Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  Painted Bull Durham sign evokes a golden-leaf era and is still visible in the old business district from the right vantage point. Courtesy of the author.

  The post office on Chapel Hill Street opened in 1934. Its first sale of tobacco revenue stamps took in $304,000, enough to cover the building’s cost of construction. Courtesy of the author.

  Usually, if anyone in our town goes uptown it’s for a reason: jury duty or trying to beat a parking ticket. A more leisurely approach, say, on foot, is more visually rewarding. While a glance one way brings to view a rearing hotel from the 1980s in its then-oh-so-hip lavender glory, a glance another way finds a gritty old newspaper office pretty much like it was the day they opened the new post office and paid for it in the first hour’s sale of tobacco-revenue stamps. There’s a sense of elegiac irony to standing on the site of Dr. Bartlett Durham’s home and gazing upon the Lucky Strike smokestack, freshly painted in the abandoned factory’s remaking as a ritzy office park and apartment complex, complete with new billboards for Bull Durham on W.T. Blackwell’s building from 1874.

  But if you get at just the right point on Chapel Hill Street, with the towers of N.C. Mutual and the police department looming to one side and the bus station office that once was a college that once was an A&P to the other—raise your eyes toward downtown across the railroad and you may discover a sign that has been there these years, risen high upon an art-deco office building in the east:

  “Genuine ‘Bull’ Durham.”

  Our town, the once and future.

  THE TIME TRAVELERS

  A recollection: There was that thick, heavy smell of wood smoke that old kitchens have, soaked into their walls and floor, too set in and strong for even a fresh October breeze through an open door to lighten. The breeze could, though, swirl around and blend the aromas of smoke and frying chicken and boiling greens and the earth and woods outside, and it was welcoming. Like home. Sort of like Marcel Proust’s madeleine, but touching something not so personal or particular, some deeper sense of comfort that comes with one’s very genes. It was late afternoon, a red sun lay over a tree line one hundred yards away, and deepening blue shadows stretched long from reddened trees across the stripped tobacco patch and kitchen garden.

  It was October 29, 1870.

  Not really, but it almost could have been. In fact, it was October 29, 1983, a Saturday when I, my wife and our infant daughter had been invited for supper in the past.

  Our host was Rob Worrell, who at the time was assistant manager of the Duke Homestead State Historic Site, on Duke Homestead Road just north of Interstate 85. When we came in, he was standing over a smoking woodstove, baking cornbread. It was well after hours at the site, the gate closed, and we had driven in the back way and parked some distance from the old farmhouse that Washington Duke built for his second bride, Artelia Roney, in 1852, and walked in along the remnant of the original road—leaving the present day behind. The homestead was well restored. We could look around a full 360 degrees and see no sign of the twentieth century.

  Nowadays, “living history” is common practice at historic sites all over, but in 1983 it was a novel idea at places outside of Williamsburg and Sturbridge Village. Worrell, though, had made a habit of putting on the past. Every so often he would put on an 1870s costume, leave modern convenience (except for toilet paper—he did cheat just that much) behind and spend a weekend living like the people it was his business to tell visitors about. It frustrated him to know what he was talking about only from reading about it, and so he would take two days and grind his own coffee by hand, roll his own cigarettes, dry his face with a feed sack and brush his teeth with a blackgum twig. “If a visitor comes in and sees clothes hanging on a nail and shoes under the bed,” he said, “the smell of woodsmoke from breakfast still hanging inside, sees clothes soaking on porch and potato peels in the yard and chickens pecking at them, it gives a better impression of what it looked like, smells like.”

  Duke Homestead, about 1895. Washington Duke is walking toward the camera along the fenced lane. Courtesy Duke Homestead State Historic Site.

  Settling around the table, on the grownups’ part there was self-consciousness that this all was a put-on. The baby could not have cared less. But the mood developed, for after all it was fall, season of nostalgia, as the world, briefly pretty as it can be, is nonetheless closing down. Shadows flowed into the kitchen, or was it the light flowing out? And Worrell’s experiment was no abstract endeavor. He was cooking according to his great-grandmother’s recipes—the kind that start out instructing that to fry a chicken one first “kill and scald” one. As a boy, he said, he’d spent a lot of time at the old family farm, killed many a chicken and slept under a feather tick. As the shadows rose, the oil lamps came out and we ate by their soft, red light, which made faces warm and left murky points of shadow behind a trunk or under a chair. The food was hearty, if oddly lacking in the salt made customary in years to come, warmed down with a little homemade scuppernong wine. Our daughter, fed and changed, turned fretful in her mother’s lap.

