Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  Thus empowered, Duke University went out in Depression times to hire the brightest academic stars that money could buy. It even hired a coach from Alabama, Wallace Wade, who made the school famous for football (lost the Rose Bowl in ’39 and again in ’42). It hired a young psychologist, J.B. Rhine, who made the school famous for his experiments in mind-reading, for which he coined the more academically respectable term “Extra-Sensory Perception.” It hired a German Jewish refugee physician, Walter Kempner, who, while treating patients for hypertension, discovered that a paltry diet of rice and vitamins did wonders for their weight. Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Harlan T. Sanders, Lorne Greene of television’s Bonanza and, legend holds, Elvis the King himself came to our town to partake of Kempner’s “Rice Diet” and made Durham famous as “Fat City.”

  The new century brought innovations in less intellectual fields, as well.

  THE GAMESMEN

  The sporting life has always been important to Durham folk. What became the first public cemetery might have been a baseball diamond but for some stubbornness on the part of aldermen and an accident with a cannon. The national pastime was not long to come in Durham, though, for by 1875—just three years after Louis Austin was laid to rest—a Durham baseball team was taking on the Eno Bottom Rangers of Hillsborough. Durham lost, 18 to 26, but the rivalry went on.

  However, players of those early years had much to learn about conditioning and nutrition. After another Durham-Hillsborough game, in 1880, Durham player George Lipscomb overindulged in ol’ redeye while giving the proverbial 110 percent on the sunny field. That night, he suffered what was thought to have been a stroke. He fell unconscious and died the next morning. His death notice concluded, “The weather is too hot to mix whiskey and baseball.”

  The gentlemanly pastime of golf arrived soon after the new century, after John Sprunt Hill—a University of North Carolina graduate who went north and did well for himself as a lawyer for Tammany Hall—married Annie Watts, only child of tobacco magnate George Washington Watts, and was induced by his new father-in-law (who hated to think of his daughter so far away and among such Northern people) to come settle in Durham and start banking with some of Daddy George’s money. Hill knew a good proposition when he heard it, came back south, started not one but two banks and bought some land in the country, where he had built for himself a nine-hole course.

  Hill had learned to like the game in New York. Of course, he had to sell some others on it so he would have someone to play with, and so in 1912 he helped form the Durham Country Club. The club went broke shortly, but Hill reorganized as the Hillandale Golf Club and operated it until 1939, when he, benevolent spirit that he was, donated it to the city “for general recreational purposes by the white citizens of Durham.” Hillandale Golf Course remains in business today, as does the Croasdaile Country Club on another piece of Hill’s property.

  Nowadays, if Durham has any “renown the world around,” it probably has a sporting connection—like by way of the movie Bull Durham, produced by homeboy Thom Mount (who owned a piece of the real Durham Bulls at the time) and released in 1988 with a hometown premiere. The actual Bulls have moved up from the bottom-of-the-bush-league bunch of the picture and the A class of the ’80s to AAA status, and to a fancy new park across town from the one in the movie, but the town’s image boosters cash in on Bull’s success (somebody is supposed to have rated it the number three all-time date movie) every chance they get, letting bygone be the original billing: “A major-league love story in a minor-league town.”

  Or renown might be by way of basketball, a game at which the universities of Durham have enjoyed some success—four national titles between North Carolina Central (NCAA Division II, 1988) and Duke. Basketball has no such long pedigree in town as baseball, though. In fact, when the first game was played in town, its report had to compete for newspaper coverage with a high school debate.

  It was March 2, 1906—about the time of year when, today, all the talk is about “brackets” and “bubbles” and “beer.” Wake Forest College, which was then still located in the idyllic college town of Wake Forest, sent its Baptist Boys to face off with the Methodists of Trinity in Trinity’s gymnasium—thought to have been the state’s first college gym and built of lumber recycled from the grandstands of old Blackwell Park’s racetrack. Word of this exhibition of “basket ball” did reach the front pages, though readers might have been excused if they overlooked it while reading about Charles Morton’s arraignment on two counts of chicken thievery in the same day; “Chicken” Morton had already spent more than half the past ten years doing road work with the chain gang.

