Kid Carolina

by Heidi Schnakenberg

  Emotional Aftermath

  Smith’s death permanently tainted Libby’s life. Not only was she implicated in the death, she bore a child in Philadelphia on January 11, 1933, that the Reynoldses refused to acknowledge. The boy was named Christopher “Topper” Reynolds. Libby never forgave the Reynoldses and referred to Winston-Salem as the “hick town that tried to lynch me.” Long after the fact, officials in Winston-Salem revealed that the grand jury had only indicted Libby and Ab because they knew they were lying during the inquest and wanted it forced into open court. Those claims were little consolation to Libby.

  The inevitable battle over Smith’s estate shortly followed in the spring of 1933. Before he had married Libby, Smith had named Dick, Mary, and Nancy, his daughter, Anne, and even murder suspect Ab Walker the heirs and beneficiaries of his estate, but since Libby and now her child were involved, the matter became complicated. Smith had made the will before he was twenty-one, which was potentially invalid, and Libby argued that he died intestate. Ironically, Smith’s will stated that no one could contest it.

  Although the Reynoldses had money of their own, they still suspected Libby was partly responsible for Smith’s death and were sickened by the thought that she would receive Smith’s fortune. Libby was pitted against the Reynolds siblings, and then Anne Cannon jumped in to lay claim to more of the estate for her daughter as well. Although she had previously waived her rights to Smith’s estate in the divorce settlement, Anne tried to claim that she had been in poor health during her Reno divorce from Smith and that she had not been in her right mind. Therefore, she was Smith’s lawful widow, not Libby. Dick responded by saying if Anne took this route, he would countersue so she wouldn’t get anything at all. They all battled over the details for three years, with twenty-two lawyers involved and fees mounting to millions of dollars and the case traveling to the Supreme Court of North Carolina before it was settled. The parties finally agreed to split Smith’s inherited fortune, which he never had the chance to spend himself, between Christopher and Libby, who would receive 25 percent of Smith’s estate, or $7 million; baby Anne and Anne Cannon, who would receive 37 percent, or $9 million; and the Reynolds siblings, who received the rest. Libby received an additional $750,000 from Dick so she would cease litigation, and she would have access to her son’s inheritance for her lifetime.

  Years later, ex-wife Anne developed a much more amicable relationship with the Reynolds siblings, but she was unhappily married a few more times and became an on-again, off-again alcoholic. Baby Anne grew up to be a sweet and responsible young woman who made the Reynoldses proud.

  Libby and Christopher didn’t have a happy ending. Libby married an actor, Ralph Holmes, who died of a drug overdose in 1945. Christopher, who grew up to look just like Smith and who was the center of his mother’s life, died on August 11, 1949, at the age of seventeen, in a tragic hiking accident on Mount Whitney. Libby inherited all that Christopher would have received from Smith’s estate. Some members of the Reynolds family still doubted Christopher’s paternity and found it embittering that this woman, who may or may not have been responsible for Smith’s death and who was married to him for only a year, would receive Smith’s money.

  With the money Dick received, he founded the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation in 1936, which he also served as president. Some said he and his sisters did it just to ensure that Libby wouldn’t get access to any more of Smith’s money, but the foundation did fund many good works for the city of Winston-Salem. Today, it funds the Z. Smith Reynolds Airport, Wake Forest University, local hospitals, parks, schools, and other projects. Through the years, Dick, Mary, Nancy, and their Uncle Will poured money into the foundation, and the coffers still show no signs of running dry. It turned out to be one of Dick’s proudest accomplishments.

  Young Dick was despondent after Smith’s death. He decided to anchor himself in Winston-Salem and spend time with his family as they all recovered from the shock of their loss. Dick’s aunt and uncle, and many cousins and relatives, were a great source of comfort to him. They had all been deeply affected by Smith’s death—although they lived separate, often wild lives, the orphans and their extended family were bonded in the common burden of living up to the Reynolds name. Dick, Mary, Nancy, and Smith had cemented their relationship and their devotion to each other the day Katharine passed away. No matter where their adventures led them, they knew and understood each other the way no one else did. Dick and Smith shared their love of flying together in New York, and Smith and Nancy spent weeks at a time together in the speakeasies and theaters of New York. The loss of Smith was another blow to the orphans, once a family of six and now down to three before they reached the age of thirty.

