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This Week's Stories

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BUDDY AND THE LYNCH GANG

Buddy, a black youth, was cutting grass in a yard in a Northampton County village in 1947 when he allegedly made some remarks and a move toward a white woman passing on the sidewalk.

She fled and informed the town cop, and he arrested Buddy and took him to the county jail in nearby Jackson.

That night, according to the jailer, several men wearing masks came in with guns, shot up the jail and tied him up, and forced Buddy into one of their waiting cars.

It was the next morning before they found the trussed-up jailer and the bullet holes, but nobody could find Buddy and the immediate assumption was that he had been lynched.

After a massive two-week-long search of the nearby forests by highway patrolmen, deputies and the National Guard, Buddy turned up unharmed in Philadelphia in the custody of a Baptist minister.

Pennsylvania wasn't about to let him come back to North Carolina to face a charge of "verbal assault," and the fellows who shot up the jail kept quiet for a while, so nobody knew for some time what really happened.

Later, however, one or two fellows hanging around a service station got drunk and started bragging about what they had planned to do before Buddy jumped and ran.

Eight or ten of them were charged with attacking the jail, but since it was only their word against each other, they got off with what amounted to little more than slaps on the wrists.

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'47 CADDY

The festival was a big event in Hertford County in 1947, taking place in May, but akin to the famed "June Germans" held every year in Rocky Mount in tobacco warehouses.

Tobacco warehouses are big buildings, used only a few months of the year. Ahoskie had three, and they often were put to any other use that could be found in the off-season.

Every spring the biggest and cleanest of these big barns was lavishly decorated and outfitted with a stage, tables, sound systems and a large smooth section to be used as a dance floor.

The county was "country" to the core, but music-wise, the festival was anything but. In the days of "swing," the bands hired for the three days of the festival were really "big-time" swing: Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo. The 1947 choice was Carmen Cavallaro.

On the final night of the '47 festival, the celebrants danced and partied until the county sheriff came onstage and called for attention. It was time for the drawing of tickets for the door prize, a brand-new Cadillac with all the trimmings.

In automobile-starved postwar days, such an event was a real attention-getter.

The party-goers gathered at the stage as Cavallaro's singer pulled a ticket and handed it to the sheriff. When he read the name, the reaction ranged from "Who's he?" to "Where does he live?"

When no one came forward to claim the Cadillac, the band got back into the swing of things. The crowd again filled the floor as the lights dimmed, and things continued "dreamy" for about 30 minutes.

Then the music stopped again and the sheriff took the stage again. He apologized for the interruption, and said they had just realized a "mistake" had been made and another drawing for the Cadillac was going to be necessary. This time, however, the singer left the stage and the sheriff drew the ticket.

Again, no one seemed to recognize the name, and again no winner came forward. The evening was wearing on, and the warehouse was beginning to fill with the haze of its principal product. The bemused crowd moved out for the final dance still not having seen or heard the happy voice of a new owner of a Cadillac.

That situation remained unchanged for several days, until word began to get around the county that the final winner of the Cadillac was a wealthy physician from Virginia. In the first drawing, the name of a black man had been drawn.

Shortly after their three-night stand at the festival, the Cavallaro band traveled to Chicago. There a reporter asked the bandleader and the singer about their recent tour down South, and got an earful about Ahoskie.

The reporter was told the singer had drawn the first name, and everybody seemed happy. But shortly afterward, a group of agitated festival officials came to them and said there would have to be another drawing; that the first one had been a "mistake" because a black man had won.

Cavallaro and the singer had reacted indignantly, saying that no way would they take part in a second drawing. It took some argument even to get Cavallaro to stop the music long enough to do it again.

The Chicago papers jumped on the story, and the national news-wire services joined the chorus.

LIFE magazine, the national weekly magazine of the day, came to town and with a center-spread of photos and captions, told a tawdry tale about "a little fly-specked town" in North Carolina.

The magazine showed the rich Virginia doctor, a white man, in the driveway of his home, with two Cadillacs – one he had recently bought himself and the one he had won. Another large photo showed the black man standing by the stoop of his backwoods shanty.

In the ensuing days, the story got worse as radio stations and newspapers told the world that the festival managers were planning to refund the dollar paid for the first-drawn ticket.

