Durham Tales Read online

  DURHAM

  TALES

  the morris street maple, the plastic cow,

  the durham day that was & more

  JIM WISE

  Published by The History Press

  Charleston, SC 29403

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2008 by Jim Wise

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by Natasha Momberger

  First published 2008

  Second printing 2009

  Third printing 2011

  e-book edition 2011

  ISBN 978.1.61423.037.3

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wise, James E., 1949-

  Durham Tales : the Morris Street maple, the plastic cow, the Durham Day that was, and more / Jim Wise.

  p. cm.

  print edition: ISBN 978-1-59629-588-9

  1. Durham (N.C.)--History--Anecdotes. 2. Durham (N.C.)--Social life and customs--

  Anecdotes. 3. Durham (N.C.)--Biography--Anecdotes. I. Title.

  F264.D8W57 2008

  975.6’563--dc22

  2008040208

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  For Elizabeth and Ben,

  our children, for whom Durham always will be, in a way, home.

  At thirty, a man suspects himself a fool;

  Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;

  At fifty chides his infamous delay,

  Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;

  In all the magnanimity of thought

  Resolves, and re-solves; then dies the same.

  —Edward Young, 1683–1765

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Part I: Orientation

  Part II: Origins

  Part III: A Golden (-Leaf) Age

  Part IV: Bull Citizens You Should Know

  Part V: Modern Times

  Part VI: Sic Transits

  Epilogue: A Sense of Place

  PREFACE

  To begin with, these are some stories from a town in the Sunbelt: my town, our town. Not the stories, certainly, for to tell them all, as the definite article implies, would fill many volumes. By the time those were complete, there would be more tales to tell, more perspectives would have appeared and other interconnections would call for explication. Besides, all stories are renewed each time they are retold, and these are not told here for the first time—just told here in this particular order, with this particular selection and with these particular words. In this way, as retold in the late summer of 2008, they perhaps compose one particular larger story, and leave one particular impression, of one particular hometown place.

  It must be said that the particular impression these stories make will be, for the most part, in the particular minds of particular readers. As such, those impressions will be influenced by others’ impressions and recollections of many particular hometown places of the readers’ own. They may also be colored by some abstract notion of “hometown,” in the way that Andy Griffith’s “Mayberry” turned out to be hometown for every American—or its imaginary surrogate. And that’s just fine.

  Remember, it was no less a latter-day genius than George Lucas who, before his Star Wars period, demonstrated that one American place of the early 1960s could be all American places, where people navigated the cusp of adulthood—the characters of American Graffiti were people we all knew in high school. There is community to be found in that: shared humanity, like the boot camp stories that any veteran can get tired of hearing; the “drunkalogs” of every alcoholic; and the sense of possibility in the first day of school vacation, wide as a Western sky, such as Ray Bradbury tapped to make one particular hometown place all particular hometown places in his classic Dandelion Wine.

  So, while the setting of these stories—Durham, North Carolina, United States of America—is a particular place, and while Durham is unique, it is not unusual. It is a town Southern by geography, but a product of nineteenth-century industrialism—railroad, automation, mass production, a global economy—and hence its history, and the “character” local boosters insist the town has, embody as much of the Northern Rust Belt and the Old West boomtown as they do of the “South” (more so, really). There is a Confederate monument on the Old Courthouse lawn, but the memorials of current civic pride are blocky, bulky brick tobacco factories and warehouses from the Gilded Age, being rapidly converted here in the Silicon Age to offices, art galleries, trendy restaurants and pricey dwelling places. Just like all over the rest of the country. One cannot say our hometown, our Bull City, our City of Exciting Stores, is not a dedicated follower of fashion, to borrow an expression from the Kinks.

  And it’s home, this author’s home of choice for forty-something years, a homeplace he has also observed and chronicled in journalistic capacity for more than half that time, the hometown where his children were born and grew, through school, youth-league sports, scouts and church, while their surrounding grownups grew along with them. Everything unique, and everything remarkably similar.

  Being a Sunbelt town (and totally unlike a “Southern” town), most of the people one meets in Durham are fresh off the boat from somewhere else, typically somewhere East or North, but sometimes even from the Pacific Rim. Inevitably, hearing of our duration here, they say something like, “You must have seen a lot of change.” Yeah, there were about 80,000 people when we arrived in 1966, and about 250,000 now; there are more roads and stoplights and eating places that used to just sell food but now serve up dining experiences. Fewer work shirts, more suits.

  When we write “our town,” we mean its surroundings, too, even those not yet so citified and in tune to the way things are according to the leading, or most televised, authorities. “Durham” still has its countryside. Our town, itself, occupies just more than a third of our county, and its stories are hardly confined by the city limits—much as it may seem sometimes to some people deep inside them. A county was here before a town was, and people were here a long, long time before either one—ten thousand years or so, according to current estimates. For that matter, worms have everybody else beat by a country light-year—some time back, a geologist found some of their remains here that were 600 million years old. Second-oldest fossils ever found, at the time.

