Talking Bunk

The famous tourist town of Asheville, NC, also serves as the seat of Buncombe County, one of the few counties in the United States whose name has passed into the English language.

Here's how it happened: in February 1820, at the end of a rancorous debate over the admission of Missouri as a state, NC congressman Felix Walker, a Revolutionary War veteran, rose to give a particularly rambling, inconclusive speech completely unrelated to the issue at hand, and focused upon a topic only of any conceivable interest to a few folks back home in his home county.  Pressed to explain his actions, Walker explained that he was not actually talking to the people in the room, but to the Congressional record--and the newspapers back home. "I shall not be speaking to the House," he explained, "but to Buncombe."

Thereafter, whenever a congressman's mouth ran ahead of his thoughts, he might well be asked if he, too, was "talking to Buncombe."

The term "talking bunkum" had become synonymous with empty rhetoric by the 1840s. As early as the start of the 20th century, the phrase had morphed into "talking bunk," and can be found in the public statements of such luminaries as Henry Ford.

Dizzy Gillespie of Cheraw, SC

   "I'm Dizzy Gillespie from Cheraw, South Carolina,"...so began many of Jazz music's best performances throughout the better part of the twentieth century.
  Jazz icon John Birks Gillespie was born in 1917 in Cheraw, population ca. 3,500--a small cotton town less than ten miles south of the North Carolina border. When he finally left Cheraw--to attend college on a horn scholarship--he'd move just thirty miles north, to the all-black Laurinburg Institute in Laurinburg, North Carolina. 
      Shortly thereafter, his widowed mother moved up to Philadelphia to live with her sister, and John Birks headed there when he finished at the institute. In Philly, he got into a band, and the rest is Jazz history.

Cheraw Childhood
The youngest of nine children, Gillespie's career as a professional entertainer began years before his career as a musician--as a small boy, he'd dance for money upstairs in the ballroom at Cheraw's (otherwise) all-white Chiquola Club.

   When Dizzy was 10, his father, James, died suddenly from asthma, and the Gillespies were plunged into severe poverty. His mother, Lottie, took on work as a maid and laundress, and each child tried to make whatever money he or she could. When he wasn't out dancing for money, Dizzy had taken to sneaking into the Lyric Theatre (now the Theatre on the Green) and watching cliffhangers. He got so good at it that the theater owner finally hired him to keep other kids from doing the same thing. As payment, Dizzy got to watch all the movies he wanted.

Cheraw High, site of Dizzy's first paying gig.

    Around 1930, a next-door neighbor brought  home a trumpet, and--upon hearing it, John Birks--who had already picked up the trombone and dabbled with the piano--decided that he'd found his true instrument.

      Gillespie appeared in minstrel shows put on by Alice Wilson, his music teacher at the all-black Robert Smalls School on Front Street. He later played his first paid gig for the students at Cheraw's white high school.

    In 1933, Gillespie left Cheraw to attend the Laurinburg Institute on a band scholarship.

    Forty years later, an interviewer noted that Gillespie always specified that he was from Cheraw South Carolina, not North Carolina. Half jokingly, he asked Gillespie what difference it made which Carolina he was from. Was there even a difference?
  Dizzy's response was telling. Even after decades of border-blurring world travel, the native Sandlapper became thoughtful and explained that the difference was actually quite distinct: "It's funny...right across the state line, they have their own ways. In different states, you find different mores of society."
   For the record, Gillespie didn't pick up his famed nickname until long after his days in Cheraw. Until his death, whenever he came back to visit, old friends and family in Cheraw continued to call him "John Birks."

Click here to hear Dizzy in 1947, playing "Salt Peanuts."

"Only in South Carolina": The DJ, the Crooner, and Folly Beach's $25 "Act of God"

King of the Moondoggers: WTMA's Jack Gale

In the mid-1950s, Baltimore-born WTMA morning-man Jack Gale was the hottest disc jockey in Charleston. In market share, he was the top-rated radio personality in the entire American South.

Before coming to Charleston, Gale had worked in Cleveland, where he'd witnessed firsthand the popularity of Alan Freed's groundbreaking R&B-oriented Moon Dog Show. Not long after coming aboard to man the turntables in the WTMA studios (upstairs in the old Dock Street Theater), Gale introduced a new Saturday night show, Hound Dog Kingdom, with which he--as the raspy voiced "King of the Moondoggers"--introduced white Charlestonian bobbysoxers to the sounds of Ray Charles, the Orioles, and other R&B acts.

Jack Gale-Concert Promoter
Gale became such a local celebrity that he was able to open up his own record shop and produce a series of concerts at the Folly Beach Pier.

Sometimes these shows made Gale a lot of money; Fats Domino, for instance, drew around 4,000 fans.

But they weren't a sure thing; a young Connie Francis sold so few tickets that Gale's business partner jumped ship and left him to pay the singer's $500 fee by himself, which the DJ dutifully did--with a check that ended up bouncing.

The talented Bronxite was no match for God.

