It’s that time of year again — the shrubs are blooming, the Queen has been selected, and Wilmington is all geared up for the 62nd annual celebration of “all that is Southern” — the NC Azalea Festival, which begins this week.

Stephen forwarded me a link to a charming article from last week’s Star News in which longtime Wilmingtonian Thurston Watkins, Jr. “remembers splendid, scandalous events from past Azalea Festivals.” In skimming through the article, I realized we had Morton images to illustrate many of the choice moments Watkins recalls. A few are included below.

Watkins reports: “Announcement of our festival to all points was accomplished by Ted Malone’s coast-to-coast radio show. Malone had mastered the art of descriptive English and would be considered an equal to Charles Kuralt’s abilities many years later.”

Watkins reports: “I remember the festival having a ‘close call’ with Queen trouble. Janet Leigh had agreed to be our Queen, but just before she was to arrive, her husband, Tony Curtis, canceled the deal. Hugh Morton was aware of a movie star, Cathy Downs, accompanying her husband at the Azalea Golf Tournament and approached her with our problem. She agreed to be the ’short notice Queen’ and they secretly took her to Fayetteville and put her on a plane back to Wilmington. The arrival ceremonies turned out just fine and her ‘royal subjects’ never knew she hadn’t made the trip from Hollywood.” (The year was 1952, and Morton took several stunning portraits of Downs, including the one above).

And finally, one Watkins memory I just have to correct. He recalls “a ‘tipsy’ Wilmington Mayor crowning a Queen Azalea at Lumina, Wrightsville Beach—with the crown upside down—then proceeding to almost fall off the stage.” That tipsy mayor was actually the Governor of North Carolina, R. Gregg Cherry, who crowned the very first Azalea Queen, Jacqueline White.

As Susan Taylor Block recounts on page 26 of her book on the Azalea Festival, Belles and Blooms:

At her coronation ball at Lumina, Miss White’s composure was tested when Governor R. Gregg Cherry crowned her Queen Azalea I. The first citizen of NC had been in town all day, enjoying seeing a number of old friends. After spending hours socializing, the elderly gentleman was somewhat overdosed on Southern hospitality. He teetered dangerously close to the edge of the stage before placing the crown upside down on Miss White’s head.

This detail of Morton’s photo shows the upside-down crown:

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?!