  “Try that,” Worrell said, motioning to an antique cradle on the hearth. We did, and in a few minutes, Elizabeth was asleep, gently rocking in her machine-made blankets and the handmade bed that was just her size. Satisfied, we sat and talked like people did back then while the world outside went dark.

  “Were you a history major?” I asked.

  “Classical archaeology,” said Worrell. “You dig a Greek temple or a tobacco barn, the techniques are all the same.”

  The evening went on, assuming the tones (in memory, at least) of an old photograph—that same snug tint as the Irish whiskey Worrell presently brought out, that same mellow, warming glow made of companionship and good sound walls between you and whatever lies in the dark and chill beyond them. Getting into the spirit, we started swapping scary stories—visiting New York City, for one, and the eerie glows and half-seen reflections that come upon one in an old house, alone.

  But it did grow late, eyelids got heavy and tomorrow was on the way. Leaving wife and sleeping baby in the security of home and hearth—albeit with lingering ghosts from the stories we had told—Worrell and I went for the car, he lighting the way with a flickering lantern for a couple hundred yards across rugged, bumpy ground. It was a dark night, really, really dark behind the screening trees, a dark you don’t see much anymore. And quiet, with just the scuttling of shoe leather on pebbly ground. The engine, when it started, was unearthly, the glaring headlights obscene. We drove back over the laborious ground we had just walked, covering it in seconds.

  The wife had not liked being left alone with the spirits, but then they were dispelled by the gnashing of gears and bouncing of springs as we drove up the lane made into a tunnel by the overhanging trees. And then! We burst out onto a paved road and into a riot of lights and noise and confusion—back to 1983. It was a shock.

  Because we had been somewhere else. There was no fooling the jangled nerves, the eyes that could not focus, the whole explosion of that moment when we burst back into our own place and time. Because we had been gone somewhere. Somewhere very else. You can’t bring back what’s past, but just in a while, once in a while, if things are done just right, you can come pretty close.

  EPILOGUE

  A Sense of Place

  They’re still arguing about that stupid flag?!!

  The fifteen-year-old was just home from two weeks at summer camp.

  Yes, they were still arguing about the flag. This particular flap had been going on not quite a year, ever since the city cited a restaurant for flying a six-hundred-square-foot U.S. flag on a pole that was seventy feet tall. Both numbers violated the sign ordinance.

  The matter quickly became the subject of vigorous city council debate; after three more businesses were similarly cited, the council voted to keep the ordinance as it was. That kept the flags breaking the law and in the public mind, and letters-to-the-editor columns continued through the fall election, when candidates of all persua
sions covered their symbolic chests if not their rear ends with patriotism. Meanwhile, another sign affront burst onto the civic scene: a plastic cow that had, since time immemorial, stood atop a suburban convenience store—commonly known, of course, as the “Cow Store.” The city council took up this issue, as well. By then, it was November 1997. The flag citation had been issued in August.

  Debate carried on into the new year. The city created a subcommittee to talk about the ordinance in February. In May, with one city councilman’s encouragement, the restaurant where the flag flap began defied the law and raised its banner again. It got fined $200 and the manager lowered the flag again. In June, the council voted against a code revision devised by the subcommittee it had created in February that would have made exception for the U.S. flag but did accept an amendment that let the plastic cow remain in place as a historic local landmark. The convenience shop owner, however, was notified that his sign was three feet too high.

  This plastic cow stood atop a convenience store for decades, then in 1997 it was threatened by the city’s sign ordinance. The cow came out the victor, deemed a historic landmark. Courtesy of the author.

  On Flag Day, June 14, the restaurant defied the law again and got a fine of $300. Then the Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Military Order of the Purple Heart and Marine Corps League let the city know they were going to raise an illegal flag of their own as a sign of solidarity (the ordinance had no language regarding solidarity), and so they could sue the city for free-speech infringement if the authorities wrote them a ticket. The city demanded $25; the veterans made a federal case of it. Soon somebody found that the flagpole atop the city’s tallest building and most of those on public school grounds were too big, too.

  This was about the time the fifteen-year-old got home from camp.

  A year after the whole mess had begun, the city council took a third vote on the sign ordinance and changed its mind, raising the size limit to 260 square feet and the legal height of flagpoles to 70 feet. While the flag flap and cow controversy had been going on, the city council had also voted itself a 37 percent pay raise. After some public objection, they cut the raise to 9 percent, but it was not enough to placate a public fed up with its elected leaders’ dithering over flags and cows while the drug dealing went on unnoticed, the potholes remained unpatched and the city’s image suffered.

