Between You and Me
Each time I make the trip to Greenville via Raleigh and Wilson, I am reminded of how things have changed.
When I am pressed for time and counting minutes, I am delighted. The new loop around Raleigh that connects with Interstate 40 near the airport and dumps you on Highway 264 near Knightdale eliminates the possibility of gridlock on Old Highway 64. And the loop through the picture postcard farm country around Wilson cuts out the stoplights on Old Raleigh Road and the slow drive through the heart of Wilson.
But when I have time to spare, I fret. The loop around the capital is boring. Dreadfully boring. I miss seeing familiar landmarks, especially the charming mother-in-law house that sits on a hill a few miles east of Raleigh. I know there is a story there yet to be told, and I wonder whether the folks would consider me untoward if I stopped and knocked. The big house joined with the smaller house beside it has a spacious porch, but I have never seen the owners about or else I would have stopped and introduced myself.
In a column I wrote several years ago about Miss Edna Boykin, I described the beautiful stretch of Old Raleigh Road where she lives — a street the Wilson bypass has robbed me of:
"Old Raleigh Road” doesn’t sound like an address that dreams are made of. But as a child, I thought the best address in North Carolina was this short stretch of highway in Wilson. The stately houses with carefully manicured lawns spoke of old money. Massive oaks reached across the street, creating an alley that has persevered for decades and earned respect from ice storms and hurricanes.”
I miss “Old Raleigh Road” and further on, after you cross the tracks, the neighborhood of shotgun houses, small shops and the Orange Hotel. The Orange Hotel. Somehow for decades it escaped my attention. Then one day I saw it — a modest two-story building with a center hall, close to the sidewalk with a low chain-link fence framing the front yard, its century-old weather boarding sporting a coat of fresh white paint and rockers spread across the front porch.
It wasn’t the rockers that caught my attention. It was the hand-lettered sign posted behind the rockers: “If you don’t sleep here, don’t sit here.” Now that is straight talk. I had to stop and take a picture. I also noticed a historical marker posted beside the front door. I didn’t get close enough to read it, but I did learn more about the Orange Hotel later.
At this point I have to tell you how I got loops and bypasses on my mind.
I was talking to friend who had just had his 50th birthday. I’ll help you with the numbers — he was born in 1960. I was telling a story that involved a “tourist home.” His face went blank. “What’s a tourist home,” he asked. He was serious. I resisted beginning with, “Once upon a time,” but shortly I was talking about when life Down East was less hurried and bypasses and loops were as foreign as bagels and lox.
Main highways like 421 were two-lane roads that ran right through the middle of tiny Eastern North Carolina towns. The trip from Greensboro to Carolina Beach, where the east-west Highway 421 ends, included coming into Buies Creek to the main intersection, taking a sharp right, traveling on a narrow paved road across the creek at Marshbanks' pasture up the hill and on to Erwin.
“Tourist homes” sprang up mostly along in-town portions of these highways, but most only survived into the ’50s and ’60swhen interstate highways appeared and chain motels began to have a presence in the South. Proprietors of tourist homes took in overnight guests. They often were widows, or older couples with extra rooms in their house, time on their hands and the desire for additional income. A simple, unobtrusive wooden sign usually was enough to catch the eye of the slow-paced traveler of that day, but occasionally neon was used to attract the late evening motorist. In warm weather, the owner might sit on the porch and visit with guests — often repeat customers — until bedtime.
I could find only one “tourist home” in Raleigh — Sir Walter Tourist Home on Hillsborough Street — and that was due to the detective work of my longtime friend John Williamson of Raleigh and Washington, DC. Sara Ezzell has operated Sir Walter for the last 23 years, now catering primarily to persons in transition or looking for an extended stay home-away-from-home. James Lee Burney reminded me of Gables Motors Lodge on Wake Forest Road, a stone home built in 1925, about the time the word “motel” —a combination of the words “motor” and “hotel” — supposedly was coined in California. Rooms have been added since. A call was answered by Charlie Griffin who has owned and operated The Gables for 45 years.