As Gale himself tells the tale in his entertaining memoir, ...Same Time, Same Station, when Bronx-born Jerry Vale came down to play both nights of a weekend at the pier, it rained so hard on Friday night that the crooner drew only around a dozen fans. On Saturday, as it continued to rain--harder--Gale began to sweat...especially when Jerry Vale's  manager pointed out that the singer was present and ready to perform, and thus, had fulfilled his part of the contract. The Bronx crooner had $1,600 coming his way, rain or shine.

The Miracle
 But it was then--as Gale sat, dejectedly telling his tale of woe to his bartender, that the Lowcountry's famous Good-Old-Boy network kicked into gear. Gale explains,

My bartender said that he didn't like Yankees like Jerry Vale, and if I gave him five minutes, he had an idea that could save me a lot of money.

Desperate, the DJ told him to go ahead, and the barman stepped outside to make some arrangements.
 
That night, just as Vale's band prepared to begin the eight o'clock show, Folly Beach police chief Herbert Wynne ran onto the pier.

He grabbed the microphone and told everybody he was closing the pier due to lightning... He called it an "Act of God." We gave the few people who braved the weather their money back, and I paid Jerry Vale $800 for the first night. I explained to him that the pier was closed beyond my control.

Vale's manager saw what was happening, and he let Gale know it:

"Only in South Carolina," he fumed, "could you get away with this."

Nonetheless, Gale had saved $800, and he was grateful. And the next morning, when Chief Wynn stopped by to solicit donations for the Folly Beach Police Fund, Gale gladly handed over $25.

The Curse of Jerry Vale? In 1957, the Folly Pavilion would burn. In 1977, it would burn again. 
In 1989, Hurricane Hugo destroyed the pier. It has since been rebuilt...for now.

APOCALYPSE LOST: Cape Hatteras as Ground Zero

"Cape Hatteras is a possible site for nuclear tests. It is relatively accessible by water, yet could be easily placed 'out of bounds' for security control."

-Findings of a Top Secret US Atomic Energy Commission report on stateside test sites, 1949. 

Fortunately, the deserts of the Nevada were easier to acquire, and the Banks were saved.

Solitude and the Making of James Brown

James Brown, the late Godfather of Soul, famously spent many of his formative years living in his aunt's brothel in Augusta, Georgia. His first memories, however, were made in Barnwell County, South Carolina, where he was born in 1933. Though his mother deserted his father (and James) for another man in 1935, the single father and his son would continue to live in the Barnwell/Elko area until 1940. In his 1986 autobiography, Godfather of Soul, Brown describes this experience and the effect it had in shaping him:

"It gave me my own mind." The young James Brown.

We lived in a series of shacks all around the Barnwell and Elko areas…The shacks were unpainted, didn't have windows except for shutters that you could pull together; and there was no electricity or indoor plumbing…

Being alone in the woods like that, spending nights in a cabin with nobody else there, not having anybody to talk to, worked a change in me that stayed with me from then on: It gave me my own mind. No matter what came my way after that—prison, personal problems, government harassment—I had the ability to fall back on myself.

The Chapel that Smokes Built

Originally a Christian school, Duke University was still called Trinity College (after the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) when the Duke family dumped $6 million of cigarette money into its lap. Quicker than you could rip open a pack of Camels, Trinity came off and the Dukes' name went on.

     But James Duke didn't feel fully at ease with the idea of knocking God's name off the marquee, and--perhaps to smooth things over with the Almighty--decided to build the campus a chapel.

     In general, the university closely followed James Duke's specifications regarding the structure. It was, for instance, built upon the highest spot on campus. (Early plans to have stained-glass depictions of the disciples puffing away on their favorite American Tobacco Company products, however, were eventually shelved.)

   The term "chapel," however, was a bit of an understatement. The neo-Gothic Duke University Chapel is patterned after Canterbury Cathedral, is hung with 50 bells, and contains more than 800 carved and painted figures (all non-smoking). James intended the structure to be the central building on campus, and sure enough, the chapel's 210-foot tower has become the best-known emblem of Duke University. 

(From Moon Travel Handbooks: North Carolina, 2nd Edition, 2003.)

Crumpets of Freedom: The Edenton Tea Party

Here’s the story: On October 25, 1774, Mrs. Penelope Barker led a tea party at Mrs. Elizabeth King's house in Edenton, North Carolina. There, the two women and their forty-nine female guests signed a decree vowing to support the resolutions of the colonies' First Provisional Congress, which had banned, among other things, the importation of British tea.

Penelope Barker

            This tale has traditionally been accepted as fact in Edenton. A bronze teapot even marks the site of Mrs. King's house, now part of the beautiful town's Old Courthouse Green.

            The downside of the tea party legend is that it probably never happened. While it's near-certain that fifty-one North Carolinian women signed their names to a protest document sent to England, many historians doubt whether they all ever sat down together at Mrs. King's house, or anywhere else. The best anyone can figure, it's unlikely that the women, most of them housebound with domestic responsibilities, and who hailed from at least five different counties and a variety of social classes, would or could have ever arranged a mass meeting. Nonetheless, in what is considered one of the earliest examples of political involvement by American women, the women did manage to sign the same piece of parchment, which likely was circulated petition style. In part, it declared: