Durham Tales

by Jim Wise

  In 2003, a developer planning to build on the land where Uncle Billie had been first buried published his intention “to Disinter, Remove and Reinter Graves” before constructing a subdivision and hired a removal firm to dig the remaining bodies out. As the workmen dug around where Uncle Billie was supposed to have been exhumed, they found about two feet down some modern Coca-Cola bottles. Apparently, the 1990 diggers got tired and bored, decided they wouldn’t find anything anyway after 107 years, tossed down their drink bottles, replaced the dirt and delivered Uncle Billie’s tombstone to Duke Chapel. Nobody would be the wiser, they figured.

  It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but when the truth came out Uncle Billie’s descendants were furious. So another crew was set to work and, going down the full six feet, found some ornate metal casket parts, some shards of glass, bits of bone and a few fabric scraps. That much of Uncle Billie was removed to go beneath his tombstone. And so he remains, while on the other side of town a university and hospital are the legacy of that little brother and the niece and nephews he helped to raise.

  “A man of upright character, of deep religious faith, a revered patriarch of his day,” parishioner Amy Fallaw wrote in The Story of Duke’s Chapel. “He left a wonderful heritage.”

  THE SPORTSMAN

  When Al Mann hung up his whistle, he took something out of fall. When Al Mann departed this life, he left a lot of good behind.

  Husband, father, grandpa, churchman, veteran, boxer and inspiration to fifty-seven years’ worth of little boys who came under his influence, not to mention their parents. Al Mann played many positions, but the one that left the greatest impression, one might argue, was Al Mann, football coach.

  For generations, Saturday mornings meant a flat at Forest Hills Park that Al and his sons Craig and Randy and, in later years, grandson Jeff, had marked off into a miniature gridiron for “towel football.” It was a variation on flag football that Al cooked up when he was a navy physical-training coach in World War II, using tightly rolled towels tucked under tightly cinched belts—grab a towel and pull it loose, the ball carrier is down.

  It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Al taught football fundamentals: blocking, “tackling,” stances, formations, plays, confidence and teamwork. Moms who were paying attention usually learned a lot. The main thing Al tried to instill, though, wasn’t in knowing when to pull left or how to read a quarterback’s eyes. It was sportsmanship, which he summed up in his trademark slogan: “Win without crowing, lose without crying.” Don’t brag, don’t gloat, don’t whine and don’t make excuses. Shake hands and appreciate the other guy. Al himself was a case in point.

  Al Mann coaches on the sidelines during a championship game at Forest Hills Park, November 1994.

  In his youth, Al was a boxer, and a very good one. As state Golden Gloves champion, he fought in Madison Square Garden. In college, he finished third in the NCAA in 1936—when college boxing was up there with college football in stature and popularity, when pugilism drew bigger crowds at Duke University than basketball. One time, in front of those crowds, he had a close bout that came down to the referee’s call. The ref called it, the crowd didn’t like it and the atmosphere quickly turned ugly. So ugly that Al was afraid for the official’s welfare. So Al put his arm around the referee and escorted him out of the gym, notwithstanding that the ref had just called Al the loser.

  “It just seemed like the thing to do,” Al said years later.

  Al and sports were a combination early on. Growing up in the 1920s, out in the country on the road between Durham and the college town of Chapel Hill, Al and his brother Wilton heard that a builder wanted boys to help move debris where he was clearing land across the road for a swanky subdivision and golf course. You drove mules and horses, worked ten hours a day and by Saturday night you’d have seven dollars in your pocket. Good deal.

  Along the way, they learned what golf was and that boys could make thirty-five cents for caddying nine holes—just right for an afternoon after school, even better on the weekends. It was an education for them. They learned to be quiet and to pay attention and learned about people. Some would cheat, some wouldn’t. Some tipped well, some didn’t. Some would cuss, one just said, “Oh, my golly.” Before long, they were playing the game themselves—along with baseball, basketball, football (sister Naomi got to play center) and boxing. The city recreation department brought a fighter down from Cincinnati to teach the sport to Durham youngsters, and every Friday night, out past the east side of town, they would set up a ring and the local champion would take on all comers.

