March 29, 2009

OUR TIME MACHINE TODAY, THANKS TO the low-tech magic of microfilm, takes us back to March 29, 1909.
The big story of the day is that the Virginia Anti-Saloon League is launching its campaign in Norfolk and Portsmouth to shut down bars.
“Our sole purpose is to eliminate the saloons,” J. W. Hough, local president of the league, is quoted in The Norfolk Landmark. “The issue is a moral one and men, women and children of all political parties and denominations are expected to enlist in the fight.”
Virginia was to go dry in 1916, three years before the rest of the nation, although Richmond, Norfolk and Alexandria were said to do so reluctantly.
The issue spilled over to the race for governor, with William Hodges Mann of Nottoway running on a record that includes passing legislation, the “Mann Law,” that sent most rural areas into the dry column years before. His opponent, Harry St. George Tucker of Lexington, waffles classically on the issue.
“Should an election for statewide prohibition occur in the near future,” Tucker declares, “I would vote wet. Should a local option election be held in my home town, which is a college town, and where there are naturally many young men, I will vote dry.”
Mann, vice president of the state Anti-Saloon League and a former Confederate soldier, would go on to win the governor’s seat and serve from 1910 to 1914.
On this March day, a British tank steamer limps into the Roads five days late, its deck gear mangled by heavy seas. A crew member with a cracked rib is taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital.
There is a fine vaudeville bill at the Majestic. The acrobatic, toe-dancing Proctor sisters delight audiences with their singing and dancing routine. A silent film, “They Led the Cops a Chase,” is set to roll at 3 and 5 p.m. And tomorrow night a pie-eating contest is expected to bring the house down.
If you take a stroll through the Monticello Arcade, you’d find that the E. A. Page & Co. rental agents are offering a fine house on First Street in Ocean View, with eight rooms and an outhouse. It doesn’t give the price, but most rentals in the area are going for $20 to $25 a month, some with adjoining stables..
Down on Water Street, the Old Dominion Line is selling first-class tickets for an overnight steamer excursion to New York, including meals and stateroom, for $5. The steamer Pocahontas will be leaving for Richmond at 7 a.m.
The most bizarre story of the day concerns a sailor who was distraught at the thought of losing his girl. He’s just begun writing, “Darling Baby, you are the only one I love in this...” when the girl enters the room. He turns and raises a bottle of carbolic acid to his lips and drinks. Within seconds, he falls into her arms and dies as the girl wails hysterically.
A Russian living at a home at Charlotte and Cumberland streets is locked up for attacking his 18-year-old servant. The woman, who came here from Poland, claims she was bringing a cup of tea to his room when the assault occurred. The accused and his wife say the girl and her boyfriend concocted the story to extort money from them.
Stories about African Americans identify them as “colored,’ while whites have no race designation. One such story involves a discharged worker at a guano plant in Berkley – read that bat manure – being shot in the hip because he “loitered around and assumed a threatening attitude.” Another tells of a white woman who is in critical condition “as a result of being frightened by a negro.”
Mothers are not exactly held on a pedestal when it comes to disputes with their husbands.
A husband sues to gain custody of his 2-year-old daughter. Although he doesn’t win, “the father will be allowed to see it on all convenient occasions.” Furthermore, the mother is “required to teach the little girl to love its father.”
The reel of microfilm flaps noisily as I rewind to escape from this strange time.

Illustration: “Pleading with a saloon keeper.” Harper’s Weekly, March 14, 1874. Library of Congress.

