“Happy Anniversary, Dad.”

–Officials of the Empire State Building, sending a 50th anniversary card (in 1979) to Winston-Salem’s Reynolds Building, on which it was modeled.

The 22-story art deco landmark, vacated earlier this year, has just been put on the market by Reynolds American. It’s my favorite building in North Carolina — what’s yours?

“In 1976, after its workers in North Carolina voted for the ACTWU to represent them, [J.P. Stevens] once again refused to bargain….

“A five-year international consumer boycott proved ineffective — in part because ‘Peanuts’ characters, stitched into the textile giant’s sheets and towels, masked the corporate identity.

“The ’Peanuts’ line, [touted as] the ’single biggest-selling sheet pattern ever produced in the history of the domestics industry,’ was in a special position of influence…. [But like his father] Charles Schulz had a deep suspicion of the demands of labor. Neither Schulz nor [his licensing agency] took steps to persuade Stevens to negotiate. Finally it was a campaign of pressure against the banks and institutions that had supported Stevens – including that future pillar of ‘Peanuts’ licensing, Metropolitan Life Insurance – that forced Stevens to settle.”

–From “Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography” (2007) by David Michaelis

“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!”

“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 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.”

“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)

On this day in 1931 Amelia Earhart, on a promotional tour for Beech-Nut chewing gum, landed her autogiro on the dirt field at Charlotte’s privately owned airport.

During her three-day stopover she demonstrated the experimental “flying windmill,” attended a United Relief Drive luncheon, made a sidetrip to Fayetteville for Armistice Day ceremonies and endeared herself to Charlotte officials by endorsing their plan to buy the airport: “A few years’ time will prove it necessary, unless a city wants to suffer the fate some towns brought upon themselves in years gone by when they refused to permit railroads. . . . ”

Charlotte Municipal Airport, paid for by a bond referendum and a WPA grant, opened in 1937.

“One day not long after his installation [as assistant secretary of the Navy], he and [Secretary of the Navy Josephus] Daniels posed on an upper-floor porch looking down on the executive mansion. The prints came back, and Daniels showed the best one to Roosevelt.

“‘Franklin,’ he asked, ‘why are you grinning from ear to ear, looking as pleased as if the world were yours, while I, satisfied and happy, have no such smile on my face?’”

“Roosevelt seemed surprised at the question….

“‘I will tell you….’ Daniels continued. ‘You are saying to yourself, being a New Yorker, “Some day I will be living in that house” — while I, being from the South, know I must be satisfied with no such ambition.’”

– From “Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt” (2008) by H. W. Brands

“A bespectacled, priggish-looking former editor of the Biblical Recorder, [Sen. Josiah Bailey of North Carolina] had supported FDR in 1932 and 1936 but had recently soured on the New Deal, mainly because of its trespasses against states’ rights. He had been preparing this speech [against FDR's plan to "pack" the Supreme Court] for weeks, and as he rose to begin, senators summoned their colleagues from the cloakroom.

“Bailey held forth with his customary melodramatics, shouting his points, banging his desk, shaking a preacher’s finger. The Southerner was offering an argument calculated to appeal to his colleagues from the North  — that ‘the Negroes in the South feel secure tonight because they know there is a Constitution and an independent Court.’”

– From “FDR v. the Constitution” (2009) by Burt Solomon