“Two aspects of life in Charlotte intrigued [Harry] Golden from the minute he arrived in the early 1940s: hookers and segregation.
” ‘All the whores frequented the post office,’ he wrote. ‘On a weekday evening, dozens of salesmen repaired to the Charlotte post office to send in their reports to home offices in Cincinnati or New York or Chicago. The minute a man dropped that brown envelope in the brass out-of-town slot, the women watching knew he wasn’t a cop and he was probably lonely.’
“He added, ‘The cheap night rates for [telephone] long distance did more to subdue prostitution that all the vice crusades ever mounted.’ “
— From “Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights” by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett (2015)