Tag: charlotte nc

Health care reform, circa 1910

“At North Carolina Medical College [educational researcher Abraham] Flexner quoted a faculty member: ‘It is idle to talk of real laboratory work for students so ignorant and clumsy. Many of them, gotten through advertising, would make better farmers.”

— From “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History” by John M. Barry (2004)

The Flexner Report, published in 1910 by the Carnegie Foundation, brought about epochal reforms in medical education in the U.S. and Canada — and led to the end of N.C. Medical College in Charlotte, which was judged “thoroughly wretched.” In 1914 college officials, unwilling or unable to spend the money needed for compliance with Carnegie standards, closed shop and enrolled their students at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.

Gallup-ing Jehosaphat! A happiness recession?

Unsettling news indeed: The “well-being” of North Carolinians reportedly ranks 36th in the nation. Gallup’s composite index weighs 20 factors, such as stress, obesity, job satisfaction, nighttime safety, happiness…. Happiness? Tar Heels come up short in happiness?

Why, it hasn’t been that long ago — the ’70s, actually — that John Shelton Reed was explaining why no less than 90 percent of North Carolinians considered their state “the best, all things considered.” In sum: nice neighbors, nice weather. (Among the dozen other states studied, Massachusetts came in last at 40 percent.)

Mt. Airy native Donna Fargo even claimed the title of  “Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.”

So what happened? In the intervening four decades, have newcomers from Massachusetts been stealthily U-Hauling their  gloom and naysaying past the interstate welcome centers? Or are 21st century North Carolinians simply unhappy, for whatever reason, in a state they may still consider the best?

Gallup asked, “Did you experience feelings of happiness during a lot of the day yesterday?” For reasons I’m sure make sense in the opinion-harvesting community, the results are presented by congressional district. Thus, North Carolina’s happiest districts are Four (Durham, Chapel Hill) and Nine (Charlotte region minus Charlotte), both at 90 percent “yes.” Its unhappiest district: Seven (Wilmington, part of Fayetteville) at 84 percent.

Finally, this caught my eye: In response to “Are you satisfied with the city or area where you live?” the 94 percent yes in North Carolina’s District Four was topped only by the 95 percent yes in California’s District 48.

Curse you, Laguna Beach.

A link dump even more instructive than usual

— How Charlotte got to be CHARLOTTE (while somehow retaining an amazing microhabitat or two).

— How Asheville came to host its first  flash mob pillow fight (while still honoring its more traditional pastimes).

—  How a covered wagon from Rowan County ended up on the second floor of a restaurant in New Washington, Indiana.

— How Benny from Lexington became “the old man” on “Pawn Stars.”

— How North Carolina lost  — to Ohio! — its official unofficial state  “ready-to-eat spiced sausage treat.”

Ike invites Congressman under his umbrella

“Last week [President Eisenhower] flew to Charlotte, N.C. for ceremonies commemorating the signing of the Mecklenburg Declaration…. The trip’s real purpose was to assist Charles R. Jonas, 49, who is up for re-election as North Carolina’s sole Republican Congressman.

“Without any open endorsements or overt politicking, Ike managed to give Jonas his beaming blessing. The President, said a G.O.P. strategist, ‘is like a man with an umbrella—everyone wants to stand under it with him.’ ”

— From Time magazine, May 31, 1954

Jonas won a second term and served 10 terms in all before retiring.

George Washington, packing heat from Charlotte?

“The rifle became so popular in the South that a factory for making the hunting rifle was established at Charlotte, N. C., about 1740. The founders came from Leman’s Rifle Factory at Lancaster, Pa….

” ‘General Washington’s favorite weapon was the rifle,’ says George W. Park Custer, in a…   memorandum printed… for private distribution…. ‘His was presented to him in 1787 [and] was made in Charlotte, N. C. It is four feet in length of the barrel, and the entire piece is handsomely mounted with silver. The lock is beautiful work. I have known the General to kill a deer at 150 yards with this rifle.’

“This same Charlotte rifle-making firm in 1777 presented General Washington with the finest and undoubtedly the first pair of rifle pistols ever made in America. They had twelve inch barrels carrying four ounce balls and would shoot with the accuracy of a rifle at fifty or sixty feet. They saved the General’s life at Germantown [in October 1777] but that story, though a most interesting one, does not belong here.”

— From the Washington Post, June 16, 1901 (as quoted in “Hornets’ Nest” by LeGette Blythe and Charles Raven Brockmann [1961])

A colorful and intriguing account indeed, but I’ve been unable to turn up any supporting evidence on Washington’s weaponry (or on George W. Park Custer).

This caution flag is from an online bio of Henry E. Leman (1812- ), a gunsmith in Lancaster County, Pa.:

“Claims have been made on a number of occasions that gunsmiths named Leman worked in Lancaster County in the eighteenth century…. The records of the Lancaster County Court House do not support the hypothesis of Leman production before the time of Henry E. Leman.”

