Sept. 28, 2008

In late 1958, on New Year’s Eve or a day before, a courtly man with a thin mustache rolled a page into his typewriter and, perhaps gazing out the window for a moment at ships in the harbor, adjusted his half-frame glasses and began writing.

“So far as the future histories of this state can be anticipated now,” he wrote, “the year 1958 will be best known as the year Virginia closed the public schools.”

Lenoir Chambers, editor of The Virginian-Pilot, was warming to the task. It was he and he alone of the major newspapers in the state who took a stand against the state’s policies of massive resistance and, in particular, the closing of public schools to avoid desegregating them. No community in Virginia suffered more than Norfolk, denying public education to 10,000 students and receiving a black eye in the process.

Norfolk was caught in the vise of state law, an act by the legislature to close any school that was forced by federal courts to desegregate. On Sept. 29 – 50 years ago tomorrow – when the city attempted to carry out the court order, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr. ordered the doors at Granby, Maury and Norview high schools and Blair, Northside and Norview junior highs chained and padlocked.

The 67-year-old southerner, author of a two-volume biography of Stonewall Jackson, was appalled.

“The punishment of innocent children is too severe,” he wrote. “The desertion of a doctrine of education on which democracy itself rests runs too much against basic American convictions and beliefs, many of which first originated or first found nobility of expression in Virginia.”

In shutting down public education on which democracy rests, he wrote, we were “condemning ourselves to darkness.” Again and again, in clear, unwavering, logical prose – as former Managing Editor Robert Mason put it – he guided the community through the crisis.

For his work throughout the year that followed, Chambers received the Pulitzer Prize for excellence in editorial writing. Fittingly, it was the editor he succeeded, Louis Jaffe, who had won the newspaper’s first Pulitzer for his passionate support of black causes, particularly his 1928 denunciation of lynching as “an unspeakable act of savagery.”

Chambers was born in Charlotte. His personal reference file, preserved in crumbling envelopes in the newspaper’s news library, shows that his father made cotton ginning machinery, steam engines and saw mills. After graduating from UNC, he taught school for a couple of years, studied journalism at Columbia University, then joined the Army and fought in the trenches of France and Germany during World War I.

He could not have known this, but the man who would be his boss and mentor, Jaffe, had done the same thing, going off to fight in that terrible war.

When Chambers returned, he began a long and distinguished career in newspapers, beginning as a reporter at the Greensboro Daily News. He came to Norfolk in 1929, working as associate editor, then editor of The Ledger-Dispatch. On Jaffe’s death in 1950, he took over as editor of the Pilot.

He was an imposing figure, portraits of him say, although he was hard to see behind the newspapers, magazines and books piled on his desk. He’d have to stand, in tweed suit and carelessly tied striped tie, to conduct daily editorial conferences with his associates. No one knew what the top of that desk looked like.

Chambers was widely read and his editorials were laced with intelligence. He was as comfortable writing about foreign affairs as regional ones.

But it was his leadership through Norfolk’s dark hours for which Chambers will be remembered. On New Year’s Eve, 1959, after schools had reopened, he wrote optimistically about the future. “If Virginia can produce more willingness to face the facts and fresh qualities of initiation and leadership in dealing with them, the year the state opened the schools can lead to a New Year of Hope.”

Photo: Lenoir Chambers, Virginian-Pilot file photo.

September 21, 2008

In July 1969, Norfolk Mayor Roy Martin got a call from a former classmate at Maury High School. They had one of the most important phone conversations in the city’s history.

The story goes back to 1908 when Walter P. Chrysler Sr. saw his first automobile at an exposition in Chicago. His fascination became an obsession that led him to produce his own car and amass one of the greatest fortunes in the world. And it led his son, Walter Jr., to ponder what he would do with all the money he would inherit.

This is one of several fascinating parts of a new book by Peggy Earle, “Legacy, Walter Chrysler Jr. and the Untold Story of Norfolk’s Chrysler Museum of Art.” Earle, former book review editor for this newspaper, is having a book-signing today [Sunday Sept. 21] from 2-4 pm at the museum.

It’s the story of the transformation of a modest provincial museum to one of America’s best, thanks to an eccentric and driven man who devoted his life and fortune to collecting works of art. And, finally, giving them away.