  CHAPTER 6

  Love, Yachts, and Politics

  1933–1941

  While Dick was recovering among his North Carolina connections, he met the woman who would become his first wife. Elizabeth “Blitz” McCaw Dillard was in her mid-twenties and unmarried, and she had taken a liking to Dick after she was invited to a few barbecues at Reynolda. Blitz was from an upper-middle-class family and was the granddaughter of a tobacco farmer as well. She had known the Reynolds girls since they were kids and went on to Sweet Briar College in Virginia after high school. All her girlfriends were married off and Blitz was on the hunt for a good husband. She quickly grew on Dick—he found her to be bold, fun, and outgoing. Dick thought she was the prettiest woman in Winston-Salem and they began dating. But Blitz wasn’t his first North Carolina love.

  As a teenager, Dick’s local sweetheart had been Ella Cannon—a cousin of Smith’s ex-wife. They had dated throughout their teens, and Ella wanted to get married. Dick told her they should wait—they were young, and he wanted to be sure they were ready. Ella was crushed by Dick’s hesitation and broke up with him. But Dick never stopped loving Ella, even after he met Blitz, and Ella married his good friend Emory Flinn years later. In the summer of 1934, Ella had just given birth to a son with Emory, when she tragically and mysteriously fell off her penthouse balcony while Emory looked on.

  Dick was so disturbed by her death that he had recurring dreams about Ella for the rest of his life.

  Wedding Bells

  Blitz and Dick had been dating for two months and their relationship had quickly grown intense. According to Dick, he had been drinking one weekend in late December of 1932 and had halfheartedly proposed to Blitz. The next morning, a group of Dick’s friends called him in fits of laughter, congratulating him on his engagement. Dick was stunned to learn that Blitz’s father had announced in church that morning that Blitz would soon be wed to Richard Reynolds. Dick claimed he couldn’t even remember what he said. Yet another milestone in his life had been fogged by alcohol.

  All day long Dick received good wishes from friends and relatives. They all liked Blitz and couldn’t have been happier that Dick would likely settle in Winston-Salem with her. It looked like Dick would have to see this “engagement” through.

  Dick soon found himself at the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church’s altar on January 1, 1933. After a modest ceremony, he did what he always did best: He threw a big party at his father’s old Fifth Street house and invited all the neighbors. It was one of the last parties the old house would ever see.

  The Era of Blitz

  As Dick and Blitz settled into their marriage, Dick eventually showered her with attention and affection, and enjoyed treating his new bride like a queen. Both of them were the life of the party everywhere they went. There was no hint of unhappiness—in fact, their love was deepening.

  Amazingly, they first moved into Reynolda, even though it had just been stained by tragedy. But they wouldn’t stay there long. On April 14, 1934, Dick and Blitz traveled to Baltimore where Dick would finally receive his full inheritance. At the age of twenty-eight, he inherited over $25 million, which made him even richer than his Uncle Will. The news made headlines. One of the first things Dick did with the money was build a hundred-square-mile estate named Devotion in Surry Coun
ty, not far from his mother’s Mount Airy birthplace. The estate was located sixty miles north of Winston-Salem, and included eleven thousand acres of untouched wilderness and wildlife. Waterfalls, trout ponds, and lakes were scattered throughout the acreage, and Dick went to work building the twenty-room main house—Long Creek Lodge. The house was built over a dam by one of the lakes and was surrounded by a variety of multipurpose buildings—a movie theater, cheese-making shed, barns, servants’ quarters, and power supply house. It dwarfed Reynolda and every other place he’d lived.

  In support of the Depression-era recovery effort, Dick turned the building of Devotion into his own WPA project—the relief measure created under President Franklin Roosevelt to put unemployed men back to work. Dick paid workers double the standard wage for construction and prolonged the building process so the men could stay employed for as long as possible.

