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:

Shoeless Joe Jackson: Baseball's Not-So-Tragic Figure

Greenville baseball prodigy Shoeless Joe Jackson has become something of an icon over the years, the subject or a character in at least two motion pictures and a one-man play, all in the past 25 years.

            In 1888, Joseph Jefferson Jackson was born in Pickens County, the oldest of George and Martha Jackson's eight children. When little Joe was five years old, his father took a job with the Brandon Textile Mill in West Greenville and moved the family down from the hills into one of the Brandon Mill textile villages. A year later, at the age of six, Joe Jackson began working in the textile mills himself.

            By age 13, in 1901, Joe made the Brandon Mill baseball team. After five years in the mill leagues, Joe was signed to the semi-pro Greenville New Leaguers. Two years after that, he was hired by the Carolina Association team, the Greenville Spinners. He hit .346 and led the league in batting.

            It was while playing for the Spinners at nearby Anderson that Joe got his famous nickname. He found that his new shoes had given him painful blisters on his feet, but because the team only carried 12 players to begin with, and a number were already hurt, his manager insisted that he play. Joe slipped out of his shoes and played the rest of the game--the only game in which he ever did this--in his stocking feet. When he rapped out a triple, an Anderson fan stood up and shouted, "You shoeless son of a gun, you!" The name stuck, though Jackson never did like it.

            In 1908, Jackson married Katie Wynn. And later that summer, the Philadelphia Athletics signed him and brought him up to the major leagues.

            Joe played the next two years in the minors, but in 1910 he was called up to the Cleveland Indians and hit .387 over the last 20 games of the season. In 1911, his first full season, he batted .408, the highest average ever by a rookie. Amazingly, he didn't even win the batting crown that year, since Ty Cobb picked that same year to hit .420.

            Jackson dominated the league for the next seven years. In 1919, while playing for the White Sox, he roomed with a member of the team who conspired to throw the World Series. Though Jackson himself batted .375 and set a record for number of hits, and fielded a perfect 1.000 fielding average, he was named as a co-conspirator in the 1920 Black Sox trial and, though found innocent, was banished for life from organized baseball.

            Though Joe did continue to play organized baseball under various aliases for a number of teams through the ‘20s and ‘30s, he never considered himself the tragic figure that the press—and, later, novelist Thomas Kinsella and filmmaker John Sayles--made him out to be.

I have read now and then that I am one of the most tragic figures in baseball. Well, maybe that's the way some people look at it, but I don't quite see it that way myself. I guess one of the reasons I never fought my suspension any harder than I did was that I thought I had spent a pretty full life in the big leagues. I was 32 years old at the time, and I had been in the majors 13 years; I had a lifetime batting average of .356; I held the all-time throwing record for distance; and I had made pretty good salaries for those days. There wasn't much left for me in the big leagues.

Joe Jackson with Greenville youngsters, 1944.

First of all, the conception of Shoeless Joe Jackson as a barefoot mill-town hayseed is way off. True, Jackson's education was limited; his signature is widely prized—partially because he only shakily signed his name a few times in his life—but many often ignore Joe's business success. Even before the scandal, Joe owned a successful valet business in Georgia. After the scandal, Joe and his wife moved to Augusta, and she ran the business while Joe played for the local ball club. After his mother died in 1935, the Jacksons returned to Greenville for the funeral—and stayed for the next 16 years, living at 119 E. Wilborn St. on the south side of Greenville, while Joe became successful owning a liquor store—though he didn't drink—and a dry-cleaning business.

            Why did he allow folks to think he was dumb in his baseball days? Joe himself explained:

All the big sportswriters seemed to enjoy writing about me as an ignorant cotton-mill boy with nothing but lint where my brains ought to be. That was all right with me. I was able to fool a lot of pitchers and managers and club owners I wouldn't have been able to fool if they'd thought I was smarter.

When Jackson died of a massive heart attack in December 1951, he was buried in Woodlawn Memorial Park on Wade Hampton Blvd. in Greenville. You'll find his grave in Section V, plot 333. If you want to visit the site, stop by the office at Woodlawn and they'll be glad to give you directions.

            In March 1996, the Shoeless Joe Jackson Memorial was dedicated at the old Brandon Mill baseball field. Later that year, the South Carolina legislature passed legislation to change the name of the road that runs near the Brandon Mill Baseball field to "The Shoeless Joe Jackson Memorial Highway."

            On May 5, 1998, state legislator J. Verne Smith proposed--and the South Carolina state legislature passed—legislation asking the commissioner of baseball to reinstate Joe Jackson as a member in "good standing" of professional baseball. This is one of the necessary steps that must be accomplished before Jackson can be considered for the Hall of Fame.

            To celebrate the 110th anniversary of his birth, Greenville Mayor Knox White declared July 1998 "Shoeless Joe Jackson Month." Plans were made for a public display all month at City Hall of Jackson memorabilia.

            For an excellent Web site on Joe Jackson, see www.blackbetsy.com, home of the Virtual Hall of Fame. To see Joe portrayed by D.B. Sweeney as an "ignorant cotton-mill boy," watch John Sayles's fine film Eight Men Out. To see him played with a New Jersey accent by Ray Liotta, watch Field of Dreams. [Originally published in Moon Travel Handbooks: South Carolina.]