March 22, 2009

Louis Guy, the president of the Norfolk Historical Society, likes to quote a famous line given to Pogo by the artist Walt Kelly; “We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.”
And just now, in the midst of the global economic meltdown, just such an opportunity has fallen into his lap.
Somewhere around 1815-1820, a French naval officer, Andre-Jules-Francois Martineng, on assignment for the American Navy, sailed up the Elizabeth River and sketched what he saw. The result is half a dozen precisely drawn images of Norfolk and Portsmouth that are jaw-dropping in their depictions of the cities’ waterfronts.
Guy recently received a packet of photocopies of the drawings from the Michel Descours Galerie in Lyons, France, asking if the Historical Society would be interested in purchasing the originals. At the bottom of the letter, is a very discrete – but no less jaw-dropping – figure of 75,000 Euros. At current rates, that’s about $102,000.
The Dutch-inspired drawings “reflect the topographical study and scientific rigor characteristic of the sure and firm hand of a young 39-year-old officer,” the accompanying letter says.
There are two sketches Martineng made in Washington, of the West Front of the Capitol and a collage of several other buildings, including the White House, and a third of the harbor at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, but six of the Norfolk-Portsmouth waterfronts.
One of the most intriguing is a sketch of Fort Nelson, the formidable bastion that once guarded Portsmouth. Originally built in 1776 and destroyed during the Revolutionary War, the fort was redesigned by Benjamin Latrobe and rebuilt, only to be knocked down to make room for the nation’s first naval hospital. Apparently, in all this time, no one bothered to sketch the fort. We didn’t know what it looked like – until now.
There are several drawings of the Norfolk waterfront and Fort Norfolk, which was built almost directly opposite Fort Nelson. Last, but certainly not least, is a sketch that looks as though the artist is sailing up the Elizabeth, with Fort Norfolk on the left and Fort Nelson on the right. It may be the closest thing we’ll ever have to a snapshot of life on the water in that era.
“As far as I can tell, this is brand new information,” Guy says.
But he’s scratching his head over how to raise money and interest. The Hampton Roads Naval Museum might be the most logical choice, but the society and museum are embarked on an ambitious plan to rebuild the massive powder magazine at Fort Norfolk. The Chrysler Museum of Art runs the city’s historic museum, the Willoughby-Baylor House, but the Chrysler’s main focus is art, not history.
It’s phenomenal that the only known drawings done from Norfolk Harbor during this period reside in a French city. The amazing thing is they’ve surfaced. An opportunity, but insurmountable? Only time will tell.
“Now that we know these drawings exist,” Guy says, “we need to find a way to bring them to Norfolk from France.”

Looking south on the Elizabeth River, with Fort Nelson on right and Fort Norfolk on left. Below, Fort Nelson, which once stood on the site of Portsmouth Naval Hospital. Norfolk Historical Society.

March 15, 2009

If you were in the service during World War II, or had family members or friends or acquaintances who were, chances are the mention of a certain building in downtown Norfolk will trigger long-cherished memories.
So here goes: the Navy YMCA.
A little piano, please. Some soft brushes, and…
“You are the promised kiss of springtime,” the recently married Navy wife sang on the performing stage at the Y, “that makes a lonely winter seem long….”
Beverley Isaksen was singing for her husband, Bob, a Navy flier who had been sent to the Pacific, but to the thousands of service people throughout Hampton Roads, she and her group, the Troupers Club, were crooning for them.
At about the same time, David Kennedy, who joined the Navy in January 1945, was dancing up a storm. He lived at the Y for a while, left for Philadelphia, then returned in 1961.
“When I came back here and they started having the dances out at Ocean View on Sunday nights. this lady came up to me and says, ‘Were you in the Navy during world war II?’ I said yes. She said, ‘Did you ever go to the Navy Y dances?’ I said, yes. She said, ‘Well I was one of your dancing partners.’”
The memories of two Norfolk people of the classic beaux-arts building at Brooke Avenue and Boush Street – now Union Mission homeless shelter – are a small but major slice of the century since the downtown YMCA opened on March 17, 1909. The ornate building, up for sale but without any viable offers, at least for the moment, is one of the city’s most treasured but endangered architectural landmarks.
Built with a gift from John D. Rockefeller, the building became a second home for thousands of sailors through two world wars. They could swim in a pool, work out in a gym, play pool, eat in a dining room, get a haircut, bring their dates to dances and, at least temporarily, forget about going off to war. It literally overflowed with guests. There were thousands of weddings in the chapel, with a record 368 alone in 1944.
Isaksen, then Beverley Bennett, had begun working at the Y before graduating from Maury High.
“I would help with anything they needed help with,” she said over coffee at her and Bob’s Freemason apartment. “I was a go-getter for whoever need stuff done. It was always very, very busy, with sailors coming and going.”
That’s when the idea was born for putting on a weekly vaudeville show to entertain the sailors. There were many talented volunteers, musicians, writers, comedians, singers, dancers, and they formed the Trouper’s Club. Soon, the USO offered to sponsor the group and they began going to Army and Navy bases, to isolated gun emplacements, ships and hospitals.
“We’d do a show for three weeks, then we’d stay at the Y and rehearse a new show, and then start another circuit. We would do popular songs of the day, sometimes solos, sometimes duets, occasionally a trio, often with a chorus that backed us.
“If we’d go on a carrier, they would lower the elevator down to the hangar deck to the proper height, and that would be a nice big stage for us to perform on, open to the sky. But costume changes! I changed costumes once in a confessional booth, That was the closest thing they could get to the stage.”
I met Kennedy at Waterside Marketplace, where, at the age of 82, he still puts on dance performances on Saturday nights. He showed me a routine that combines a high kick and a Russian squat kick. A tattoo on his left arm displays a Navy anchor and the name “Gerry,” for his one-time dance partner.
. “I hope they don’t tear it down,” says Kennedy. “They’ve got to make something out of it, because it’s got too much history. it’s just got absolutely too much history to be destroyed.”