  The northern part of our county, up toward Virginia, is rolling and hilly, almost to the point that in a few places you can kid yourself that you’re in the high country, though the county’s highest point is a mere 730 feet above sea level. To the south and east, though, it stretches out and drops all the way down to 230 feet in a swamp not far from Chapel Hill. The hilly ground is part of the Carolina Slate Belt; the rest is called Triassic Basin. Around Penny’s Bend on the Eno River there’s an anomalous patch of soil that favors plants that belong in the Midwest prairies; in steep and shady spots, you can find mountain laurel.

  Out in the county you can also find places with curious names, the ones you have to get from old-timers or a county map from a highway department. Down south, there’s Few—renamed for a Duke University president after Pearl Harbor made the original name, Oyama, seem a little inappropriate. Up north, there is Bahama (pronounced B-hay-mah), for the founding Ball, Harris and Mangum families, adopted when the railroad came through and declared that “Hunkadora” was no name for a depot.

  So, in this homeplace of flux there are
enduring constants. These stories have to do with some of both. Those who have heard me talk, sat in on my classes or read much of what I have written will probably find some of them familiar. I hope that, in this new package and in these new words, they will find the stories freshened and as much fun to read as they have been for me to tell again.

  No writer is an island, and so I would be remiss and downright rude if I did not acknowledge and say thanks to those who have aided and guided me along the way. First to my wife, Babs, who gave me a do-you-know-what-you’re-getting-yourself-into look when I mentioned I had this project in mind but has so far refrained from “I told you so.”

  And to architects Frank DePasquale and the late George Pyne, who introduced me to and mentored me in the pleasures of Durham past. To the good folks at Duke Homestead, Bennett Place and Stagville historic sites and the Durham Public Library, particularly North Carolina librarian Lynn Richardson, for assistance and companionship over these years. To my colleagues at the old Durham Morning Herald and News & Observer for encouragement, ideas and opportunities—in particular, Mike Rouse and Jack Adams, who gave me a job interview on the first Saturday of dove season and hired me on the spot back in 1981.

  And to the people of my hometown, with fondness and gratitude. I do deeply appreciate you all.

  PART I

  ORIENTATION

  City of Durham, North Carolina: population 218,179 (2008 est.)

  Durham County, North Carolina: population 257,947 (2008 est.)

  Other county communities: Bahama, Rougemont (unincorporated)

  Median household income (2004, county): $44,048

  Location: latitude 36° north, longitude 79° west

  Square miles, city: 104

  Square miles, county: 299

  Town incorporated: 1869

  County formed: 1881

  Major employers (2006): Duke University & Medical Center, 29,911; IBM, 11,527; GlaxoSmithKline, 5,179; public schools, 5,060; Nortel Networks, 2,600; Lenovo, 2,300; City of Durham, 2,289; V.A. Medical Center, 2,086; Research Triangle Institute, 2,003; Durham County, 1,737

  Nearby towns: Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Morrisville, Cary, Hillsborough

  Driving time to: beach, 2½ hrs.; mountains, 2½ hrs.; Richmond, Virginia, 2 hrs.; Charlotte, North Carolina, 2 hrs.; Washington, D.C., 4 hrs.; Atlanta, 6½ hrs.

  THE HERALD

  Come fall, the world revives. In the mythology that informs one’s bodily rhythms, school starts back and football season opens. In fact, around here, they both kick off in the pits of mid-August, but autumn’s symbolism somehow endures; down at the coast at the end of summer comes a “mullet blow”—a shift of winds from southwest to north—bringing cooler, drier air and motivating fish to bite again. Inland, the seasonal turning is often as not announced by several days’ slow and steady rain, indicating that the mugginess of summer is over until next year and the mornings and the skies will sparkle for some weeks to come.

  And the Morris Street maple tree turns color.

  Fifty weeks of the year, more or less, the intersection of Morris Street and Fernway Avenue is a nondescript corner, historically a transition point between the central business district and a venerable residential section. For a little while, though, usually right after the equinox, it’s got the brightest show in town when, weeks ahead of the other trees that grace the city’s streets, a gnarly old sugar maple greets the morning with a fiery burst of orangey red.

  The maple has an eastern exposure and is set off by an evergreen magnolia on one flank, a late-changing willow oak to the rear and, like as not, a clear, rich blue sky above and beyond. About go-to-work time the sugar maple catches the rising sunlight full-face. It’s like the god of summer has plugged in the lights to alert us that he’s off duty and there’s only about one hundred shopping days left until Christmas, if you’ll pardon our getting ahead of the story. Sheer, unadulterated glory.

  Now, the maple tree’s location may be otherwise nondescript, but it does have a story of its own. Right across Morgan Street there is a long, low building that sort of suggests a gymnasium. These days, it houses offices for the public school system, but its original function was to be a United Service Organizations (USO) club, one of four in town, entertaining thousands of fresh-faced boys training for war at Camp Butner, just up the Oxford highway.

  In a later age, the building housed the draft board, welcoming other generations of fresh-faced boys to almost-adulthood and, in some cases, decisions that would determine the remainder of their lives.