  Finishing college, Al went to work for American Tobacco and coached boxing as a hobby at a community center in Edgemont, a rough part of town. The idea was that boys would come in, work out, get tired and go home—instead of making trouble. The war came along and he went to serve, and when he got back to Durham, some prominent men in town asked him to teach their sons to fight. That led to front-yard football, then basketball as well. Boxing, in time, fell out of general favor, but the other games continued. All the boys—and eventually girls, too—got a trophy at season’s end for making first- or second-string “all-American.” There was a trophy for improvement, too, but the top honor, given according to the kids’ own votes, was for sportsmanship.

  It went on from the late ’40s until 1995, when, just weeks before the season was to open, Al realized his health just wasn’t up to it any more. He said he might be OK by basketball season, might bring back football next year—but he wasn’t and he didn’t, and fall just wasn’t the same ever again. It is safe to say that neither were any of his players after they spent a season or several in Al Mann’s league. At home, he had every roster of every team, going back to the beginning—little boys who grew up to be doctors, lawyers, bankers, politicians, civic leaders, even one who argued a civil rights case before the U.S. Supreme Court and won.

  It was sad when he hung up his whistle. It was sad when he passed away in early 2001. Sadness, though, is a self-centered emotion, and the ending of something that has been good—a tradition or a life—should be occasion for appreciation for what one has been privileged to share in.

  A few years before Al retired, some of his former players held a dinner in his honor and had made T-shirts emblazoned with the Al Mann slogan. Some time later, one of Al’s youngsters, in company with his parents, wore his shirt into an English tearoom. A lady there was impressed.

  With a team readied for kickoff, Coach Al Mann moves out of the way of the game.

  “Win without crowing, lose without crying,” she read out loud. “I wish every boy could have that.”

  Quite an epitaph, that. Quite a Mann, too.

  THE “MOM”

  The historic preservation set refers to the old farmhouse at 326 East Trinity Avenue as the Geer House. Those who know it better call it Mom’s. From the late 1960s until the late 1990s—a solid generation, that—326 East Trinity was home to Ruby Blackmon Planck, a.k.a. “Mom.” Literally speaking, she was mom to just her own five kids, and the big old house was home to her husband, Chaunce, and four of the children (the eldest having moved to San Francisco back when hippies were still beatniks). Metaphorically, though, she was Mom and her home a sanctuary for an honorary extended family of in-laws, outlaws, mystics, mechanics, gypsies, geeks, poets, professors and plumbers.

  In the ’60s and early ’70s, Mom was chief cook and bottle washer for the old Cosmo taproom above the Ivy Room restaurant midway between Duke University and downtown. That is where, with wit and wisdom and good conversation, she collected a clientele mixed of physicians and pilots; Environmental Protection Agency engineers and already-aging flower children; truckers, veterans, freaks, flakes; and some souls lost and some souls looking to get into that condition after reading too much Kerouac. The occasional undergraduate would get sent back to campus early if Mom knew there was a test in the morning.

  After she retired, much of Mom’s coterie followed to her kitchen on East Trinity, where she hel
d court while suppers simmered, sizzled or set. “Durham” and “gourmet” were mutually exclusive terms back then, but Mom’s repertoire ranged from Assyrian to Harnett County, and mealtime was as likely to mean dolmades as country ham. Between the street out front and the certified wildlife sanctuary out back, Mom’s place was a cozy confine in the world but just a little outside it, too. Roger the Anglican/ Catholic/Buddhist would wax metaphysical, and George the physiologist would wax emphysemic about antismoking attitudes. Don would talk about growing things, Elton about flying things and Phrog about blowing things up or reading to children.