Jean Esther Outland, daughter of Lida Maddox and Grover Cleveland Outland of South Norfolk, “was cheerful and lively,” Earle writes, someone “who could light up a room. She was always ready for a party – and especially an opportunity to dance.” And by most accounts it was at a dance in 1944 that she met her future husband.

As chance would have it, Walter Chrysler had volunteered for the Navy in 1942. But he was not your average sailor: 32 years old, and already a world traveler, Broadway and Hollywood producer, and, oh yes, one of America’s most impressive art collectors.

He was not your average sailor in other ways. A 1955 Confidential Magazine article entitled “The Strange Case of Walter Chrysler Jr.” reported that he was forced to resign by the secretary of the Navy because of “notorious wild parties” at his home in Key West. Another report, according to Earle, has Chrysler being discharged because he was “found to be gay.”

Walter and Jean were married in a simple ceremony at Freemason Baptist Church in January 1945. They lived in a fabulous Park Avenue apartment and mansion in Northern Virginia while at the same time he continued his obsession with collecting art. As the collection grew, he sought more space and settled on a one-time church in Provincetown, Mass., then an artist’s and writer’s enclave.

But the collection was soon bursting at the seams, and its owner let it be known that he was looking for a major museum to house it. He received 147 applications from around the country, and considered 50 of them, including museums in Denver, Houston and Oakland. But it was the Italianate Norfolk Museum of Arts and Science that most intrigued him.

Earle doesn’t speculate how far Mayor Martin’s jaw dropped when Jean Chrysler called him, but it’s clear he saw it as a possible cultural bonanza for the city. “Without hesitation I said of course we were interested,” he wrote in a memoir.

Chrysler’s one stipulation was that the museum change its name, and not every city leader was thrilled with this. Some even fought against the proposal. But the city agreed, even throwing in the naming rights for the new symphony hall. Earle sets the scene for the deal-making in the office of City Manager Thomas Maxwell, as told by banker Jack Gibson.

“’And Roy [the mayor] came out while I was explaining to the bigwigs of Norfolk, saying, ‘Now we gotta sell this guy!’ Roy says, ‘Jack! Shut up!’ At which point, Maxwell came out of his office with his arm around Chrysler. ‘And the damn deal is done,’ said Gibson. ‘It is done!’”

And so it was.


Photo: Walter and Jean, ca. 1940s. Courtesy Chrysler Museum of Art.

September 14, 2008

Along a pathway in a forested section of Norfolk Botanical Garden, sunlight filtered by a canopy of tall pines and oaks splashes the leaves of ancient azalea bushes and rhododendrons. The bushes are so gnarly and thick they seem part of an old growth forest.

An old growth forest of memories.

It is here, on the right just beyond the entrance off Azalea Garden Road, that the garden was born. And here tomorrow, 70 years later, where those who cleared the land and crowned it with thousands of plants will be remembered.

What’s happening is a groundbreaking for the WPA Memorial Garden, honoring more than 200 African American women and 20 men who built the original azalea garden. It was done, like so many public projects of the 1930s, under a Works Progress Administration grant.

Norfolk Botanical credits Thomas P. Thompson, city manager from 1935-39, with the idea for an azalea garden that would rival those in Charleston, S.C. He hired a young horticulturist, Frederic Heutte, as the city’s first superintendent of parks and forestry, and together they chose 150 acres of woods and wetlands on the edge of another new development that year, Norfolk Municipal Airport.

Imagine this: 220 people laboring from dawn to dusk at 25 cents an hour, clearing dense vegetation and carrying the equivalent of 150 truckloads of dirt to build a levee. Then, early the following year, beginning to plant 4,000 azaleas, 2000 rhododendrons, several thousand shrubs and trees and 100 bushels of daffodils. In all, 75 landscaped acres, crisscrossed by five miles of hiking trails, made up the first Azalea Garden.
It must have been awesome.

As the airport expanded, the garden did too, migrating northward. Its name was changed first in 1955 to Norfolk Municipal Garden and then, three years later, to Norfolk Botanical Garden. It now spans 155 acres, with 12 miles of pathways and more than 30 themed gardens. Partly because of its WPA history, it is recognized as a Virginia Historic Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

And of course, it includes one of the largest collections of azaleas – and camellias – on the East Coast.

And the credit, at least initially, goes to these ladies and gentlemen.

According to research by Norfolk Botanical, some of the men and women may have been migrant farm laborers, but most were apparently local. There aren’t any surviving records of who they were, but staff of the garden have identified about 20, and the list is slowly growing as they search for others. “Was your parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle a part of this project,” they are asking.