  Dick looked for more things to do in Winston-Salem. He asked his Uncle Will for a position on the board of RJR but he was voted down by the board, who thought he didn’t have sufficient business experience. Dick was disappointed, but he didn’t fight it. Instead, he invested heavily in local business and real estate and began buying solid gold bricks, which he felt were necessary to back up currency. As his business ventures grew more complicated, he hired an accountant, Grey Staples, to manage them but soon fired him when he and Coyner discovered that Staples had embezzled $150,000. When Dick fired him, Staples committed suicide. Dick felt responsible for his death, and to make amends to his family, he hired Ledyard Staples, his brother, to work in his stead, whom he kept in his employ for the rest of his life.

  Dick also took advantage of his time in the community to give back to the city that helped make his father a rich man. He donated land and financed the 186-acre Reynolds Park—the first public park in Winston-Salem and the first accessible to the black community. Dick doubled this effort as another WPA program and put dozens of unemployed men to work. When it was finished, it included an eighteen-hole golf course, tennis courts, the city’s first municipal pool, an amphitheater, and picnic areas. Dick appeared at the opening ceremonies.

  At home, Dick and Blitz threw grand parties, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of attendees, which sometimes lasted for days. They went skeet shooting together at Roaring Gap and attended the Kentucky Derby with their friends. They soon became interested in horse racing and joined the Hambletonian Society, a horse racing club that hosted the country’s most famous horse race. Dick’s Uncle Will was one of the original founders of the society, and Will’s fastest racehorses were named Dick Reynolds and Mary Reynolds. On July 7, 1933, Dick Reynolds won a pacing stake in Cleveland, and on August 17, 1933, Mary Reynolds won the Hambletonian at Goshen, New York, as Dick, Blitz, Mary, and her husband, Charlie Babcock, watched.

  By 1934, Dick and Blitz started training their own horses at Seminole Park in Orlando, Florida, which Uncle Will partly owned. Dick’s best horses—Red Dewey, Joshua, Erla, Mack Abbey, and Taffy Volo, went on to win numerous races up and down the East Coast throughout the 1930s. And in 1937, Dick became vice president of the Mineola Driving Club in Garden City, Long Island.

  It wasn’t long before Dick’s past came back to haunt him, though. At a horse race in Goshen, Dick was served with a $140,000 lawsuit by the German dancer Johanna Rischke. She alleged that Dick persuaded her to abandon her dancing career in Europe several years earlier on the promise of a theater contract in New York that never happened. At first, Dick didn’t take the suit seriously and tried to claim that she had no grounds to file the suit because she was in the country illegally. But the courts forced Dick to respond. Eventually, Dick settled the case with Rischke, whose role in Dick’s life was never clarified, but not before he had a lot of explaining to do with Blitz.

  Although the Johanna Rischke situation was thus put to rest, it was not the last Dick would see of such cases. He had a pattern of neglecting “unfinished business,” and he often failed to keep the many reckless promises he made to the people he picked up. There always seemed to be something—or someone—that would get in the way of his new loves.

  Around the same time as the Rischke case, the old lawsuit over the Reynolds Airways crash was finally resolved. Dick was ordered to pay the victims’ families $20,000 in damages after several years of litigation. At that time, Dick dissolved Reynolds Airways and renamed the Winston-Salem operation Camel Flying Service.

  In a relatively short time, Blitz and Dick’s union produced a big, growing family. They had four beautiful boys in seven years: Richard Joshua Reynolds III (1933), John Dillard Reynolds (1936), Zachary Taylor Reynolds (1938), and William Neal Reynolds (1940). They were Dick’s pride and joy. Along with Devotion, Dick built a huge, yacht-shaped townhouse for his family in Winston-Salem called Merry Acres. But he and Blitz raised the boys at Devotion, where Dick took them outdoors for a variety of activities. He built a skeet shooting range, tennis courts, and a jungle gym, and took the boys horseback riding and canoeing on the estate, much to their delight.