  Now, the reader should understand that this loony episode was not unique. High-tech trash trucks, the town dump, city hall’s golden parachutes, sensitivity surveys, small-business loans to nonexistent companies, slumlords in high places—all that and more have given Durham ammunition with which to shoot itself in the foot, in its official capacity. Back in the ’80s, a worthy citizen proposed that the city paint some civic-pride message on a rusty water tower that stood beside the freeway from the airport. Elected public servants took up the cause. They debated for weeks. What message? “Welcome to Durham”? Perhaps “Welcome to Durham, N.C.”? The public works department agreed to paint something up there, but then there was the color scheme to decide. Duke University’s blue and white? North Carolina Central University’s maroon and gray? The all-American red, white and blue? It’s a small wonder that the Durham Bulls’ color scheme of royal blue and University of Texas burnt orange wasn’t tossed into the mix as well. Or maybe it was..

  After two months’ deliberation, the city worthies settled on a blue “Welcome to Durham” in the typeface New Gothic Bold. But then the agreement came undone. Some citizens were annoyed that the message did not mention “City of Medicine,” the then-current image-boosting slogan. One council member declared this was all “mindless boosterism” and another declared, “Welcome to Mayberry.” Yet another called for further study. The council took another vote and agreed to forget about it. It was eleven more rusty years before the water tower finally got a coat of paint—plain white.

  The Slogan Sign by day. After the sign was put out of order by a storm, the chamber of commerce decided it was not worth the cost of repair. Courtesy Durham Public Library.

  But in Durham, citizens will only stand for so much. In 1998, after the flag, the cow, the raise and a number of other embarrassments that had festered for longer in the community’s mind, the peasants rose up and petitioned to whack the city council from thirteen members to seven, figuring that six fewer mouths would emit that much less hot air, and if nothing else the council meetings would waste less time. The council protested that it would be too much trouble to get such a measure on the ballot by November’s regular election day, and holding a special referendum would be a waste of the taxpayers’ money.

  In the end—actually, December 1998—the people voted and the council was cut down to size. The plastic cow remains upon her storied rooftop, though the convenience store is now a taco stand. And in 2001, a federal appeals court rejected the veterans’ suit, ruling that a municipality is within its rights to decree that size does matter.

  Yes, they were still talking about the flag.

  And, yes, our town can be a loony bin. It doesn’t have the nickname “Bull City” for nothing. But the outcome of the flag flap, et al, illustrates one important point. In Durham, you can fight city hall and win.

  Durham, one citizen who knows the place well has said, is a town where anyone can call a meeting and people will show up. Another has said that Durham is a town where everything happens out in the open. Durham does have a way of airing its dirty laundry in public, but some of it at least gets aired; and through its history, what good things have come to pass in Durham—hospitals, public schools, public health, the library, the Eno River parks, letting some air out of a bloated city council—came about through private citizens’ initiative and the fact that they cared enough about the place to overcome the all-American malaise of civic inertia.

  Sure, you can’t drive three stoplights in a row without getting stopped by at least one, and the streets run every which way except where you need to go—and might change names three times before you realize you should have left all hope at the city limits. We have two Five Points, one a confusing intersection and the other an open-air pharmaceutical exchange. Crime and poverty seem intractable. Housing’s been an issue at least since 1940. And consultants’ reports come and go like colds in kindergarten. However, all in all it’s a fascinating, fun and inviting place to live and be a part of.

  That’s the thing about Durham: civic life is a participant sport and everybody’s welcome to play. It can be messy, it can be downright silly, but it’s as much a part of the community culture as the darkly comic boosterism that, way back in 1913, proclaimed Durham was “renowned the world around” in 1,230 colored electric light bulbs from the top of a building. The “Slogan Sign” soon went down in a windstorm.

  Durham has a sidewalk fiddler who once ran for the United States Senate and we used to have a panhandler who would give you a quarter if you didn’t have one to give him. It’s just that kind of a place.

  When you are fifteen, it’s downright crazy. When you are thirty-five or forty, you might think it absolutely outrageous. A few more years’ perspective, it’s merely foolish. The fact is, it’s just our town being itself and would we really want it any other way? How dull.

  Welcome home.

  Please visit us at

  www.historypress.net