  Durham Bulls team photo, 1913. Courtesy Durham Bulls.

  Athletic rivalries among the ivory-towered institutions of the state were already customary. When the University of North Carolina won a baseball game, the bullhorn on the Blackwell tobacco factory would sound. When Trinity won a game, the Duke factory whistle let out a war whoop. Some academics regarded manly sport as a harmless safety valve for the hormonal excess to which young male flesh is heir, though others snorted that games were a waste of scholars’ attention and time and could be even gateway pastimes to “gambling and other immoralities…states of excitement subversive of habits of study.” Trinity and the state university had begun a rivalry at football in the 1880s (who won the first game is a matter of dispute), but Trinity’s serious and pious next president, John Carlisle Kilgo, banned that sport upon taking office in 1894.

  Basketball, perhaps, seemed a more respectable diversion, at least enough to give it one old college try. Enough people in the area had heard of such a thing that about seventy spectators came to watch, from a balcony, and the game story reported that “every one seemed to enjoy the event very much.” Attendance might have been greater, had not the Calhoun and Grady squads of Trinity Park School been at the same time locked in fierce debate over organizing labor. Wake Forest won the basketball game, 24 to 10; it also won a rematch at its own campus, but the Methodist five did achieve some success that first season, twice topping those debatable scholars from Trinity Park School.

  THE FOURTH

  When the Durham Traction Company laid out its electrical streetcar line, it, like most other firms engaged in that same business, recognized there were more avenues to profit from than just moving commuters to work and shoppers to stores and getting them back home again. Many doubled in real estate and building, snapping up country land that their lines stretched out to reach and reselling it at suddenly appreciated (a.k.a. inflated) values or going ahead themselves to raise and sell homes in “streetcar subdivisions.” In Durham, one of those sideline enterprises was an amusement park.

  Early in 1902, the Traction Company bought twenty-seven acres located six-tenths of a mile beyond the town cemetery and announced it would there build a park “for the benefit of the people of Durham.” On the eve of July 4 of that year, the park remained unfinished but nevertheless hosted a barbecue for the Improved Order of Red Men. Even so exclusive an affair required extra cars to serve the crowd, and an even bigger group was on hand for the official grand opening two weeks later. After all, recreational offerings around growing Durham were not too many, much less very varied, and this brand-new Lakewood Park boasted a merry-go-round, a roller coaster, a pavilion for dancing and, above it all, strings of colored electrical lights. It even had a bathing pond, down at the property’s low end.

  Well, the Traction investors had themselves a hit. Since, by this time, respectable people in North Carolina could observe the Yankee Independence Day without feeling grandpa turning in his grave, by 1904 Lakewood Park was hosting a “Glorious Fourth,” going head-to-head with a picnic out at Redwood on the Seaboard branch just short of the county line. Lakewood management promised something “elaborate,” including a barbecue and Brunswick stew supper provided by the Sheltering Circle of the King’s Daughters as a fundraiser for their planned Old Woman’s Home, and a splendid display of fireworks.

  Merry
-go-round at Lakewood Park. Advertised as the “Coney Island of the South,” the park operated from 1901 through the summer of 1936. Courtesy Lakewood Park Community Association.

  The crest of Lakewood Park’s roller coaster gave a view of the streetcar-suburb neighborhood that developed in the early 1900s. Courtesy Lakewood Park Community Association.

  In another ten years, the park had added a roller-skating rink, orchestra concerts, bowling, vaudeville shows and a Natatorium with ever-freshened water. In the Roaring Twenties, Independence Day brought horses and a high-dive platform—local patrons could win prizes if they dared to get aboard, and two couples even celebrated their nuptials on high before sixteen thousand guests. Clarence Gainey and Janie Gentry and Archie Garrett and Bertha Campell took their vows upon the platform and entered holy matrimony with a splash.