My only experience with a tourist home was in the early ’50s. A neighbor took me with her kids on a trip to Clearwater, FL. We made it just across the Florida border the first day and found a dimly lit tourist home in a dimly lit town. I opened a spigot in our modest quarters and the noxious, sulfur-infused water of that part of Northern Florida almost took my breath.
My friend Billy Yeargin, whose family was in the tobacco warehouse business in Oxford, NC, recollects a tourist home run by Frank White in his hometown. Tobacco markets were seasonal, and auctioneers, government graders, company buyers and others converged on small southern towns in the fall and had to have lodging. Tourist homes often were their only choice. I know of at least one in a market town, operated by an attractive lady with a bent for entertaining that had less than a stellar reputation among church ladies. It seemed a bit more than coincidence to them that she always had a couple of ladies in residence during market.
It would be a stretch to picture these tourist homes, which had pretty well run their course by the ’50s and early ’60s, as the forerunners of today’s bed and breakfasts. They were generally comfortable, no-frills operations. And breakfast was not part of the deal. However, on occasion the tourist home operator would have a café nearby and one stop in the evening would serve two purposes.
That was the case in Wilson, according to Willis Peppers, whose family owns the Orange Hotel, which I discovered is now a rooming house listed on the National Register. In the segregated South, black travelers had to search high and low for overnight accommodations. The Orange catered to blacks and, according to Peppers, provided lodging for many famous African-American musicians of the period, some of whom played for the “Germans” — grand parties held in the spacious tobacco warehouses. Just across the street, “Miss Libby” had a café (Libby’s Café) and rented rooms to travelers. A mile or so east at the intersection of Highways 301 and 264, Peppers said, there was Woodard’s Inn, originally operated by Herbert Woodard out of his home, who also had a café. Mabel Ellis ran a tourist home a short distance away, Peppers said.
Some of the black tourist homes had names like Cadillac Tourist Home, New York, and Harlem that signaled to black travelers from Up North that they were welcome. I remembered one in Wilson as The Brooklyn, but no one, including Peppers or my good friend and pit master extraordinaire Ed Mitchell of Wilson, could confirm it. I inquired, and, yes, Peppers is a cousin of Julius Peppers, defensive lineman for the Carolina Panthers — at least as I write — from nearby Bailey, NC.
Often in the open country, tourist facilities took the name of “tourist court.” Small, free-standing units were called “tourist cabins.” In Harnett County, we had the Pine State Tourist Court. It was set in a grove of stately pine trees near the present courthouse. The trees at one time were painted white as high as a tall man could reach. Pine State, like almost all of these operations, died with the advent of modern motels. Some turned into a shabby collection of cabins for transient workers or locals down on their luck. Old Highway 301 from Richmond through the Virginia countryside to Fredericksburg, that I used to drive, was littered with abandoned tourist courts.
Between you and me, this column has a rather sad ending. When we became obsessed with getting places quickly and building bypasses, loops and interstate highways, tourist homes, tourist courts, tourist cabins, motor lodges and the like found themselves on the back roads of America. Most of them died a slow death — victims of progress.
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My Usual Charming Self
A recent PBS “Frontline” program boasted firsthand coverage of a secret Taliban insurgent force in northern Afghanistan. I must say I was underwhelmed. The Islamic banditos — a splinter group controlled by a former prime minister of Pakistan — reminded me of the Three Stooges with an attitude.
The al-Qeada representative imported to make roadside bombs used an instruction manual that didn’t appear to help much. His new Taliban friends gathered around to help, stating they might all be blown up — but what the heck, to die for the cause is the goal anyway.
Predictably, the roadside IEDs all failed when put to the test on the main highway north to Tajikistan where the America-led coalition sends supplies down to the fighting in southern Afghanistan. Even if they had gone off, the inept guerillas were too confused to follow up and attack any vehicles that may have been waylaid. The only action involved arguments between the members of the raiding party, each criticizing the other for not providing adequate warning or reacting too slowly.
Certainly this branch of the Taliban effort is not representative of the entire fighting force, but they share traits. The insurgency forces all use weapons buried by villagers and townspeople during the unsuccessful Russian occupation of the 1980s, augmented by smuggled arms from rouge nations, al-Qeada and other jihadist groups. And their strategy and tactics are centered on one unifying principle — heard over and over in the PBS documentary — hatred for America. No other nation is mentioned, just America, although the coalition forces patrolling the northern area are German.
