This post was written by John Blythe, a Digital Curation Fellow in UNC’s School of Library and Information Science and a member of the Digital Libraries class just wrapping up their Morton project. Here’s a brief bio of John provided by SILS:

John Blythe, a native of Chapel Hill and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumnus, came to the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) following an 18-year career in journalism that included stints as a Web editor, radio producer and newspaper reporter. His interest in digital curation and preservation grew out of an encounter with a box of old tapes made by his grandfather [LeGette Blythe] during a long career as a newspaperman and writer in North Carolina.

As a native Chapel Hillian, a UNC alum and a Tar Heel basketball fan, I was used to seeing Hugh Morton sitting cross-legged on the sidelines at the Smith Center (and at its predecessor Carmichael Auditorium) snapping photos of men’s basketball games. I also knew that Morton and his family owned Grandfather Mountain. On several occasions as a teenager, I joined the freckled and pale-skinned masses who mount an annual July pilgrimage to the mountain’s MacRae Meadows (which bears the name of Morton’s maternal ancestors) to celebrate all things Scottish at the Highland Games.

But it wasn’t until I joined with five of my library science school classmates in digitizing some of Morton’s photos that I realized how prolific a photographer he was. More than 500,000 images! I was also surprised to learn how long photography had been one of Morton’s passions. And what a chronicler of UNC he was. As we digitized we found negative after negative of UNC students, some candid and some posed. There was the series of photos taken either in McCorkle Place or Polk Place of a male student reclining in the grass joined by a changing group of women. Posed? Yes. They had the look of a clothing ad you’d find among the inserts in a Sunday newspaper. I thought, “Who is this guy? How did he manage to attract so many women? And why wasn’t I so lucky during my undergrad days?”

There was another negative. This one appeared to be candid. Taken of a dorm, it featured some young women lounging on the roof of an enclosed porch. The negative was overexposed and tested my newfound digitization skills. “Remember what Stephen said,” I told myself. “Increase the contrast here. Put a little more shadow there.” As I followed these steps, my mind wandered. I was taken back to the Chapel Hill of my youth. It was a hot summer day. We were driving home from swimming lessons at Bowman Gray Indoor Pool. And there, as I looked out the window, was the porch and the dorm. Was it Spencer dorm? Alderman? McIver? Kenan? The image wasn’t clear enough in my head. Briefly there was the nostalgia for the old, the dislike of change and the sentimentality for the Chapel Hill we used to call “The Village.” But the photo also summoned back happy memories. The relaxed feel of a six-year-old whose summer is filled with possibilities and few limitations. There’s the chance to play. And play again. There’s summer nights of “Kick the Can” and “No Bears Out Tonight.” And going barefoot all day.

As a budding archivist, I’m learning that documentation is important. We need to know what dorm is featured in the photo. We should provide the names of the happy couples reclining in the grass. Mr. Morton, it seems, liked to take photos more than he liked to record who was in them. As Stephen and Elizabeth have told us, they’re dependent on you (the reader) to help us with that documentation. That’s the professional speaking. But, speaking personally, as someone whose memories of Chapel Hill now span five decades, I’m just as happy to look at these photos and imagine. That’s the Hugh Morton I’ve now come to know—a man who’s provided the opportunity to get away from daily responsibilities and daydream.

—John Blythe

It’s another of those “1,000 word” moments, where a Morton image sends me off on a journey of discovery. On my recent visit to Grandfather, Hugh’s wife Julia told me the following story: she and Hugh got a speeding ticket in 1945 while driving through Columbus County, NC, on the way back home after their honeymoon. A few years later, Hugh was assigned to photograph the arrest of a supposed K.K.K. leader in Columbus County—Morton went to the jail, and to his surprise the man being arrested turned out to be the same man who had given them the speeding ticket. Mrs. Morton couldn’t quite recall his name, but thought it was “Early Bird” or something odd like that.

So, when I saw the negative envelope labeled “K.K.K.,” I thought to myself, maybe these are the negatives Mrs. Morton mentioned . . . and indeed, they do show a man being fingerprinted. I noted that the calendar on the wall read Whiteville, NC (in Columbus County), February 1952.

To my surprise, a quick web search for the K.K.K. in this time and place returned a bounty of fascinating information. First I learned that the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in Journalism had gone to the Whiteville News Reporter and Tabor City Tribune, two weekly newspapers, “For their successful campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger, culminating in the conviction of over one hundred Klansmen and an end to terrorism in their communities.”

