Tag: charlotte nc

You don’t have to be Jewish to cover NASCAR, but….

“Yes, Nascar was born in the Bible Belt South. And racing and religion are inseparable. Each weekly driver’s meeting ends with a prayer and every pre-race ceremony includes an invocation….

“But… it’s one of the oddities of Nascar: Many of the people who cover the sport happen to be Jewish….

“Many of us are based around the Nascar hub of Charlotte, N.C., land of a thousand churches … and two temples. But hey, at least [speed.com editor-in-chief Tom] Jensen was able to find a nice place to celebrate his son’s upcoming Bar Mitzvah.

“It will be at the Nascar Hall of Fame. Where else?”

— From “The merry Jews of Nascar” by Viv Bernstein at Jersey/SLANT (July 23, 2013)

As might be deduced from the idiosyncratic spelling of NASCAR and the obligatory “N.C.” after Charlotte, Ms. Bernstein covers the sport for the New York Times. 

 

President Taft’s words forgotten, but not his weather

On this day in 1909: President William Howard Taft visits Charlotte for Meck Dec Day and the dedication of the 12-story Realty Building, the Carolinas’ first steel-frame skyscraper.

Just as a parade past Taft’s reviewing stand ends, a sudden downpour sends thousands running for cover. The president’s speech, moved indoors, opposes partisan politics in the federal judiciary. But it will be the “Taft rain” that Charlotteans remember.

Later, at what will become Johnson C. Smith University, Taft sits in a chair custom-built to accommodate his 325 pounds and urges blacks to continue pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

These two postcards from the collection mark Taft’s visit to Charlotte.

 

Cole got listeners out of bed, farmers out of mud

On this day in 1952: Collier’s magazine profiles Grady Cole as “Mr. Dixie.” Cole, a homespun announcer who wakes up the Piedmont every morning on WBT, has been Charlotte’s premier celebrity since 1929.

“Cole says he’s still not a professional radio man,” Collier’s notes. “But he snows under all rivals, and his droll news and weather reports bring him $100,000 a year.” His share of the Charlotte audience: 71 percent.

Gov. Kerr Scott is credited with the state’s massive rural road-building program in the early ’50s, but it was Cole who generated popular support with his long-running “Get Farmers Out of the Mud” campaign.

 

So who WAS that girl climbing the flagpole?

“There is a minor incident [in “Appointment in Samarra,” 1934] of a girl climbing a flagpole at a country club. At the time I wrote that, it was my invention, but after the book was published, I learned that a girl had climbed a flagpole at a country club in North Carolina, and another girl had climbed a flagpole at a country club in Ohio. So Dayton people and Charlotte people thought I was writing under a phony name and was a former resident of Dayton and Charlotte.”

— John O’Hara, reflecting on the challenge of writing pure fiction

Remembering the day I almost found a cure for cancer

“2012 marks the 40th anniversary of the year in which humanity finally cured cancer. Readers of today’s obituary pages may doubt this. But I know about the anniversary because I broke the cancer cure story for the Associated Press. Forty years later, alas, my story remains unmatched. The experience taught me a valuable lesson about journalism.

“I was a 23-year-old reporter working for the AP in Charlotte, alone in the office on an autumn Saturday evening….”

— From “Reporter at Work: It Could Have Been My Biggest Story” by Bob Cullen at jacklimpert.com (Dec. 13, 2012)

Reporters such as Cullen have always struggled with speed vs. accuracy. Unfortunately, as coverage of the Newtown killings illustrates, speed now seems to have claimed the upper hand. 

 

Packing missile parts called for ‘domestic touch’

“[In 1958], to communicate its contribution to the nation’s security, Douglas [Aircraft Corp.] organized a tour of its 1.5 million-square-foot plant in Charlotte, North Carolina, to show reporters and civic leaders ‘how the Nike-Hercules [missile] is assembled from start to finish.’

“The sole woman reporter [Lillian Levy of the Washington Evening Star] observed that ‘the heavy work of missile-making is strictly “a man’s job,” ‘ noting that only men toiled on metal fabrication and painting. ‘It is in all the electronic work connected with the guidance system that women dominate,’ she reported.

“Donald W. Douglas Jr., president of the company founded by his namesake, concurred: ‘Women seem to have a natural talent for the fine precision effort required.’ It was observed that female workers who packed guidance components demonstrated ‘a very domestic touch’ because of that task’s similarity with the ‘familiar kitchen chore of canning.’ ”

— From “Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War” by Christopher J. Bright (2010)

 

Elephant crushes keeper, sends Charlotte crowd fleeing

On this day in 1880: Shortly after being unloaded in Charlotte, The Chief, a circus elephant, turns on his keeper and crushes him to death against a rail car.

“The man sank down without a groan,” reports The Charlotte Observer, “and the elephant turned and started up the railroad track, the excited crowd fleeing in every direction. The loose elephant got into the main streets of the city, and a crowd was being formed to hunt him down and shoot him when it was learned that the circus people were after the truant beast.

“They took the other two elephants, Mary and The Boy, and, driving them rapidly through the streets, overtook The Chief, chained him to the others and finally got him back to the circus grounds.”

John King will be buried in Charlotte’s Elmwood Cemetery beneath a five-foot monument donated by his fellow circus workers. On it is carved the image of an elephant and a palm tree.

If you had a cause, DNC vendors had a button

From vendors, a sampling of pinback buttons from the Democratic National Convention. The Occupiers didn’t achieve much success in the streets, but their designer showed considerable talent.

Speaking of unproductive protests, here’s my own.

 

Charlotte’s ‘cock-fight might better have been omitted’

Harper’s Weekly sent a correspondent and an artist to cover the 1875 centennial celebration of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Although it admitted skepticism about the document’s authenticity, Harper’s devoted a full page to the ambitious program of speeches, fireworks and banquets staged by the town of perhaps 5,000.

“The people are exhibiting an enterprise that will in time make Charlotte a centre of considerable trade and manufacture,” the paper astutely predicted.

It voiced less enthusiasm, however, for “one of the side-diversions of the day… a grand cock-fight between North Carolina and South Carolina birds which might better have been omitted from the programme.”

 

Charlotte: Did you just insult us — or what?

Unlike my previous samplings here and here and here, some of the slights suffered by Charlotte seem to have been unintentional — or maybe not even insults at all. What do you think?….

“It makes you wonder who won the War Between the States.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, visiting novelist, marveling at Charlotte’s glitzy uptown. (1994)

— “Chapel Hill’s afraid of rock ‘n’ roll. They’re more into misguided intellectual leanings. Charlotte always knew how to rock. There is no fear of loud guitar and eyeliner, which are things that I think are important.”

— Michael Rank, longtime member of Snatches of Pink, comparing music scenes. (2004)

“No one has given me the finger yet.”

— Robert Parish, Celtic turned Hornet, comparing Charlotte’s drivers with Boston’s (1995)

“Charlotte is a little more flashy than you guys think you are — a little bit more adventuresome.”

— Land’s End spokeswoman Charlotte LaComb, noting that only 53 percent of the dress shirts it sells in the “White Shirt City” are white, vs. 60 percent nationwide. (1994)

“That’s the story from Jacksonville. So long, everybody.”

— Fox Sports TV announcer Dick Stockton, signing off after the Panthers-Dolphins game in Charlotte. (2006)