As hurricane rattled ship, an impromptu jazz concert

On this day in 1933: “En route from Havana to New York, the luxury passenger ship Morro Castle was stranded off Cape Hatteras in a hurricane. The entire orchestra was seasick and the ship’s 140 passengers gathered in the lounge because of water in some cabins.

“Twenty-two-year-old Gwendolyn Taylor of Philadelphia distracted the crowd with piano playing and singing. ‘I thought I ought to do something,’ she later recounted, ‘and the only thing I could do was play. So I played. I sang, too; only cheerful things. I think some of the women wanted to hear hymns, but I thought they needed jazz more.’ ”

— From “On This Day in Outer Banks History” by Sarah Downing (2014)

Being stranded overnight off Hatteras was far from the worst misfortune the Morro Castle would encounter.

 

Booker T. Washington signed it — and the rest is mystery

“On a warm January day in 1903, the most famous and influential black leader in America came to San Diego.

“Booker T. Washington created such a stir that roughly 15 percent of the city’s population showed up to hear him speak on ‘The Negro Problem.’

“Washington’s visit is a little-known episode in the city’s halting march forward on civil rights, and now it has a fascinating footnote, a bit of cross-country serendipity involving an autographed first-edition book, a library sale and a retired law enforcement administrator with a keen eye for what things are and where they belong.

“The book is ‘Character Building,’ a 1902 collection of speeches by Washington. He signed it and gave it to his host in San Diego, George Marston, the city’s most prominent merchant, who in turn cherished it enough to put one of his personal bookplates on the inside of the front cover.

“And then, somehow, it wound up in North Carolina 112 years later….”

— From “Book bought in North Carolina comes home to San Diego” by John Wilkens in the San Diego Union-Tribune (Sept. 5)

It was High Point Public Library volunteer Bill Phillips who spotted the book, paid $2 for it and donated it to the San Diego History Center. But Phillips has not a clue to its puzzling past: “I hope some unsuspecting person will come forward and say, ‘Oh, that was in a batch of books I left there.’ “

Might any Miscellany readers know (or want to speculate) how “Character Building” made its way from San Diego to High Point?

 

Chapel Hill drinkers to ABC stores: Got rye?

“Statewide, [liquor] drinking habits follow patterns, sometimes unexpected ones. Rural counties like Bertie, Greene and Hertford have an outsized appetite for gin, while Dare, Currituck, Onslow and other coastal counties imbibe rum at an accelerated rate….

“Tennessee whiskey sells better closer to North Carolina’s western boundary….  Wake, Durham and Orange counties all are significantly ahead of the state average in rye sales, peaking at 463 percent above the norm in Orange County.

“ ‘Rye is a hot new trend right now, for sure. Most of my business is on the south side in Chapel Hill,’ said Barry Roberts, buyer and warehouse manager for Orange County’s ABC board. ‘Rittenhouse Rye is particularly hard to find. I order it 50 cases at a time when I can get it.’ ”

— From “What We Drink in North Carolina,” an entertaining data dive in the Wilmington Star-News (Sept. 6)

Not so beloved: Elvis Presley Coconut Water Vodka. 

(Hat tip: John L. Robinson)

 

Welcome to North Carolina — not so fast, Comrade

“On a 1926 lecture tour, Lucia Ames Mead — the 70-year-old grande dame of peace activism — was ambushed in North Carolina by anti-radicals led by Margaret Overman Gregory, daughter of Senator Lee Overman, who had conducted the famous hearings in 1919 to expose the alleged crimes of Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution….

“Gregory, state DAR regent, warned that North Carolina was ‘the target of the most desperate efforts of the Soviet propagandists seeking the overthrow of the American government and planning for a Red Russian invasion of the South.’

“Gregory and her followers attended Mead’s appearances en masse and prevented her from delivering addresses in Charlotte and Salisbury….”

— From “Battling Miss Bolsheviki: The Origins of Female Conservatism in the United States” by Kirsten Marie Delegard (2012)

 

Bill Powell vs. dictionary over ‘Tar Heel’ vs. ‘Tarheel’

“A professor of history at the university in Chapel Hill believes [Tar Heel] should be two words….and he has been campaigning quietly to get the matter corrected and standardized….

“William Powell has petitioned Merriam-Webster… whose definition in Webster’s Third Unabridged Dictionary reads: ‘tarheel, also tarheeler: from Tarheel State, nickname for North Carolina; a North Carolinian — a nickname.’

“Frederick Mish, joint editorial director for Merriam-Webster, says the spelling as one word is not likely to change for a while.

” ‘We have to weigh evidence from North Carolina as well as evidence from other places. There has to be a clear-cut preponderance one way or another as to spelling….'”

— From “Tarheel or Tar Heel?” by the Associated Press in the Wilmington Star-News (Dec. 11, 1977)

However long it took Merriam-Webster to find its requisite “clear-cut preponderance,” today the online Unabridged refers to “Tar Heel or Tarheel also Tarheeler.”

“Tarheeler”? A topic for another day….

 

At Arthur Smith Studios, James Brown birthed ‘funk’

“On February 1 [1965, James] Brown and his band stopped by Arthur Smith Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, en route to a show, and laid down ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’ in a hour…. They did it in one take. It was suppose to be a run-through, but Brown knew he had to leave it as is — because everyone in the studio was dancing to the playback. He writes in his memoir [“I Feel Good,” 2005] that even though he was a soul singer, it was on this night that he started going off in his own unique direction.

