Sept. 27, 2009

Copies of the letters in the library of the Chrysler Museum of Art are almost as faded as the history they represent, but they have one thing in common, a yearning for information about a perilous and confusing time.

It was May 6, 1862. Norfolk was in disarray as Confederate forces, knowing they couldn’t hold the city, withdrew and hundreds of families packed their bags and fled.

“We have no mail from Norfolk since Saturday,” wrote a worried Moses Myers II to his brother Joseph in Richmond. “I cannot learn anything as to the rumors of the evacuation of Norfolk and we are all in the dark. Now awaiting the arrival of the train from Petersburg to-night – in the meantime people are leaving here as tho’ they deemed each day might be the last one of safety.”

Moses II and Joseph were grandsons of the first Moses Myers, the founder of a shipping and family dynasty – and scion of the first permanent Jewish settlers in the city. The Moses Myers House on East Freemason Street has begun a series of themed tours that place the ca. 1797 house in the context of local history, including the presence of slaves and the impact of the Civil War.

What’s fascinating to me is that, after Norfolk fell on May 10, the Myers House was not evacuated and not taken over, as so many local mansions were, by the Union Army. A state of martial law existed, at one point under the command of Gen. Benjamin “Spoons” Butler, who undoubtedly – if his reputation matched reality – would have helped himself to the family silverware if not the entire furnishings. Butler or not, household items had a way of walking away during the war.

Much of the credit for keeping the house in family hands goes to the plucky son of the house’s founder, Myer Myers, who stayed there with his only surviving sibling, the elegant Mary Georgiana – or “Georgy,” as one of her nephews called her.

“They could have left and sought refuge with family in Richmond, but they chose to stay,” John Christiansen, manager of historic houses for the Chrysler, told me on a tour of the Myers House last week.

Besides, the roads between Norfolk and Richmond were not all that safe, Christiansen said. There were marauding soldiers from both sides, as well as bandits, along the way. And leaving many of their possessions behind wasn’t a great idea.

Myer Myers rebuilt his father’s shipping business after Moses’s sad fall into bankruptcy and heartbroken death in the 1830s. You might think, with his worldwide business connections, Myer might have been a unionist, but when Virginia seceded he cast his lot with the Confederacy.

So did his nephew, William McBlair, who built the fortifications at Craney Island during the war. As the “ever devotedly” McBlair wrote to his wife, Virginia, who had fled to Warrenton, “I have a stronghold at present and am daily becoming more offensive and impregnable. If our late friends will only give me a few more days, I shall give them a very warm reception. It is madness on their part to attack Norfolk. Their defeat will be certain.”

But that was before the evacuation.

Myers was an officer in the Virginia militia and helped train new recruits. According to Christiansen, he hoped to parlay this experience into a position on the staff of one of the Confederate generals. When that failed to pan out, he considered enlisting as a private, but his nephew Joseph convinced him that he wasn’t young or healthy enough for that ordeal.

Myer, like his dad, was a shrewd businessman. With what might have been a wink and a nod from Confederate officials, he apparently obtained a license to purchase cotton from the Deep South and sell it to northern textile mills that desperately needed it. You have to wonder whether bribes were involved.

But the stroke of genius was saving the house. According to family lore, Myer, who had a side job as British consul, had a plaque to that effect polished so it could be better seen, and ran a Union Jack up the flagpole. Northern forces, fearful of Britain’s southern leanings, gave the house a wide berth.

So this fellow with the interesting double name, is a Myers House legend.

The House is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday. Hourly tours are free.

This portrait of a dapper Myer Myers, painted about 1820, hangs in the drawing room of the Moses Myers House. Courtesy of the Chrysler Museum of Art.

Sept. 20, 2009

Detroit Tigers pitcher Fred Hutchinson gets a hit in a game
against Boston Red Sox, probably 1943. Notice all the
white uniforms in the stands. [click to enlarge]