In the strictly segregated region, the event always had been "for whites only." In local rationalization, the argument was that the black man – knowing he couldn't get through the door – had no business buying a ticket. And the ticket salesman, also fully aware of Jim Crow, had made a "big mistake" by selling him one. The intention was to rectify the "mistake" with a brand-new one-dollar bill.

These news reports reinforced the firestorm, and local citizens, suffering under the continued barrage of national denunciation, decided something more had to be done.

In a last-ditch effort to salvage the situation, it was decided to give the holder of the first-pulled ticket the dollar-value of the Cadillac.

At first they offered him an equivalent Cadillac, but reportedly he turned that down, saying there was no way he could get any kind of car back into the swampy woods where he lived.

He took the $3,000, came out to the highway, bought a little piece of land and built himself a four-room house.

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Elmo, talking about . . .
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NEW LIFE FOR OLD MISTAKES

One big problem is that most folks today were born yesterday, and don't have any idea what really happened the day before yesterday.

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Last Week's Mail
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To The Poor Town News ~ Hi. I was with Cal Bryant a good portion of the afternoon, eating cucumber sandwiches at a wedding tea. While we were jumping from topic to topic, Cal mentioned that one of us needed to let you know of the major roadway advance in Poor Town. Over the past few weeks, NCDOT came swooping through and made the highway three lanes (two plus a turning lane) all the way from Ahoskie to the intersection at Earley Station Road. Poor Town continues its comeback. ~ Jim Sullins (Ahoskie).

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To the Poor Town News ~ (Wednesday) ~ Hello there. Greetings from the foot of Pike's Peak in Colorado Springs! My name's Ron Lupton. My folks grew up in the North Carolina coastal swamp areas (Roxobel and Columbia) in the 'teens and '20s ...... married early 1930s. Have quite a few stories about them and their times. Would be proud to share some. Your publication's a fun read. Shirley Edwards of New Bern recommended you to us Luptons. ~ Ron Lupton (Colorado).

(Sunday) ~ Jim: Come to think of it, most of my stories are from my dad, who grew up in Columbia. I don't know of any old Roxobel photos, but will ask my sister, Betty Wine of Tucson, if she has any. I'm also a computer-hater and technophobe (oh, yes......dyed-in-the-wool: I've given my PC the name 'Osama') and don't know how to send photos via e-mail. Pshaw, I don't even know how to 'cut and paste' on this cyber-horror. When I see it I prefer to 'cut-and-run'!

My aunt, Ettie Smith (Felton) grew up in Roxobel and would tell stories. We kids only wanted to hear ghost stories, and she had a few. She had a hair-raiser that occurred to her in the late '20s or early '30s, but I'm uncertain of the location......possibly around Suffolk. She also talked about fireballs rising up in the Roxobel Cemetery when someone was approaching death. One of her anecdotes involved her second husband, Jethro Felton:

UNCLE JETHRO AND THE BUGGY
© 2002 Ron Lupton

Uncle Jethro Felton, Aunt Ettie's second husband, was a lumberman in the Roxobel area. According to her, this incident happened as they were on their way home together one evening in a one-horse buggy.

"Mr. Felton" (she never called him Jet or Jethro......a holdover from the pretentiousness of the Victorian Era, I suppose) enjoyed taking a drink, even during prohibition. His drinking was The Major Scandal in our extended family ~ other, of course, than Aunt Ettie's divorce from Thomas Cain, husband No. 1.

Jethro was feeling either chipper or dour because of his hip flask, and when they reached a small stream that required fording, the horse balked. No matter how encouraged or threatened, the animal would not continue to pull the buggy across the stream.

Ettie climbed down from the buggy and tried to lead the horse across. Nothing doing. Tempers rose, and finally Jethro grabbed his walking-stick (he was almost totally blind, even then), reached forward, and gave the animal a substantial "goose."

That worked. Too well. The hitch and trappings jerked apart when the animal jumped, leaving the buggy in mid-stream, slowly sinking in quicksand.

It was up above the axles before Ettie could help Jethro flounder his way to safety. The horse, free and motivated, made it safely the rest of the way home, dragging its reins.

(In recounting this tale, Ettie never could stop laughing long enough to tell us when or if the buggy was rescued, or how they got home that night.)

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