  On the south, across Fernway, is the Imperial Tobacco building: a British company’s toehold in the backyard of the American Tobacco Company. The Brits established their presence in our town in 1903, after James Buchanan Duke—a homeboy expatriated to New York City to make himself the expansionist creator of the U.S. tobacco trust—bought a factory in the United Kingdom. Two could play in the global economy of cigarettes. Buck Duke and his overseas counterparts soon came to a gentlemen’s agreement on whose turf would be whose, but the Imperial kept its foothold in Buck Duke’s hometown just the same.

  The maple tree grows from what was, a century and more ago, the property line between two residential lots on a street lined with fashionable homes. The street itself appears on the Blount Map, which depicts Durham circa 1867 as elderly native Lewis Blount could best remember in 1923. On the map, it is called “Mangum’s Lane” and separated the farms of William Mangum and J.R. Green. It runs north from what is now Five Points, at the western edge of the central business district, and disappears after a couple hundred yards into “original forest.”

  A venerable sugar maple near downtown puts on a brilliant show weeks before other trees in town turn color. Courtesy of the author.

  By 1887, the street’s name had changed and it had at least two residents—J.R. Patton and J.W. Pope—both employed at the Globe tobacco warehouse. In the next decade, Patton went on to become the town’s tax collector. He held the position for about forty years and by 1897 had married a lady named Alice. City directories place them at several addresses on Morris Street until, by 1910, they settled in for the duration at 301, on the Fernway corner. J.R. Patton died in the late 1930s and Alice in the mid-1940s, and then John Scarborough, carpenter, moved in with his wife, Alma. They were gone by 1958, when the lot is listed as vacant.

  By 1897, the year Pope was elected to the board of aldermen, Pope and his wife, variously identified as “Mary” and “Mollie,” had set up housekeeping next door, at 303. He served as county treasurer from 1890 until 1894 and on the board of county commissioners from 1902 to 1904. The Popes enlarged their house sometime around 1905 and began taking in boarders. One of them, Allen Slater, married the Popes’ daughter, Mary Frances. They remained in the Pope homeplace, Slater making his living in real estate until his death in the late 1960s. Mary Frances lived there about fifteen more years.

  A plat of the Patton property drawn in 1944 shows an asymmetrical house set well back from the street, with a five-sided bay on the side toward Fernway Avenue. The “Pope-Slater” house is described in a 1982 architectural inventory as having Tuscan columns, a wraparound porch, fourteen-foot ceilings and a monumental stairway. Both houses are gone now; the corner lot is an unpaved parking lot, the one next to it overgrown. The only signs the homes were ever there are steps at the sidewalk retaining wall.

  And there is the landmark tree, each year heralding the change of season. The tree is a survivor. It takes, we are told, about 150 years for a sugar maple to reach its full growth, and then it can, under congenial circumstances, look forward to that many more years of maturity. Our sugar maple’s circumstances have not been all congenial: its early color change could be due to stress induced when the houses were torn down, and its roots still must contend with pavement on one side and parked-car compaction on another.

  And to tell the truth, the tree shows that it has had a hard life. Some upper branches are dead, others look sickly. But a few yards away, in one of the abandoned h
omesites, an offspring has taken root and grown. There is hope that autumn’s show can go on.

  THE ICE MAN

  Late in life, Tom Phipps would say he never had any thought about living anywhere other than Durham. Not ever in ninety years. He said he just fell in love with the place as a boy and still felt the same, even though, by the time he reached his ninetieth birthday in 1996, the Durham he had known was gone.

  “Ain’t no more Durham,” he said. He was not bitter, just a little sad. There had been a time when Tom Phipps knew every street in town intimately. But they all changed. Everything moved to the outskirts that had once been faraway fields and woods.

  Phipps came to Durham in 1915 when he was nine years old. By horse and wagon, his family moved the twelve or so miles from Chapel Hill, and the first things they saw were tobacco warehouses. The family took up residence just across the street from one, and in old age Phipps remembered the streets choked with farm wagons hauling the yellow crop to market. He remembered the soldiers who trained in the warehouse with their wooden rifles, preparing for great adventure in the Great War Over There, and he remembered November 11, 1918.

  “All at once, I heard whistles blowing, horns blowing on cars, people hooting and hollering.” Men were up on the roof of the Seaboard warehouse, and the factory whistles cut loose with their bull’s bellow and Indian whoop.

  “The war was ending,” he said. But joy was brief. The same autumn that brought Armistice Day brought the great flu. The epidemic closed Durham’s schools, and Phipps went to work delivering prescriptions. When he made some of his deliveries, the customers were too weak to answer his knock. “Sometimes, next thing you’d hear about them, they were dead.”

  Not everything was bleak. Phipps would spend time with the horses at the fire station and Howden Funeral Home uptown on Mangum Street; coming from the country, he liked animals. And there was Lakewood Park at the end of the streetcar line, with its swimming pool, roller coaster and diving horses. The owners advertised it as the “Coney Island of the South.”