“I have a framed, yellowing copy of my first published oeuvre, a poem called ‘Fresh Fruits of Autumn Leaves,’ which at five years old I had composed for my mother while we were having a bath…. My mother jumped out of the tub, grabbed a pen and paper and asked me to repeat what I’d said….

“My father, so moved by this effort , sent my poem to the Carolina Israelite — why this publication, I’ll never know…. Even at age five… I knew it would never have gotten published if my father hadn’t been James Jones.”

– From “Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir” (2009) by novelist Kaylie Jones

Naturally, I was curious. What was the connection between Israelite editor Harry Golden and James Jones, author of “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line”?  They shared bestseller lists in the ’50s, of course. But my inexpert Googling turned up no more in common than both their names on free-speech petitions on behalf of Lenny Bruce.

Although Jones isn’t mentioned in the Harry Golden Papers at UNC Charlotte,  I found what I was looking for in the James Jones Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin: a 1965-66 exchange of letters between Golden in Charlotte and Jones in Paris, plus Gloria Jones’ handwritten manuscript and James Jones’ typewritten version.

And here’s the Carolina Israelite connection: “Dear Harry Golden, It turns out that my secretary is a great fan of yours and receives your columns from a brother at home. So I’ve been reading them too…. You published a poem by a young boy of seven, or was it nine?… It gave me the idea of sending you a poem which my five-year-old daughter wrote, and which astounded me…. If you could see your way clear to printing it, we would all be most happy…”

Golden: “I will run Kaylie’s poem in the January issue…. The next time I get over there I’ll call you and maybe we can have a chat and bit of fellowship.”

Jones: “I am writing now at the request of my wife, who would like  ‘many, many copies’ of the January issue. If you could send us… say 60 or 80, I would reimburse you at their retail cost.”

These are only excerpts — I forwarded to Kaylie a copy of her father’s lengthy and (in Golden’s words) quite “warm-hearted” query letter. “What an amazing thing to receive,” she replied. “I’m sitting here with tears streaming…. How wonderful to know how he chose that publication!”

Nick Graham, the ever-alert manager of the digitization project, North Carolina Maps, knows that I love maps and, at one time, studied the history of highways in North Carolina. He recently alerted me to a great 1924 highway map of North Carolina digitized from the collection of the State Archives in Raleigh. The back of the map has a chart of distances between towns and a lot of information about driving in the state – the state-wide speed limit was 30 mph. Our favorite thing, however, was a motto written in bold letters across the bottom saying “It is Harder to Get Lost in North Carolina than to Find the Way in Many States.”

Series 2 of the Hugh Morton finding aid is now available online! Visit the finding aid here to check out the addition of People and Events, late 1920s-early 2000s (bulk 1940s-1990s).

To see photos from Series 2 online through the Hugh Morton Collection of Photographs and Films, click here.

More information on the addition is available through our sister blog, A View to Hugh.

“Robert Williams was one of the most realistic comedians the screen had. He made Cary Grant look like he was overacting…. To watch Robert Williams act was like seeing a comic using the Method, long before the Method became famous with Marlon [Brando] and Monty [Clift].”

–From a Turner Classic Movies interview with actor Christopher Plummer (2008)

“Williams … had a one-of-a-kind way of speaking a line — breezy and distracted, yet focused. An unmistakeable original, Williams is one of film history’s regrets. After a handful of talkies and this one starring role [opposite Jean Harlow in "Platinum Blonde"], he died of a ruptured appendix at age 34.”

–From “Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man” (2002) by Mick LaSalle

“If he had lived, he almost surely would have become a major star.”

–From ”The Films of Frank Capra” (1974) by Donald C. Willis

Robert Williams was born in 1897 near Morgantown in Carteret County and grew up on a farm. He ran away from home at age 11 to join a tent show.

In an undated 20th Century essay by Olive F. Gunby titled “Courtship in Carolina,” the author describes the socially appropriate way of wooing a proper North Carolina lady.

The courtship, as described by Gunby, should naturally begin when the gentleman invites the lady for a ride in his buggy after church.  As the relationship progresses, the gentleman may drop by her house to visit her, and manages to speak directly to all members of the household except her.   And because dancing is “an amusement indulged in only by the sinful and depraved,” the only social interactions between the pair can occur while playing games at a gathering.  Actually proposing marriage requires a year or two of gathering courage.