  Yet times went by and tastes changed, and so did management, and even though by 1932 its owners advertised Lakewood as a Southern Coney Island, the park’s Fourth of July was utterly upstaged by an air parade and bomb-dropping contest at the East Durham Airport. After the 1936 season, Lakewood Park closed for good, and Independence Day was left to do the best it could on merits of its own.

  THE AIR BIRD

  It was also in North Carolina, far to the east at Kitty Hawk, that those Ohio boys with the Wright stuff got off the ground in December 1903 and set adventure on a whole new dimension. A Durham Recorder jokester wrote, “Most any adventurous boy would prefer to be Wright than president,” and twenty-five-year-old Jimmy Umstead must have thought he saw the future when, on May 3, 1911, an aeroplane came to our town for the very first time.

  Invited by the Merchants Association to show his stuff above the baseball park in East Durham, barnstormer Lincoln Beachy put on a show of “dipping, circling, soaring into the ethereal blue” while “rivaling the speed of the swiftest bird.” Overall, the turnout disappointed the merchants, but Umstead got “the air in his mind” and, just a few weeks later, left his home on Holloway Street and went off to investigate the state of aviation. That’s what he said he was doing. Most of those he told about it thought he must be putting them on, but by Independence Day he was back as proprietor of Umstead Aviation Inc.

  Umstead had incorporated to build, show and sell airplanes, but he had the further inspiration for an “airplane-mobile” that could soar into the sky and, if encountering bad weather or other difficulty, come down to earth, fold its wings and proceed along the ground—or start out as a ground car and take to the air when the road got as bad as North Carolina roads inevitably would get. To get his business up and soaring, though, he bought a seventy-five-horsepower Curtiss biplane, hired pilot H.E. Callahan and, as fall approached, hit the county fair circuit.

  The circuit led Umstead Aviation to the great Midwest, where the fields were flat and wide and there weren’t so many fences and rubbernecking loafers to get in the way of takeoffs and landings. The company did its first business selling rides and showing off at the Home Comers and New Comers Celebration at Henryville, Kentucky. Through the season, they went town to town, disassembling their plane after each show and shipping it to the next by train. Word spread: “Columbus [Ind.] is to have a real, live aeroplane here next week!” Two pilots fell to their deaths during a Chicago air show that Umstead and Callahan attended, but, as the hometown Herald affirmed, “Mr. Umstead does not have a yellow streak and so did not become discouraged.”

  Until one fateful day at the West Alabama Fair, that is. It was December 5, and Umstead and Callahan had one of their biggest crowds ever. Umstead even gave a speech before Callahan climbed aboard, revved the engine, lifted off the earth and pitched into a nosedive. The crowd was speechless, but only for a moment, and then they rushed the wreckage for souvenirs.

  It was not the climax he had dreamed of, but Air Bird had had enough. He folded what was left of his wings and went back to the nest by ground transport. “I didn’t feel like embarrassing my father,” he said years later, but he yet proved he was a man of indomitable spirit—making a fortune in beach real estate during the ’20s and then successfully campaigning for the repeal of Prohibition, having, perhaps, decided there is more than one way to get high.

  THE PARK

  Our town, at least the older, inner sections, is blessed with many trees and parks. Look upon us from on high, the place looks like a forest. Trees have always been important in our town, a sentiment perhaps dating from the very early time when the old ridge and cleared farmland around it were known as the hottest place this side of his Satanic Majesty’s realm.