Then I read about something called the Carter-Klan Documentary Project, being run right in our backyard at the UNC Center for the Study of the American South. This is an effort begun in 2003 to create a documentary film and other multimedia elements about the work of W. Horace Carter (then editor of the Tabor City Tribune) and others to combat the early 1950s Klan insurgency in Columbus County, led by Grand Dragon Thomas Hamilton. The timeline on the project’s detailed website describes the events of February 16, 1952, when “more than 35 FBI agents, working in close coordination with state and local law enforcement officials in Columbus County, N.C., arrest 10 Klansmen for the kidnapping and flogging of Ben Grainger and Dorothy Martin on October 6, 1951,” and says that several other area Klansmen were arrested from February to May of 1952.

Far down on the Thomas Hamilton page, I found a photo (below, from the Raleigh News & Observer) and description of Early Brooks, a former Fair Bluff policeman who led “the most vicious and active klavern” in Columbus County. “Eureka!,” I exclaimed to myself, a former policeman named “Early”—this has to be the guy. But when I compare the photos, I actually don’t think it is the same person. What do you think? If it’s not Early Brooks, who is it? And who is the arresting officer?

One last note about all this: in searching the UNC libraries catalog for information about W. Horace Carter, I found an oral history interview conducted with Carter in 1976 as part of the Southern Oral History Program (available online, both audio and transcript). Turns out Carter and Hugh Morton went to UNC-Chapel Hill at the same time—Carter was editor of the Daily Tar Heel in 1944, and Morton took photos for campus publications . . . surely they knew each other. Did Carter give Morton the assignment in 1952? Was the photo published? I hope someone can fill in the details.

As I’ve been sorting through Hugh Morton’s negatives over the past few months, it’s been fun to keep an eye out for different technical aspects of his work—how he would occasionally experiment with various film types and lenses, lighting, focus, depth of field, etc. One trend I have noticed is his fondness for time exposures, or the use of longer exposure times (leaving the shutter open for multiple seconds, minutes, or maybe even hours) to convey motion in the images he created.

You’ll often see this technique used in photos of waterfalls, where a longer exposure gives the water a silky, almost foggy look. This isn’t the greatest example, but take it from me—Morton experimented heavily with waterfall photography. (Anyone know where this was taken?)

One of Morton’s best known time exposures is on page 41 of the 2003 book Hugh Morton’s North Carolina—the one where Morton got a security guard to drive his car up and down the road to Grandfather Mountain while he held the shutter open. (I would have included that image in this post, but I’m thus far I haven’t found the original!). NOTE: See update at end of post.

I love the image below, which I presume was taken at one of the ski slopes in the Boone area. (Anyone know which one? While I did grow up in Boone, I was not physically coordinated enough for skiing. Also, my mother worked for a while in the local emergency room, so I knew the possible consequences). The light trails create a wonderful and somewhat creepy effect in combination with the “ghostly” skiers at the bottom.

Here’s another striking example from Morton’s younger days—this one’s labeled “Rides, Carolina Beach,” and was taken sometime in the 1940s.

Finally, here’s an example of a time exposure gone wrong (or right, depending on your perspective—I think it looks cool). Believe it or not, this is a nighttime image of UNC’s Old Well, taken sometime around 1940. Perhaps he hadn’t yet invested in a tripod?

UPDATE 5/20/2008: Stephen’s been messing around with the new scanner, and I just happened to notice that he had done a test scan of one of Morton’s time exposure slides of the road up to Grandfather Mountain. Here it is:

If there’s one thing “A View to Hugh” has made clear, it’s that every photograph has a story behind it—especially if it was taken by Hugh Morton. My recent visit with Hugh’s wife Julia, daughters Judy and Catherine, and grandson Crae really impressed this point upon me. Mrs. Morton could barely finish telling me one story before launching into another (I tried to take notes, but eventually gave up). I do remember one set of photos she mentioned, of the “Cat Girl,” a New Orleans burlesque performer Hugh went to see on one of his trips to the Sugar Bowl with the Charlie Justice team in 1947. Here she is:

The website FrenchQuarter.com has a tidbit about “exotic dancer Lilly Christine the Cat Girl”—that must be her! According to Mrs. Morton, Hugh didn’t care for cheesecake photography, and “wasn’t good at it”—he was apparently pressured, against his will, to go see the Cat Girl by a group of friends that included then-mayor of Chapel Hill, Robert W. Madry.