Despite my toungue-in-cheek paraphrasing of Gunby’s treatise, what’s interesting to me is that much of the action of bringing the couple together seems to be fueled by town gossip regarding the public development of the relationship.  Gunby writes that after the post-church buggy ride, news of the interaction will be discussed by neighbors and friends across town over lunch.  If the man’s horse is seen tethered in front of the girl’s house, news of this will also spread, designating the lady as off-limits for other suitors.  Gunby writes:

“Mike Brown’s bay was hitched in front of Aunt Mary Ann’s gate when I came by” is announced at sundry supper tables that evening, and soon it is whispered around that Mike Brown is “going after” Loretta … no one in that neighborhood will dream of interfering with Mike’s plainly evinced intentions.  (174-175)

Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have any thing else in the NCC about 20th Century courtship, although there were two North Carolina Historical Review articles written about Antebellum courtship and 19th Century courtship.

“In 1840 U.S. census takers…recorded 9 percent of adult whites as illiterate….

“In New England no state had less than 98 percent literacy, which equaled [world leaders] Scotland and Sweden.

“The state with the highest white illiteracy was North Carolina: 28 percent. The public school system called for in the state constitution of 1776 had never been implemented. However, in 1839 the Whigs gained control of the legislature and put through a long-delayed law authorizing common schools in counties that consented. As a result white illiteracy fell to 11 percent over the next 20 years.”

–From “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848″ (2007) by Daniel Walker Howe

“[Three months later] there was a cave-in in a North Carolina mine in which 71 men were caught and 53 actually lost. It attracted no great  notice. It was ‘just a mine disaster.’

“Yet for more than two weeks the plight of a single commonplace prospector for tourists [near Mammoth Cave] had riveted the  attention of the nation on Sand Cave, Kentucky. It was an exciting show to watch, and the dispensers of news were learning to turn their spotlights on one show at a time.”

–”Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s” (1931) by Frederick Lewis Allen

Allen was contrasting the failed cave rescue of Floyd Collins in 1925, perhaps the first news media sensation of the century, with the Coalglen explosion that hastened the decline of North Carolina’s once-thriving coal industry.

Not that North Carolinians didn’t show their own appetite for the morbid. The slow removal of bodies from the Carolina Coal Mine, the News & Observer reported, was dishonored by “an indecent exposition of the picnic spirit by a truckload of heedless students who came over from the University.”

Check out this new Harriet Jacobs website, hosted by the Edenton-Chowan County Tourism Development Authority.  It’s a great resource for information about Jacobs, the runaway slave and abolitionist from Edenton, North Carolina.  The website contains a biography of Jacobs, historic maps of Edenton, NC, curriculum for North Carolina fourth and eighth grade classrooms, and suggestions for further reading.

In addition to several copies of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the autobiography of Jacobs, check out these other resources in the North Carolina Collection about Harriet Jacobs and Edenton, NC:

Harriet Ann Jacobs, 1813-1897:  Self-Guided Tour of Her Edenton Years, 1813-1842.  If you ever visit Edenton, this pamphlet, published in 1998 by North Carolina Historical Sites, tells you where you can see former sites where Jacobs lived and worked, as well as the site where Edenton linked with the Underground Railroad.

“The Search for the Edenton Years of Harriet Ann Jacobs,” in Carolina Comments, 1990.  This is an essay by George Stevenson that discusses the real people and places of Edenton behind Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

For a list of other resources about Harriet Jacobs in the North Carolina Collection, click here.

“Instead of an Ivy League university, [Robert Moses' grandson Christopher Collins] wanted to go to little Chapel Hill College in North Carolina; [his mother] Jane was appalled, but Moses told her, ‘Oh, let the boy go where he wants.’”

–From “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” (1974)

Above is a postcard published by the Asheville Postcard Co., which was likely made from a photograph taken by George Masa.

The writers of NC Miscellany recently got a tip that Buncombe County Public Libraries has an online display of several of George Masa’s photographs paired with the postcards that were printed from them.  You can view the collection here.

One neat thing about the way they’ve displayed the postcard with the photograph is that you can see how postcard publishers often manipulated small details in the photograph.

Masa was born in Japan, and moved to the United States sometime around 1906 after his father died suddenly.  He traveled to several US cities before coming to Asheville in 1915 on a student tour group.  He remained in Asheville for the next 18 years of his life, employed in various capacities.  He photographed guests at the Grove Park Inn in the beginning, and later opened the Photo-Graft Shop (which would be come the Asheville Photo Service).  He loved being in the Smoky Mountains, and frequently photographed scenic views of the area.  He was an early advocate of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Appalachian Trail.  (adapted from Powell, William S.  Dictionary of North Carolina Biography.  University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1991.)

Unfortunately, we have not been able to identify any of the postcards in our collection as the work of George Masa (except for possibly the one above). You can browse for items published by the Asheville Post Card Company, which published postcards from the photos of Masa and other photographers from the 1920s and on.