“Somebody once said, ‘A Yankee is worth a bale of cotton, and he’s easier to pick.’ “

John Shelton Reed, UNC Chapel Hill sociologist, speculating (in 2000) on the guiding principle behind the entertainment complex South of the Border.

In honor of our country’s birthday, NC Miscellany shares these Fourth of July-related postcards.

By the way, IS anyone heading to a “Greasy Pig Race”?

In my Wide World of Serials Receipts, I always find myself looking forward to the latest issue of the North Carolina Postal Historian. Not only for the excellent color reproductions of tobacco-advertising first covers (the subject of the current issue–see image below) and the occasional Confederate letterhead, but for the colorful choice of postage stamps that always adorn the mailing envelope (see above). They’re much more engaging than your typical first-class, red-ink postage metering, don’t you think?

Cheers! Yesterday NCCU celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of their charter, which was signed on June 30, 1909.  You can read the News & Observer’s coverage of the celebration here.

Below is a flier from a 1976 artist exhibition held at NCCU.  It comes from one of two boxes of NCCU empemera that we have housed in the NCC’s Vault, call number VC378.9 M67 N.C. Central.

I am proud to announce that all of the NCC’s North Carolina phone books have been cataloged and are now available for searching in the UNC Library’s online catalog. To help make finding these phone books easier in the online catalog, we decided to keep it as simple as possible. Now, you can simply search for: “Place name phone book” (i.e. Chapel Hill phone book) to find one of our collection’s North Carolina phone books. Each record is linked to our helpful and handy “Guide to Telephone Directories in North Carolina”, which is currently in the process of being updated and edited so that it reflects our most accurate holdings.

See the links below for telephone book resources in the NC Collection:

Link to Guide to Telephone Directories in North Carolina

Link to Chapel Hill phone books record in catalog [an example of what a catalog record will show]

The new installment of “This Month in North Carolina” is ready for consumption!

Krispy Kreme Original Glazed … nearly recession proof, feared by nutritionists, and beloved confection of North Carolina. Read all about the genesis of this Southern doughnut mogul here.

The NCC has a fabulous “staff picks” display up in our reading room, which everyone should come by and check out, if you have some free time. The staff of the NCC is asked to place different themed items in this exhibit, which is changed about every 3-4 months.

The current staff pick theme is “Summertime”!! Earlier this year, I cataloged an item which I thought would be perfect to add to the summertime themed staff picks display. Its content screamed summer and it even had important North Carolina content about where to enjoy these summer time activities! After taking another look at my chosen piece, I reconsidered publicly displaying it and decided that a blog post would be a better way to present this particular summer time activity: Skinny Dipping!

The nudist magazine, Free Beaches, published a 36-page article entitled “Guide to nude beaches of the United States” in June, 1978, which listed twelve spots in North Carolina that were nude friendly. Most places listed were secluded swimming holes where skinny dipping was known to happen. Although one nudist subdivision was also mentioned; a little online searching found that this subdivision does still exist and is described as a “clothing optional community”. The article states that “North Carolina has an active clothes-free population “ and that further information could be found by contacting an organization based in Chapel Hill!?

If you’ve ever wondered what your trusted staff is up to when they aren’t on the reference desk, it looks a little like this:

Not too long ago I had my first can of Cheerwine, and I was curious to find out more about this North Carolina soft drink.  It turns out that the Cheerwine website lists several recipes using their soda, including punch, cherry pie, barbecue sauce, and my personal favorite, the CheerDevil Cake, which Harry and Jason can be seen eating above.  I think I’ll have to make a batch of Cheerwine ice cream next.  To get to the recipes section of their website, first click on product, then recipes.

I won’t post the recipe here, but I will leave you with a great tip, suggested to me by none other than our very own Jason Tomberlin:  after the cake cools, poke holes in it using a spatula so that the icing can drip down into the cake.  Delicious!

When I’m not baking, I’m at the NCC working on the North Carolina Postcards project.  Below is a postcard from ca. 1916, showing the interior of the bottling facility at the Chero-Cola Company in Winston-Salem, NC.  Click on the image to view its record in the NCPC digital collection, where you can zoom-in.

For those of you that still read the newspaper, you may have noticed a story in this morning’s Raleigh News and Observer called “By the book: Introducing our summer series.” This summer the paper is going to examine North Carolina, a guide to the old north State…, which “was one of a series of WPA travel guides that sought to introduce Americans to their own country, recounting the history, geography, culture, economy and folklore of each state.” The summer feature is going to retrace “many of the routes in the book, exploring the state in search of good stories in the tradition of those Depression-era writers.”

Follow along with the series this summer; it may make you want to take a road trip.