So far, the list includes Mildred Perry, Edna Joyce, Lena Bunch, Ethel Graham, Sally Anthony, Jenny Garris, Ethel Johnson, Virginia Chavis, John Holley, Josephine Rollins, Nep Thomas, Henrietta Martin, Irene Cousin, Carrie Melton, Mitt Mason, Maria Parker Haskins, Mary Nash, Sadie Buxton, Montgomery Wills Jr. and “Miss Elizabeth.”

These folks not only created a masterpiece by the sweat of their brows, but created an enduring legacy that the founders of the garden could barely have imagined.

Monday’s 1 p.m. groundbreaking includes refreshments and, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., free admission to the gardens. The official opening is set for next spring when the azaleas will be in bloom. It will be, you can be sure, spectacular.

Photo: Women prepare for planting at Azalea Garden. Norfolk Public Library.

September 7, 2008

We whooped it up for the Old Dominion last year because our English forbears straggled ashore at Cape Henry and, finally, Jamestown, four centuries before. Okay. Now on to the next hundred years!

But not so fast.

There’s another 400-year anniversary just around the corner, and this time it’s about a place that has, against all odds, endured. In 2010, Hampton will observe its quadri-centennial as the oldest continuously occupied city in America. That’s a big deal, although the beginning was a whole lot less than stellar.

The Kecoughtans, a native tribe led by one of Powhatan’s sons, had long cultivated garden plots and fished along the riverbanks near the eventual site of Hampton University. Before that, paleo-Indians called the place home for something like 12,000 years.

John Smith and his crew had made their second landing – after Cape Henry – at this spot. As J. Michael Cobb and Wythe Holt put it in their new book “Hampton,” one of the Images of America series by Acadia Publishing, they were welcomed with food and dancing by the Kecoughtans. But the relationship went down hill from there.

The colonists, who had their eyes on this land from get-go, established a military outpost, Fort Algernourne, nearby in 1609. “The next summer, the English attacked and routed the Kecoughtans, removing the survivors westward and building now-lost Forts Henry and Charles, probably astride the entrance to Hampton River,” the authors write. They called the place, at least temporarily, Kecoughtan.

“English settlement soon expanded beyond the walls of these forts, the authors continue. “Renamed Elizabeth City in 1619 in honor of King James’s daughter, by 1625, it had the highest population of any Virginia settlement, with 359 people. Thirty-four of its 89 houses were fortified. It became one of the most important ports in Virginia; the early location of a customs house there indicates its commercial significance.”

Hampton was quickly drawn into the vortex of local and national matters. “It’s resplendent with history of all sorts,” Cobb, curator of the Hampton History Museum, marvels. One of the most notable accomplishments was the establishment of the first free school in America in 1634. (Another 400th anniversary?)

After thriving as a tobacco port, the city was pillaged by the British during the War of 1812. This outrage led to the construction of Fort Monroe, the largest moated bastion in the nation. It was this fortress, ultimately, that led to the city’s utter destruction during the Civil War.

Because the Union held onto the fort, beefing it up with a huge, threatening federal presence, the Confederates retreated, putting the city to the torch. The raging fires left little more than a few blackened chimneys. Soon after, thousands of former slaves – who had been deemed “contrabands of war” moved into the ruined quarters and eked out an existence as free men and women. Soon after the end of “the murderous, bleak, and exhausting war,” as the authors termed it, Hamptonians returned to their ruined town.

Hampton rebuilt itself as a seafood port. “Crabtown” not only featured plants where crabs were steamed picked and canned, but a four-story mountain of oyster shells that dominated its waterfront for more than half a century. One can imagine the aroma at the town’s docks.

The 128-page book is dominated by pictures and captions. In fact, it began as a project to document the city’s history with photographs. The fun part now, Cobb says, is that “people are coming out of the woodwork, saying ‘that’s me!’” He and Holt will talk about the book and sign copies at the History Museum on September 22 at 7 p.m.

Like the book, the museum’s exhibits begin with the story of the people who first greeted the English settlers. But it’s clear that the newcomers wanted this prime waterfront land, and used the excuse of the murder of one of their men – even though the Indians didn’t do it – to seize the land. And never gave back an inch. They figured, as the old saying goes, that they stole it fair and square.


Sidney King illustration of the English landing at Kecoughtan. National Park Service.