  The house was full of living things: dogs, cats, rats, fish, ferrets, plants and people. It didn’t take much excuse for a party. The night Chaunce turned sixty, he was the last man dancing. Thanksgiving was occasion for true feasting, and any wedding in the crowd called forth one of Mrs. Planck’s splendid, towering cakes—even if, once, the slippery layers had to be held together with a cavalry saber. Poker games, cooking lessons and talk—about big bands in the ’30s, wartime in the ’40s (Chaunce had been in the second wave into Normandy), New Jersey in the winter and gardens in the spring and about books and writing and writers. Gathered around her kitchen table while something simmered on the stove, over coffee in the morning or Manhattans on Friday night, conversations ranged from Depression-era politics to the proper way of stuffing grape leaves, from media criticism to Buddhist theology and from growing peas and shrubbery to the power of the written word.

  Ruby “Mom” Planck with one of her wedding cakes, 1977. Photo by David Williamson.

  Mom loved writing, and she collected writers—real and wannabe—into her fold. She encouraged, cajoled, criticized and shared rejection slips, as well as her Ladies’ Home Journal piece, to show that, yes, it could be done. Some of those fortunate souls went on to see their names in print in the bookstores, while others found there were other forms of creativity. For all, Mom remained a matron saint.

  Ruby Planck was born in Duke (now Erwin), North Carolina, a hamlet south of Durham, on June 29, 1916. She was the youngest of nine children born to Norman and Mary Lee Blackmon and grew up in a succession of cotton mill towns. In Burlington, a leftist disguised as a Methodist Sunday school teacher recruited her to go for training as a political organizer in Moscow. Her brother Joe put a quick stop to that idea, but it was a story Mom liked to tell for years to come.

  Mom would take on any challenge, especially if it involved cooking. In 1978, someone asked her, a one-time Southern farm girl, to demonstrate authentic, down-home, folky persimmon pudding for the Festival of North Carolina Folklife. She did it, for four hot July days and fifty thousand festival-goers—though theretofore she had never made persimmon pudding in her life, authentic, down-home, folky or otherwise. Mom’s court endured, but all things end. The courtiers aged, some moved away and some passed on. Mom eventually gave up the kitchen and moved to a retirement home—all the way insisting that it was not a “rest” home. Right to the end, she kept her spirit, her wit and her sense of humor.

  Not long before she died at the good old age of ninety-one, a preacher came to call. They talked for a while, then the good pastor said he’d be going since Miss Ruby looked ready to nod off.

  “That,” she said, “is because you’re boring.”

  THE BATBOY

  When he was twelve years old, Jack Stanley had the best job in the world. He wore a uniform. He mingled with stars. He made one dollar per game and twenty-five cents for every pair of shoes he shined.

  Jack Stanley was the Durham Bulls’ batboy. It was 1962, he said, and at that time, “if you were batboy for the Bulls, you were the biggest kid in town.”

  Unfortunately, it didn’t last long.

  “Mom was always against the idea,” he said. “Bad influences.” But a neighbor had made the contacts for him, and Jack’s dad thought it was great.

  To appreciate how Jack himself felt, you have to understand that, for a Durham boy back then, baseball was what you did. A typical summer Saturday brought walking uptown to a cowboy movie, a hotdog at Amos ’n’ Andy’s, playing ball all afternoon and going to the Bulls at night.

  “When we grew up, that was the national pastime,” he said.

  Boys’ fields of dreams moved up from backyards to city parks as they graduated from Little League to Colt League to Pony League. If they were good enough to play American Legion ball, they actually played at Durham Athletic Park—“the Cathedral of Baseball” for Jack and his buddies, the hallowed ground where stars-to-be like Joe Morgan, Rusty Staub and Jose Herrera hit and ran and threw.

  “We really looked up to those boys,” Stanley said.

  So there was twelve-year-old Jack Stanley, wearing his Bulls uniform to Carr Junior High School, retrieving bats and helmets, shagging flies at batting practice, “anything they told you to do”—even going up in the stands to fetch the cake “Ma” Gregory baked for the pitcher each Sunday.

  And, of course, he was rubbing elbows in the locker room and the dugout, where “the guys” talked about swings and misses, “million-dollar baby” signing bonuses and trips up and down the farm system.