The Germans don’t do much patrolling — or fighting. Their job is to win the hearts and minds of the local population with aid packages and public works, the centerpiece of the counterinsurgency policy in vogue in the US and Western Europe. Consequently, jihadists roam around freely and strike aimlessly.
And herein lies the problem, pointed out brilliantly by Mark Moyar, chair of the US Marine Corps University’s insurgency and terrorism program. In his 2009 book — A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq — Moyar presents detailed accounts that prove the need to throw out the handbooks and start all over by focusing on leadership to a far greater degree than practiced in the “hearts and minds” methods employed today.
Under Moyar’s scenario, the German forces in northern Afghanistan should be searching out insurgents with alacrity, led by officers with initiative and dedication to success — although the jihadists in their patrol area are more likely to blow themselves up than pose a threat to coalition forces.
Notes from La-La
Seven percent of private sector workers are members of a union. In the public sector, it’s 12 percent, representing 51 percent of all union members. This raises the specter of worker-controlled government agencies focusing on their own needs over citizen services. No wonder a recent Rasmussen poll discovered 70 percent of public sector employees were satisfied with their jobs and job security. In North Carolina, the State Employees Association has affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the same crowd working with President Barack Obama to force all healthcare workers to be members of SEIU. This is called syndicalism, a form of socialism we hoped we had extinguished when we won the Cold War. The dictionary definition of syndicalism says: “a development by trade unions that aims at the possession of the means of production and distribution, and ultimately the control of society, by federated bodies of industrial workers, and that seeks to realize its purposes through general strikes, terrorism, sabotage, etc.” Enough said.
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Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University, has bravely dared to state that tenure for college professors needs to be studied and modified. I posted a piece on American Thinker (www.americanthinker.com) about the horrors of tenure, reviewing specific cases of the depredations of tenured radical scholars and the damage this cadre has done to individual scholars who don’t toe the prevailing campus party line (The Duke 88 comes to mind here). Many readers around the nation were horrified to know that, in North Carolina, it only takes K-12 public school teachers three years to attain tenure and a job for life. They are discovering this is true in their state too. No wonder we can’t fix the education system.
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The latest data show that young voters are going cold on Obama, with only 40 percent approval from 18-29-year-olds who played a decisive role in his victory in November 2008. Perhaps they too are looking at the numbers. The Obama stimulus promised 3.3 million new jobs; the actual result is the loss of 3.7 million jobs — for a net/net loss of over 7 million jobs — with the resultant rise of total unemployment from 7.4 percent, when Obama took office, to 10.4 percent today. Or the young folks are realizing that politically motivated scientists cooked the numbers on global warming — which led Obama to promise $300 billion to Third World countries labeled as “climate debt” for the sins of first and second world productivity. Or maybe they just don’t like the Gestapo tactics used by Democrats to force through a healthcare plan that forces them to have health insurance or face heavy fines and jail time.
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It’s not just young voters who are nervous about national security and the threat of terrorist attacks on American soil. While Obama’s attorney general holds tribunals to prosecute CIA and other intelligence officers accused of using excessive force in interrogating captured terrorists, the intel services — our front line of defense against an attack — are afraid to take initiative for fear of attack by their own government, even for actions approved in writing. This sorry state of affairs leaves us dangerously disarmed and vulnerable.
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We all should be disappointed that our vaunted space program has been cut off at the tail fins in an empty gesture by Obama to act like he cares about the deficit. Space is the only new frontier, and America is the Lewis and Clark leading the way. NASA is winding down the old shuttle program to restart with a new mission to places far, far away. Now we aren’t going, and our existing space efforts will rely on other nations to shoot up our astronauts and scientific equipment. As I wrote recently in this column, the Obama crowd has stolen the future away from Americans, and now the world.