  After a while, Dick was anxious to travel the world again as he had often fantasized, but he hadn’t bargained for the burden of a family. First, he ordered a customized private plane—a trimotor Stinson monoplane made in Detroit—to be flown to Winston-Salem, should they ever need to take off on a whim. They still hadn’t made one trip on Dick’s precious freighter, the Harpoon, which Blitz urged him to sell. She thought a freighter wasn’t a good place for bringing up a family. Blitz increasingly spent her time with Winston-Salem society people, which bored Dick. But Dick would come up with plenty of activities to keep him busy.

  In 1934, auto pioneer Howard Coffin invited Dick on a hunting vacation on the Georgian island he owned called Sapelo, with the intention of asking him to invest in his neighboring Sea Island Hotel. But Dick was interested in Sapelo, not Sea Island. Georgia’s coastal islands were already occupied by some of the country’s wealthiest men. J. P. Morgan and the Carnegies owned the neighboring islands, and the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers vacationed on Jekyll Island. Sea Island was increasingly developed by millionaires like Coffin. But Sapelo Island, with its thousands of acres of untouched landscape, natural beauty, salt marshes, oaks, and wildflowers, was a sight to behold. It had recently been featured in National Geographic, and the island had been visited by two presidents, Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and other prominent men who had appreciated its beauty. Eventually, Coffin gave in because he needed the capital. Dick bought the land and Coffin’s mansion, the South End House, for less than $1 million. The sale included the entire island, except the settlements by the island’s indigenous residents.

  Dick took such an interest in the conservation of the island that shortly after he bought it he joined the American Wildlife Institute, which aided the government in protecting the nation’s wildlife. For decades, Sapelo would continue to be Dick’s headquarters for conservation and preservation efforts.

  When Dick bought the island, he added the 124-foot Zapalato his fleet. Coffin accepted the deal, although it pained him to give up the majestic yacht. At the time, Coffin had lost nearly everything in the crash of 1929 and would take whatever he could get. The price—$50,000—for the Zapala was a fraction of its worth and Dick knew he’d nearly stolen it. The elegant yacht, which was originally built by Luders Marine Construction, was already famous for its luxury. It included a walnut dining room, social hall, three mahogany double staterooms, two single staterooms, four bathrooms, and large deck space. It had two eight-cylinder Winton engines of 500 horsepower each and a cruising speed of 17 knots. After Dick acquired this yacht, his interest in boating grew even more.

  He thought if he built a bigger yacht, he could change Blitz’s mind about cruising with the family. He soon began work on building his next boat, the Lizzie McCaw. The work gave him an excuse to be off on his own with his true favorite lady, the open sea. He hired a group of yacht builders, Sparkmen & Stephens, who built the Lizzie McCaw with surprising speed and success. While spending
time with the builders, Dick became acquainted with the yacht racing circuit and took an interest in the possibility of racing himself.

  In 1937, Dick began to fulfill his dream of yacht racing, participating in numerous races up and down the Atlantic Coast and Europe and almost always placing well. Dick first took the Lizzie McCaw to compete in the six-hundred-mile Fastnet Race at the Royal Ocean Yacht Club off the southern coast of Ireland. At first, his entry was disqualified when his skipper didn’t see the signal to start the race. But the officials decided to forgive the error and Dick won fifth place.

  Dick eventually threw himself into yacht racing with the same abandon he’d once shown to aviation. In December of 1937, construction began on his new yacht at Nevins Shipyard in City Island. Sparkman & Stephens were constructing the fabulous single-mast, fifty-five-foot cutter, called the Blitzen, and many other smaller speedboats for Dick. Dick’s ploy to entice Blitz to the open water worked when he gave the yacht her nickname.

  In 1938, Dick launched the Blitzen and entered the yacht in the world-class thrash from Newport, Rhode Island, to Bermuda. A great sailor named Robert Garland, who would become a lifelong friend, joined him on the race. Dick was triumphant when he won the Class B division. Next, Dick raced the 225-mile Block Island race at Bayside Yacht Club in Queens, where Dick took the lead with the help of a generous southwest breeze.

  But the 1939 Honolulu Fastnet Race was the big win he was most proud of.

  Dreams Chased

  The son of tobacco lord R. J. Reynolds was the big draw at the 1939 international Fastnet Yacht Race in Honolulu. Dick, who was about to cause an upset in the yachting circuit, had created a media frenzy.