  Other kids came to the ballpark for Long Meadow Night to get the free ice cream, or Greasy Pig Night, to chase a slicked-up porker around the infield and under the bleachers. (“I think that pig got beat up pretty bad,” he said.)

  Jack went there to work, however. As a batboy, Jack worked for trainer Fred MacNeil, an old-timer who had advice for boys among the “salty characters” of a baseball team: “Don’t you ever take any of this home.”

  Jack Stanley’s undoing was that he forgot.

  He had been on the job just two and a half months when, after a game, he sat down to the family’s Sunday dinner and said, “Would you please pass the damn butter beans?”

  “My mom hit the ceiling,” Stanley said. “My dad said that was a battle he wasn’t going to fight.”

  Jack was still wearing his uniform.

  “Having to turn in that uniform was a bad day in my life,” he said. “That ended my career…Broke my heart.”

  He did keep playing ball, through high school and a year at Louisburg College. He graduated from UNC, became a salesman, then a supervisor for Liggett & Myers and then started his own bulk mailing business. But there was nothing like being a Bull batboy.

  “To my dying day,” he said, “that’s the best damn job I ever had.”

  THE GARDEN SPIRIT

  Virginia T. Watkins reigns at Hope Park, a benevolent soul. People who work in or just observe the park may feel her sharing in their pleasure.

  Virginia Watkins died January 15, 1995, at the age of seventy-eight. Her earthly remains are a couple of miles away in a cemetery, but her spirit lies over an eighth of an acre by the freeway and near the new ballpark, behind the high-rise Henderson Towers apartments for folks who are getting on in their years. The night before she died, she told one of her neighbors she wanted that park to be there—be there after she departed.

  The park was all Virginia’s idea, and she set her stubborn self to work to get a vacant lot full of weeds and rocks turned into a restful spot of lawn, trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetables—with a stone slab in Virginia’s honor set into a gentle rise between two pine trees where she would have a good view from which to keep an eye on her realm.

  Virginia set a tone for herself almost as soon as she moved into the towers. She started planting roses in memory of each resident who passed away. When the weather was dry, she would bring down jugs of water from her apartment way up on the ninth floor to keep the roses healthy. People who didn’t care about other people bothered her; she tried to love and be loved, and her attitude was infectious. Not that she couldn’t be tough when the situation called for it—even to the extent of balling up her fist and grinding it against a cheek to make her point.

  She charmed the West Durham Lumber Company into donating plants and a class of fourth-grade children into donating time and work. A service club came along
to help, the Boy Scouts, a gardening nonprofit—old people, kids, all kinds of folks joined in. Henderson Towers itself appointed a garden committee. A few months after Virginia passed, her neighbors held a ceremony to unveil her stone.

  Stone marker commemorates Virginia Watkins’s driving spirit behind Hope Park at the J.J. Henderson apartments. Courtesy of the author.

  They could tell that she was pleased.

  PART V

  MODERN TIMES

  No less than our town’s origin myths and lore from the gilded-leaf decades, our communities’ twentieth century tales have added characters, quirks, depth and curiousness to the greater history. The first decade of the 1900s saw African American capitalism take root in the middle of the uptown business section, where the North Carolina Mutual insurance company built its office and leased space to the Mechanics & Farmers bank. In 1910, black dentist and missionary James Shepard founded the National Religious Training School and Chatauqua, and when it later encountered difficulty staying in business, he maneuvered the state into taking it over and reorienting it as North Carolina College for Negroes. It’s a regular university now, with expansion plans and neighbors aggravated about it.

  The ’20s brought Buck Duke’s Endowment, which he set up in Charlotte (headquarters of his electric power business) while giving the old hometown (where he hadn’t lived since 1884, preferring the society of his peers in New York City) a boost with some millions for little Trinity College if it would just change its name to honor Buck’s ol’ daddy. Buck had the old campus totally rebuilt, another campus built from scratch a mile and a quarter away (so as to put the screws to speculators who had been snapping up property around the Trinity campus in expectation of his generosity) and soon thereafter died, leaving the school even more.