Thoughts, anyone?

UPDATE: Internet findings suggest “Charlotte, N.C.” was actually  Charlottesville, Va. Alas.… And “George W. Park Custer” was almost certainly George W. Parke Custis, Washington’s step-grandson and adopted son.

The making of ‘The Mind of the South’

“At Wake Forest [W. J. Cash] became… a fan of H. L. Mencken, the acerbic Baltimore journalist who’d derided the South as ‘the Sahara of the Bozart’….  He wanted to write for Mencken’s magazine, American Mercury.  In 1929 [it] published his Menckenesque dismantling of U.S. Sen. Furnifold Simmons…. ‘the stateliest Neanderthaler who ever cooled his heels on a Capitol Hill desk’….

“Other articles in the Mercury would follow, including an indignant portrayal of Charlotte as a citadel of bigotry and Babbitry, besotted by Presbyterianism and in love with Duke Power Co., a city where life for many consisted of ‘a dreary ritual of the office, golf and the church’ that is ‘unbearably dull even for Presbyterians.’

“Cash’s 1929 article ‘The Mind of the South’ attracted the interest of  the Knopf publishing house. Cash told Blanche Knopf of his plans to expand it into a book [not published until 1941] with the thesis that ‘the Southern mind represents a very definite culture, or attitude towards life, a heritage, from the Old South, but greatly modified and extended by conscious and unconscious efforts over the last hundred years to protect itself from the encroachments of three hostile factors: the Yankee Mind, the Modern Mind, and the Negro.’
–
“The salient characteristic of the Southern mind, Cash argued, ‘is a magnificent incapacity for the real, a Brobdingnagian talent for the fantastic’ — a mind, in short, that is wholly unadjusted to the demands of the modern world.”
–
— From remarks Sunday by Ed Williams, retired editor of the editorial pages of the Charlotte Observer, at the induction of W. J. Cash into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame
Also inducted: Walter Hines Page, Allan Gurganus, Robert Morgan and Samm-Art Williams.

Streets you can’t beat — or maybe you can

“When longtime resident Fred Helms, a 93-year-old lawyer, turns onto Queens Road West, he draws an appreciative breath and announces, ‘We are now entering …  the most beautiful residential street in the world.’ ”

— From “Charlotte’s Magnificent Mile” (Sept. 17, 1989)

(Beautiful, but not indestructible. Less than a week after this story appeared in the Observer, Hurricane Hugo littered Queens Road West with snapped-off willow oaks. And since then the boulevard’s aging canopy has endured “Hugo on Ice” [2002] and continuing assault by cankerworms.)

I was  reminded of Fred Helms’ grand claim by the recognition recently given New Bern’s Middle Street by the American Planning Association. (Hat tip to Mary Newsom.)

My own short list of North Carolina’s great streets tilts toward the less pristine and preserved, even the somewhat seedy. This weekend in Salisbury, for instance, I enjoyed wandering the idiosyncratic old storefronts of Main and Innes  — antique shops, election headquarters, coin shop, hardware stores, wig shop, used book stores, wine shops, famous hot dog stand, drugstore, shoe repair shop, lots of restaurants with no apparent dreams of being franchised — and not a Crate & Fitch or Abercrombie & Barrel to be seen.

So what’s your idea of a great street?

Sunday link dump: No comics or Parade, but still….

Instead of (or in addition to) lamenting the shrunkenness of your Sunday paper, check out these digital destinations:

— Who knew that Charlotte as recently as 1931 was home to a post of the Grand Army of the Republic?

— Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, Ralph Ellison…  Jim Ross.

— Can’t see the Capitol for the trees? Here’s why.

— Preliminary pruning reduces North Carolina’s Civil War death toll to 36,000 tops.

— “Did German U-boat sailors see a movie in Southport during World War II?”

— Charlotte’s role in Solomon Burke’s  “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.”

No admission fee for today’s link dump

— Turnstiles yet to whirl dervishly at new museums in Charlotte and Greensboro.

— Am I the only one left unenlightened by this compare-and-contrast of addled Gainesville preacher and martyred Gastonia striker?

— Theme of Sunday’s L.A. Times syndicated crossword puzzle: “The Long and Short of It — A long E sound in familiar phrases is changed to a short I sound and clued wackily.”  61 across calls for 21 letters meaning “Black gooey knolls near Charlotte”…. Get it?

Today’s link dump has had no contact with agents

— Click away a leisurely afternoon with these 206 images of Asheville from the Library of Congress.

— “The Nylon Capital of the World… need not embellish its past with a bogus story about Leonidas Polk.”

— The distinctive architecture of Gaston County’s oldest building “came down the Great Wagon Road.”

— Hugh McColl Jr. recalls “the most boring city I’d ever seen in my life.” (Relax, Raleigh, he’s not talking about you.)