  In fact, the nature of our town’s politics changed dramatically when, in 1972, some residents in an older neighborhood were wakened one morning by the sound of chainsaws and discovered the oaks that graced and shaded their quiet streets were coming down by order from city hall, to make way for a new thoroughfare connecting the central business district with the suburbs to the west. That was the first these regular citizens had heard about any such thing, and they talked, organized and hired a lawyer and marched on the city council to demand the trees be spared. It is tempting to imagine torches and pitchforks in their hands. And it worked. Nowadays, if you want to cut down a public tree, you better plant another one in its place, and as for mass grading—look out, is all I can say. Those neighbors stayed together and became a formal association, and now our town’s Inter Neighborhood Council packs some punch. “Neighborhoods” are right up there with watching out for the taxpayers’ money and solving the image problem when it comes election time.

  In 1937, a street was even split in two to avoid a tree. The city was extending Markham Avenue from Watts Street to Buchanan, but a two-hundred-year-old white oak, twenty-two feet in circumference, stood nobly smack-dab in the way. To accommodate the tree, the road crew bowed the right of way outward and left an island of earth, a hundred feet long and twenty-four across, in between the two lanes of traffic. They even installed an underground watering system and laid the gutters such that public works director H.W. Keuffner swore that not even a drunk could run a car into the tree. Sadly, old age caught up with the oak and it had to come down nine years later, but its island remains in case it’s needed again or somebody downtown figures it’s time to rebuild the street.

  Brodie Leonidas Duke was the eldest of Washington Duke’s children and contributed much to Durham’s character. Courtesy Duke Homestead State Historic Site.

  As for our town’s parks, most of the older ones came thanks to John Sprunt Hill, the golf-playing banker from Tammany Hall, who accumulated a good bit of land one way and another and donated a lot of it for the public’s pleasure. One of our sylvan landmarks, though, came by way of a different benefactor: Brodie Duke, who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bought up a swath of real estate that curved around the western and northern sides of town.

  Brodie was Washington Duke’s oldest boy and is often referred to as the family’s black sheep. Not that he was by any means a bad fellow, but he did have three weaknesses: women, liquor and commodities futures. He was on and off the bottle most of his life, on it once to the point that, in a reorganization of the Dukes’ tobacco company, Brodie was exempted from putting up any capital but had to cease from embarrassing the firm any more with how he carried on when drunk.

  He became a silent partner in the business and may have held a grudge about it, especially if he felt his place in the family and its firm was being supplanted by George Washington Watts, whom the Dukes brought down from Baltimore to handle the financial operations. If so, it might explain why, when he laid out the streets in his holdings, he gave them names such that a map read east to west would say “Washington, Duke, Hated, Watts.” The family probably gave Brodie a talking-to, for a street was renamed “Gregson,” in honor of the Dukes’ preacher.

  Brodie was married four times, made fortunes and went broke, but he ended his life with a young bride, a mansion where the old Carr Junior High building stands on Morgan Street (the low athletic field behind
the school was the bottom of Brodie’s fishpond) and a history of charitable bequests of land, including a tract on the Roxboro road where he let folks graze their cattle and strip mine for coal, thus leaving the land cut with deep and steep ravines. When he died in 1919, Brodie left that land to the city, which did nothing for it until the Depression, when the New Deal made money available for building nice things like parks.

  City hall wanted to develop Duke Park with tennis courts, an amphitheatre and swimming pool, but, by the mid-’30s, a fashionable Duke Park neighborhood had grown up around Brodie’s bequest. A lawyer named Basil Watkins, who had just moved in, started a grass-roots drive to put an end to any such thing as a public park. He and his fellow travelers claimed a park would attract “an influx of undesirable elements” who would make the park loud and crowded and generally obnoxious to those who had come to the neighborhood seeking peace and quiet among their own kind. Watkins did get seventy-five names on a petition and railed to the city council about sacrificing trees for the sake of swimming, the cost to taxpayers of maintaining a park and picking up after littering undesirables.

  Despite the “verbal fireworks” reported, the council did what it wanted and got its park. The pool became the scene of an annual water show and provided summer refreshment until 1993, when the pool developed an irreparable leak into the underground stream right under it. The city filled in the pool and planted grass there. Some of it grew.