Photos: Beverley Bennett in a Mexican outfit in 1940. David Kennedy serving guests at the Navy Y on Valentines Day, 1946.

March 8, 2009

If you grew up in Virginia Beach in the 1920s and your parents loved going to the movies, the place to go was a curious, even funky, theater on 17th Street near Atlantic Avenue that looked a little bit like the Alamo. Mission revival style, with arched windows and doors.

In 1925, when Roland Courts Theater opened, you might have watched a blockbuster silent film, “Lost World,” in which “mighty prehistoric monsters clash with modern lovers in a most remarkable story of love, romance and amazing adventure (from the poster).”

As a young girl, Anne Henry didn’t miss many movies at Roland Courts, and then, after it changed over to a playhouse a couple of decades later, didn’t miss many productions. When the Little Theater of Virginia Beach put on its first play there, “John Loves Mary,” she played a Red Cross worker, a male role – even though she was then pregnant.

“The stage was small and very shallow,” she remembers. “You had to go into the men’s room, then through the back door to the alley and another door to get backstage.”

Her memories, and those of dozens of others who recall the heyday Roland Courts may be clouded by a recent court owner instructing the owner of the complex – the theater is adjoined to two other buildings that were once apartments and stores -- to either fix it up or tear it down. The wrecking ball could start flying in as little as two months.

But wait. The next scene of this drama has an almost-theatrical, riding-to-the-rescue turn of events. The city created a Virginia Beach Historical Commission in January, and it seems to have hit an architectural homerun in its first attempt to save one of the area’s dwindling supply of historic structures.
They were lucky. The Jewish Mother, the long-cherished deli-restaurant and performance venue, is looking for a new space because its old building on Pacific Avenue and 31st Street is scheduled for demolition. With the help of historic tax credits, the restaurant wants to restore Roland Courts, using the two apartment/retail wings for dining and the theater for performances.

I got a sneak preview last week in the company of Scotty Miller, owner of Jewish Mother, and C. Mac Rawls, chairman of the commission, and Bernice Pope, a commission member.

The first thing you notice inside the twin retail/apartment buildings, with their terra cotta floors, is the arches that seem to span every opening. The passageways must be 10 feet wide, with massive brick arches. The windows are palladium style.

These two wings would provide seating for restaurant patrons, and the middle courtyard between the buildings would allow outside dining, Miller says.

But the thing that’s really special about Roland Courts is the theater, the gray structure at the back. Except for light streaming through the doorway, it’s dark, so it takes a couple minutes for your eyes to adjust, but soon the curtain on 80 years of history begins to rise. Upstairs, there’s the balcony, and a bank of Klieg lights. Opposite is the stage, a bit narrow because it was built as a movie house, but still adequate for decades of live performances. I remember that Henry told me the Little Theater put on, among other productions in her day, “Brigadoon” and “The Fantastics.”

Now, Miller says, the theater would be perfect for Jewish Mother performances.

“It’s a neat room,” he says. “Once word got around that this is up and running, it would be the same as down the street.”

“This place,” he adds, cradling blueprints that have already been drafted, “would be perfect.”

Says Rawls, “I think it would be wonderful if it’s restored properly.”

May the curtain rise again.

Photo: The Roland Courts, circa 1925. Courtesy of the Virginia Beach Historic Preservation Partnership.