This is just one example. As great as the stories are, the difficulty is that 500,000 images in the Morton collection equals a heck of a lot of stories—a lifetime’s worth, from a very full lifetime. (Using the “1,000 words” estimate, that’s 500 million words!!) Uncovering and documenting all these stories is one of the major processing challenges we face.

Fortunately, we have people to draw on, like Hugh’s family, friends, acquaintances, and other readers of this blog. And we have other sources, too, like one I just got around to looking at—that fabulous magazine The State (now known as Our State), in which Morton photos were very frequently featured. Here in the North Carolina Collection, we’re lucky enough to have not only the entire run of the magazine, but also subject indexes, and (thanks to some wonderful guy named Robert M. Topkins) a 1976 index to pictures appearing in The State.

Morton was friends with the original publisher Carl Goerch, as well as his successor Bill Sharpe, whom Morton has described as “the one person who most whetted my interest for making pictures of and for the state [of North Carolina].” This photo of Goerch, Sharpe, and Sharpe’s wife appeared on page 7 of the August 19, 1950 issue of The State, along with the text quoted below.

As you look at this picture you can almost guess the words that might have been spoken:

Says the lady: “You numbskull! You nit-wit! You’ve got no business on this beach. Now get yourself away from here just as quickly as you can, before I call a policeman. Git, I tell you; git!”

Says the man in the bathing trunks: “But lady, I didn’t mean any harm! Goodness knows I didn’t. When you were stooping over, picking up shells, I thought you were my wife. That’s the reason I spanked you.”

Says the lady: “I don’t want to hear anything further from you. On your way before I call a cop!”

Says the man with the marine cap, the dark glasses, the checkered shirt, the rolled-up trousers and the slightly protruding stomach: “That’s tellin’ him, mamma: that’s tellin’ him!”

The lady happens to be Mrs. Bill Sharpe. The man in the bathing trunks happens to be the editor of this publication. The man with the marine cap and all the other accessories, including the slightly protruding stomach, happens to be Bill Sharpe. And Hugh Morton of Wilmington just happened to be around just in time to take the picture.

I guess if you don’t know the story behind a picture, you can always make one up . . .

Wilmington’s 61st annual North Carolina Azalea Festival kicks off next week (April 9-13). Hugh Morton played an integral role in the event’s founding: while only in his twenties, he was selected to serve as president of the inaugural festival in 1948. (A letter from Morton on the festival’s website explains that when he missed a committee meeting, they responded by electing him president). As Susan Taylor Block writes in “Clan MacRae,” an article in the 4/2007 issue of Wrightsville Beach magazine, Morton deserves credit not only for Wilmington’s Azalea Festival, but also many of its azalea plants:

Morton had worked diligently since 1946 to make the 1948 Azalea Festival debut a success. He encouraged Wilmingtonians to plant azaleas, persuaded the local government to plant an additional 175,000 azaleas at Greenfield Lake and recruited garden clubs to transplant azaleas from their own private gardens to public spaces. Morton encouraged the festival fathers to be careful stewards of the event’s ticket take, seek out quality in celebrity guests and make the azalea itself the guest of honor. He knew that if the first festival ended up in the red, it would be the last.

North Carolina Azalea Festival negatives in the Morton collection are numerous and mostly in good shape, but not well-documented. The early years of the festival (from 1948 to about 1958) are best represented, but little identifying information is provided other than the year (if that). Fortunately, we have at least one good source to work from—historian Block’s 2004 book Belles & Blooms, heavily illustrated by Morton’s photos. Block’s time line will help us pin down some of the major details, like who was queen in what year, what celebrities attended, etc.

In the meantime, though, we’re asking you to help us put names to faces in some of these early shots.

Judging from the enormous fur coat and all the cameras pointed at them, I’m guessing that these people are famous. But who are they?

The image above was taken at the 1950 Azalea Festival. I can’t read any of the name tags, but I do see that the man on the far right (in the headdress) has a program from “Unto These Hills” (an outdoor drama performed at Cherokee, North Carolina) in his pocket.

The man in this photo is Grady Cole, talk radio celebrity with WBT Radio in Charlotte, North Carolina (and frequent Morton photo subject in the early 1950s). But who is the woman—and is she the same woman from the previous photo? Most importantly, why are they holding up what looks like an x-ray of somebody’s spine?!