” ‘I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums. I had found out how to make it happen. On playbacks, when I saw the speakers jumping, vibrating a certain way, I knew that was it: deliverance….Later on they said it was the beginning of funk.’

“The lyrics of ‘New Bag’ are simple — just Brown trying to get a ‘new breed’ babe to dance with him by showing that he can do the Jerk, the Fly, the Monkey, the Mashed Potato, the Twist and the Boomerang. But the phrase ‘new bag’ came to symbolize the new Black Power approach many activists were embracing, along with a new way to deconstruct the blues for the next generation of musicians. With the song, as music critic Dave Marsh wrote, ‘Brown invented the rhythmic future we live in today.’ ”

— From “1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music” by Andrew Grant Jackson (2015)

 

North Carolina Celebrates 175 Years of Free Public Education

As many North Carolina public school students wrap up their first week back in the classroom, we salute the state’s 175-year history of providing free education.

North Carolina’s first free school opened on January 20, 1840. It was near the present-day community of Williamsburg in Rockingham County. Although the school no longer stands and its exact location is unknown, a highway marker southeast of Reidsville marks the vicinity of the school.

The first free school in North Carolina opens in Rockingham County on January 20, 1840.
The first free school in North Carolina opens in Rockingham County on January 20, 1840.

The Williamsburg school opened a year after the North Carolina legislature passed the Common School Law, on January 8, 1839. County elections were held in the same year with taxes for schools on the ballot. Sixty-one of sixty-eight counties voted in favor of the taxes. Every county would have at least one publicly funded school by 1846.

Some North Carolinians questioned the viability of a system of public education. They asked where to find teachers? Was the $60.00 annual salary sufficient to draw farmers, merchants and mechanics into the profession? Was the three month term too short to be effective? How would children travel two, three and even four miles each way to attend? The letter writer Rusticus raised such questions in a letter to the editor in the August 7, 1839 issue of the North-Carolina Standard (excerpt below).

Rusticus writes a letter to the editor against free public schools in the August 7, 1839 issue of the North-Carolina Standard.
Rusticus writes a letter to the editor against free public schools in the August 7, 1839 issue of the North-Carolina Standard.

On March 17, 2015 the North Carolina General Assembly passed a resolution commemorating the opening of the Williamsburg school “reaffirming the General Assembly’s continued support and advocacy for strong, innovative, and high-achieving public schools during the observance of the one hundred seventy-fifth anniversary of the first public school in North Carolina.”

Bachelors shed stigma — not so, ‘old maids’

“Early in the 19th century there had been talk in North Carolina of penalizing unmarried men by imposing special taxes on them. Like spinsters, they were not fulfilling the universal obligation to procreate.

“But by the Jacksonian era there was nothing scandalous or wholly pathetic about the aging bachelor as such. At least he could afford condescension about women in the same position as he. T. W. Peyre, a Carolinian bachelor, remarked about a landlady’s daughter who was ‘a maid…. approximating the antique, but of what degree I know not, whether a voluntary old maid, or an involuntary, or an old mad by accident, an explicable old maid or a literary old maid.’ ”

–– From “Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South” by Bertram Wyatt-Brown (2007)

 

‘Dixie’ survives in Winston-Salem — for now

“Council Member James Taylor is backing away from his suggestion that [Winston-Salem] consider dropping the word ‘Dixie’ from the name of its popular fair.

“ ‘The support at this time seems to be for leaving the name the same,’ Taylor said of the Dixie Classic Fair. ‘Because this seems to have driven a wedge in the community, I don’t see a need to pursue it any further’….

“Taylor’s discomfort with ‘Dixie’ makes sense to…William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at UNC Chapel Hill: ‘It’s a highly charged word and, like the [Confederate] flag, it will increasingly be relegated to the pages of history in a public way.’…

“Though Taylor is now supporting keeping the fair’s name, it’s likely the issue may surface again, Ferris said.

“ ‘You have people who look back at displaying the flag and singing “Dixie,” and the Old South was a place to long for,’ he said, adding that those memories are being increasingly contested by people who view the Old South through a prism of violence and human rights violations with little affection for the “land of cotton.”

“ ‘The South is evolving and considering its future and figuring how to best understand its history. And contesting those memories is one way to do that,’ Ferris said. ‘The word “Dixie” is part of that re-evaluation of what the South is and how it should be publicly presented.’ ”

— From “Council member says he won’t pursue name change for Dixie Classic Fair” by Lisa O’Donnell in the Winston-Salem Journal (Aug. 12)

 

Black baseball player sparks racist outrage in Gastonia

On this day in 1934: The American Legion baseball team from Springfield, Mass., withdraws from a tournament in Gastonia because of local resistance to its lone black player.

Ernest “Bunny” Taliaferro was barred from the team’s hotel, and the Charlotte Observer reports that “those in charge of the tournament would not guarantee the safety of the Springfield nine when it went on the field in the face of heckling and manifestations of hostility by the onlookers.”

Scorned and threatened in Gastonia, Taliaferro and the rest of team would return home to a heroes’ welcome. In 2003 a monument bearing all their names will be erected at the Springfield ballpark. And there’s even a children’s book.

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