in a tobacco barn, accidentally inventing the process that produces bright-leaf tobacco.

3. True. De Niro was discovered for the role while performing at the Matthews Dinner Theater in 1967. His big break in movies didn’t come until six years later in “Bang the Drum Slowly.”

4. High Point, the state’s eighth largest city.

5. True. North Carolina’s Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice was runner-up in both 1948 and 1949.

 

1. True or false: At the time of George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, North Carolina had yet to ratify the Constitution.

2. A panel of journalists and historians assembled by the Associated Press ranked what three events as the top stories of 20th century North Carolina?

3. In what sport does Whoopdedoo represent North Carolina’s greatest challenge?

4. What Hollywood actress traces her father’s side of the family to the Lumbee Indians?

5. Why does Wilmington remember Dec. 15, 1955, as “Black Thursday”?

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1. True. (Nor had Rhode Island.)

2. The Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903, the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in in 1960 and Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

3. Skiing. It’s the steepest slope at Sugar Mountain.

4. Heather Locklear. (In Robeson County, Locklears outnumber Smiths more than two-to-one. More than 40 percent of Locklears in the United States live in North Carolina.)

5. That was the day the Atlantic Coast Line railroad announced it would move its headquarters to an undetermined but more central location. The new site turned out to be Jacksonville, Fla., and the move was made in 1960.

 

1. With what other state does North Carolina share the subject of its statehood quarter?

2. Name the three largest “-boros” in North Carolina.

3. True or false: The first use of “redneck” noted by the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1830, referred to North Carolinians.

4. What musician — a graduate of Laurinburg Institute in Scotland County — is credited with popularizing the hipster facial hair known as the soul patch?

5. A Congressional investigation in 1965 found that North Carolina had the most active chapter of what organization?

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1. Ohio, which claims the Wright Brothers because they lived in Dayton, even if they didn’t make their first flight there.

2. Greensboro, Goldsboro, Asheboro.

3. True. “Mrs. Royall’s Southern Tour”mentions “the Red Necks, a name bestowed upon the Presbyterians in Fayetteville.” A prolific and obstreperous author, Anne Royall detested Presbyterians, describing them as “blue-skins,” “blackcoats” and “copper-heads.” Royall’s cursing at Presbyterian proselytizers near her home in Washington resulted in her becoming the first American ever convicted of being a “common scold.” (She was fined $10.)

4. Dizzy Gillespie.

5. The Ku Klux Klan. On a single night that year the Klan burned crosses at courthouses or city halls in Oxford, Currie, Wards Corner, Burgaw, Roxboro, Salisbury, Henderson, Statesville, Tarboro, Whiteville, Elizabethtown, Southport and Wilmington.

 

1. What is Carolina muddle?

2. In Look magazine’s 1956 issue on “The South vs. the Supreme Court,” what North Carolinian contributed “The Case for Segregation”?

3. “To such an open declaration by the Marion businessmen that they will assist Capital to choke Labor, can there, on the part of workers, be any conceivable answer save the most militant and universal and immediate organization of trade unions?” Who wrote these words about the Marion Manufacturing Co. strike that left six workers shot dead?

4. True or false: In antebellum North Carolina, towns such as Edenton, Fayetteville and Wilmington required free blacks to register and to wear cloth badges on their left shoulder bearing the word “FREE.”

5. The movie “Cold Mountain,” set in the N.C. mountains, was filmed mostly in what country?

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1. A thick fish stew found in eastern North Carolina and Virginia, especially the Outer Banks.

2. Sen. Sam Ervin.

3. Sinclair Lewis. His newspaper coverage was collected in the pamphlet “Cheap and Contented Labor: The Picture of a Southern Mill Town in 1929.”

4. True.

5. Romania.

 

1. True or false: More than one in four of the Americans named Zeb live in North Carolina.

2. Sherwood Anderson based his 1932 novel “Beyond Desire” on what N.C. event?

3. What late U.S. senator was born in North Carolina as Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr.?

4. What 17-year-old gave up painting and turned to folk music after attending the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville in 1936?

5. “Disraeli saw two nations, the rich and the poor, in 19th-century England. That day in Durham, North Carolina, I for the first time saw two nations, black and white, in 20th-century America.” Who wrote those words — Richard Nixon, Terry Sanford or John Edwards?

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1. True. Zebulon “Zeb” Vance, governor during the Civil War, has been called the state’s most popular political figure.

2. The Gastonia textile workers’ strike of 1929.

3. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., born in Wilkesboro in 1917. His mother died a year later, and young Cornelius was adopted by aunt and uncle Vlurma and Titus Byrd, with whom he moved to West Virginia when he was about 2.

4. Pete Seeger, for whom hearing the five-string banjo proved a life-changing experience.

5. Nixon, recalling the sight of a shift change at a downtown tobacco plant while a law student at Duke.