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Editor-at-Large
Since I’d made numerous trips to the old Soviet Union and the countries it controlled in Eastern Europe, I expected to be prepared for a socialist/communist Cuba. I discovered Cuba can’t make up its mind on how to describe itself. Sometimes you hear communist, sometimes socialist, sometimes revolutionary and sometimes just anti-American, although the people profess a deep love for America and long to come here. However, there was one description of the old Soviet Union that did fit. Winston Churchill said that Russia was “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Ditto Cuba.
First off, let me explain how we got to Cuba. Since 1996, when the Helms-Burton Act strengthened the embargo on trade to force Cubans to pay American owners for property seized in the 1959 revolution, US tourists have been virtually barred. I say “virtually” because, while over 150,000 American tourists sneak into the island through Canada or Mexico, there are still some legal ways to go. We chose a humanitarian/ecological tour, which had a license to travel granted by the US Treasury. Our license allowed us to travel freely around the island so long as we did not bring back Cuban government-made products like cigars or rum. We were encouraged to buy native crafts and paintings and music produced by Cubans. Actually, it is difficult not to end up spending some money that goes to the government as it controls almost everything; however, we did the best we could.
But before you get your knickers in a twist about our supporting the enemy, you need to realize that you have just encountered the first riddle about Cuba. Yes, the US has an embargo against trade with Cuba in hopes of producing shortages that will bring down the government, but at the same time the US sells the Cubans almost $600 million worth of food each year, making the US Cuba’s fifth largest trading partner (first is Canada). So it’s an embargo except when it isn’t.
My initial reaction to Cuba was that it wasn’t cut out to be a communist/socialist country, at least not in the old, original style. Whereas East Germany, say, or the Czech Republic, were gray and sullen, the Cubans are colorful, enthusiastic and full of life. Instead of somber folk songs to celebrate the output of the tractor factory, the Cubans sing or play (endlessly) rumbas, cha-cha-chas and romantic ballads. You can hardly walk down the street without encountering bars and discos with a Latin beat drifting out of the windows.
Now I don’t want to give the impression that Cuba is a paradise — far from it. Life is very tough on an income of $40 per month: you can’t buy a car newer than 1959 unless you have a “special” privilege; most of the elegant buildings in Havana are ruins covered with trees and vines; the people are constantly watched by the neighborhood committees for the Defense of the Revolution; and, most gallingly, they are required to live trapped in a regime that, while it propagandizes its success, is clearly a failed state. I’m just saying that a beautiful tropic island — filled with intelligent energetic, fun-loving people — is hardly the place I’d have chosen for a crazy egalitarian experiment.
Moreover, you now have this totally confusing situation in which the revolutionary regime is betting on capitalist tourists to dig them out of their hole. Hundreds of thousands of tourists from around the world are flocking to Cuba, requiring hotels, resorts, food, boats, spas, swimming pools and other amenities totally out of reach of any Cuban. (The Cubans who once could afford those things are in Miami.) This, too, creates a situation totally different from, say, the old East Germany where tourist amenities were few and far between — and where even the hot water was not a sure thing. In our hotel, you could even select from three kinds of pillows.
Now there was one thing I recognized from the old Soviet bloc — the propaganda billboards. Here they were all about Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Cienfuegos, the heroes of the Revolution. There are also the propaganda speeches written on walls. I saw one delivered by Fidel in 2000 printed on the wall of the Corona cigar factory — as good a model of a 19th century sweat shop as you are likely to find. The speech was exhorting the Cuban people to be proud of leading the world into a socialist/communist society. Could anyone believe that this run-down, hungry, falling-apart country — led by an octogenarian — was leading anyone anywhere other than to Miami? I asked a Cuban friend whether anyone believed this kind of stuff. “Of course not,” he replied, “but what do you want us to do?” I turned to the economy and asked him to make sense of the system by which Cubans were paid in pesos worth 24 cents and the tourists were given pesos worth $1.20. “Jim,” he said, “you can’t make sense of a senseless system, so stop trying.”
In a way, that seemed to summarize the whole crazy Kafkaesque, unreal world of Cuba. You can’t figure out an illogical, surreal, distorted, broken, failed dream; ironically, the same failed dream from which the Soviet bloc awoke 20 years ago.
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