Exploring the History, Literature, and Culture of the Tar Heel State
On this day in 1921: A banquet at Monroe’s Hotel Joffre welcomes Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander of Allied forces during World War I, in the only N.C. stop on his nationwide victory tour.
Foch was scheduled to dine in Charlotte, but the Southern Railway refused to pull his private railroad car from the Monroe yards of rival Seaboard Airline, forcing Gov. Cameron Morrison, Josephus Daniels and other dignitaries to travel to Monroe.
On this day in 1965: The Rolling Stones make their first appearance in Charlotte, drawing less than a half-full house at the original Coliseum (and failing to rate a review in the Observer).
Reports the Charlotte News: “What it was wasn’t music, but it was harmless. Promoter Jim Crockett had hired 40 policemen to hold back the mob, but there wasn’t any mob. [Mick] Jagger looks like a teenage miss who’s just washed her hair and can’t find her curlers. His straggly brown locks swishing around his shoulders, Jagger wrestles with the microphone, does some fancy strutting and spinning and sings.”
Pictured: Media pass for the Rolling Stones’ much better attended 1997 concert, the first in Charlotte’s new NFL stadium. The show sold out 54,436 tickets and grossed a reported $3,126,945.
Unfortunately for the Carolina Panthers, the stage set-up required resodding 25 yards at one end of the field. Heavy rains made the next game an embarrassing mudfest, including no fewer than nine fumbles.
On this day in 1945: A dance and show at the Charlotte Armory features the Nicholas Brothers and 27-year-old Dizzy Gillespie (who is still playing a conventional trumpet — his famous upturned bell will result from a serendipitous 1953 mishap).
Admission is $1.50 – “white spectators, 75 cents.”
The New Yorker’s supercilious first mention of North Carolina in 1925 proved to be typical of those for decades to come:
“The depressing motto of the Charlotte Theatre, Charlotte, North Carolina, is ‘Attend the Movies Regularly. In No Other Way Can You Get So Close to Life for So Little.’ ”
— Aug. 30, 1947
“Overheard in the Metropolitan Museum, a lady in front of Whistler’s ‘Mother: Arrangement in Grey and Black’ (speaking in a deep Southern drawl): ‘I don’t see why there’s all this fuss about Whistler’s mother. She’s just one of those old McNeills from North Carolina.’ ”
— May 1, 1954
“The Sears, Roebuck store in Charlotte, North Carolina, recently advertised ‘Plastic-like Leather Handbags.’ ”
— April 15, 1961
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My bedside stack of New Yorkers (with blow-in cards in situ) is as high as anyone’s, but the editors’ dismissive depiction of pre-Sun Belt Southerners often made me wince…. OK, sometimes I also laughed.
It’s been a while since I last dumped a batch of North Caroliniana into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, that instantaneous measure of phrase frequency over the decades.
Caveat e-lector: This is data at its rawest — conclusions should be jumped to for entertainment purposes only.
Here goes:
— Duke lacrosse vs. Duke football and Duke basketball
— Grandfather Mountain vs. Cold Mountain
— Oprah Winfrey vs. Michael Jordan and Colin Powell
— Charlotte North Carolina vs. Raleigh North Carolina
— Southern fried chicken vs. Buffalo wings and Chicken McNuggets
“When I first came to Charlotte [in 1941], I was the only poor Jew in town. I lived in drab bungalows whose siding often sprang for want of nails and there were occasions when I couldn’t meet the rent for my room in a semi-transient hotel whose curtains were stiff from a decade’s dirt. When I wore tan and brown summer shoes in December, Gentiles thought me eccentric.
“They were right. I was trying to make a living by selling Pure Midas Spring Water to folks who drank Coca-Cola for breakfast.”
— From “Travels Through Jewish America” by Harry Golden with Richard Goldhurst (1973)
On this day in 1961: The “Freedom Riders,” headed from Washington to Jackson, Miss., to challenge the South’s segregated bus facilities, incur their first arrest during an overnight stop in Charlotte.
Joe Perkins, a 27-year-old New Yorker, refuses to leave after being denied a shoeshine in the bus station’s white-only barbershop and is jailed for trespassing.
“We had expected this sort of thing in the Deep South,” says James Farmer, executive director of the Congress on Racial Equality, “but not in Charlotte.”
The Freedom Riders will experience much worse treatment, starting with beatings in Rock Hill, S.C., and ending with bread-and-water imprisonment in Mississippi. Their mission, however, not only brings the bus system into compliance with the law but also arouses widespread public sympathy and paves the way for more civil rights workers to come South.
Footnote: Although I’ve never seen it confirmed, Chuck Berry apparently was alluding to the Freedom Ride when the “poor boy” protagonist of his “Promised Land” (1964) “stopped in Charlotte, but bypassed Rock Hill.” Berry wasn’t exactly Woody Guthrie, of course — he wrote the lyrics with the help of a prison atlas while serving time for a Mann Act conviction.
Footnote footnote: Elvis’ 1974 cover of “Promised Land,” which 23 years later resurfaced prominently in the “Men in Black” soundtrack, ” omits mention of Charlotte, Rock Hill and Georgia — the whole second stanza.
“Maybe [Mick Kelly] would be a great inventor. She would invent little tiny radios the size of a green pea that people could carry around and stick in their ears.”
— From “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1940), Carson McCullers’ first novel, begun in Charlotte and completed in Fayetteville
Singer-playwright Suzanne Vega recalls this prescient line in an interview about “Carson McCullers Talks About Love,” opening Thursday Off-Broadway.
McCullers lived in North Carolina during the late 1930s while her husband, Reeves, was working as a credit investigator. During her stay in Fayetteville she also wrote “Reflections in a Golden Eye.”
“The [Rolling Stones’ 1965] tour continued successfully through Baltimore, Knoxville and Charlotte, where [photographer] Gered Mankowitz and [drummer] Charlie Watts were beaten up in the hotel coffee bar by a little old lady with an umbrella, who looked exactly like Granny Clampett of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies.’ She’d taken a dislike to them because of the length of their hair. The manager finally led her away.”
— From “Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock ‘N’ Roll Band” (1990) by Bill Wyman with Ray Coleman