Where would you guess baseball legends like Bob Feller, Phil Rizzuto, Pee Wee Reese and Dom DiMaggio once played in this region? And where did sell-out crowds once pack an elegant brick stadium?
If you thought City Park or Harbor Park or any of the outlying fields in Hampton Roads, you would have been wrong. But I’ll bet you already knew that the place where many a baseball’s great went out to play in the noonday sun was McClure Field on the Navy base.
New informational panels at the 89-year-old stadium on Farragut Avenue and in an online exhibit on the Hampton Roads Naval Museum’s Web site (http://www.hrnm.navy.mil/mcclure/index.htm) tell the history of the stadium and some of the great players who passed through its portals.
It’s remarkable how fast it all came together. The Navy had arrived at the former Jamestown Expo site at Sewells Point in 1917, and almost immediately – even though the U.S. was being sucked into the vortex of World War I – set out to build a first class athletic complex.
To look at the place, as I did a few weeks ago, you’d think you were at a miniature Wrigley Field in Chicago, with classic Georgian touches. In fact, MClure Field, named for base commander Henry McClure in the 1940s, is the second oldest brick stadium in the nation, with dugouts, restrooms, home and visiting lockers and showers. It was a multi-purpose field, designed for football, baseball and track, with a next-door swimming pool soon to be added.
“They wanted to really make a statement that athletics was going to be part of your navy life,” says Naval Museum Curator Joseph M. Judge as we sit on the first base side in the bleachers looking out toward Admirals Row.
The stadium opened in 1920 and served as the focus for intramural sports for two decades. Then, as the U.S. hastily made plans for entry into the Second World War, McClure entered what will probably always be considered its heyday. Some of the greatest names in baseball enlisted in the Navy and played ball for the Naval Training Station or Naval Air Station teams while awaiting their assignments. Big league teams played exhibition games against the base team – and often lost. The Navy sold tickets to sellout crowds and used the proceeds to help build ships. The base newspaper trumpeted baseball stories while virtually ignoring the war.
“The pro teams weren’t very good in World War II because everyone was in the service,” says museum registrar Michael Taylor who joins us in the stands. “Joe DiMaggio [Dom’s more famous brother] played for an Army team but you hear nothing about the Army teams being as good or as famous as these guys. These guys were like rock stars.”
Legend has it that Dom, the Boston Red Sox outfielder who consistently won batting championships, bounced a homer off the distant Minnesota House on Admiral’s Row.
The “Dream Team” during the early war years included Cleveland Indians ace Bob feller, Philadelphia Athletics outfielders Sam Chapman and Ace Parker (the “Pride of Portsmouth”), Detroit Tigers pitcher Fred Hutchinson, Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese and pitcher Hugh Casey, New York Yankees shortstop Phil Rizzuto, and DiMaggio.
“Rapid Robert” Feller, who enlisted a day after Pearl Harbor and missed four years as a major leaguer, surely would have been one of the greatest winning pitchers of all time. Still, at 90, he remembers his Navy experience as among his finest moments.
The displays include a photo of an African American team that played in a segregated league. Even the stands were segregated, with blacks only admitted to separate bleachers in left field. The services weren’t integrated until 1948.
Baseball at McClure Field had its moments.
As Joe Judge puts it, almost every Navy pilot came here for training, even those from the Pacific. Ships from all over the world nodded at the piers. ”You know, all these kids are being pushed through here, and it’s like, OK, here we have Phil Rizzuto, Dom DiMaggio, and we’re going to go out into the ball field, because tomorrow…next stop is God knows where.”
McClure Field, with 300-foot fences in every direction, is now a major softball venue, but it is still baseball history’s field of glory.

During the 1943 season, major league clubs began playing against Naval Station teams. Here, Fred Hutchinson gets a hit against the Boston Red Sox in front of a sell-out crowd at the base. Courtesy of Hampton Roads Naval Museum.

Sept. 13, 2009

Tomorrow would be George Holbert Tucker’s 100th birthday, and no one could tell the story about his birth better than he, complete with a mischievous grin, a slap on the back and an explosive guffaw.
It wasn’t Mrs. Minnie Maddry’s palaver about him being born in Berkley under a miraculous star that took the cake. It was the one about the 9 o’clock gun at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.
The booming gun had been silenced after a high-ranking naval officer’s wife complained that it woke up her child. But, finally, after someone with connections in Washington had intervened, the nightly salvo returned.
“My mother had a difficult time delivering me,” Tucker wrote in this space five years ago, “and for a while it looked like I would never be born alive. Then, when the midwife was about to give up, the Nine O’clock Gun resounded over the Elizabeth River. And rising to the occasion, I finally put in an appearance, qualifying myself as a Berkley son-of-a-gun!”
It was typical of Tucker’s puckish and often spicy stories that graced the Pilot’s pages for the better part of 50 years, frequently accompanied by his own pen-and-ink sketches.
The Bard of Berkley, as Minnie called him, died in April 2005 at the age of 95 shortly after penning one last column. He was a celebrated, irreverent story-teller who will not easily be forgotten. This Wednesday at 7 pm in the Kaufman Theater at the Chrysler Museum, the Norfolk Historical Society will celebrate his 100th birthday.
The event, emceed by Society president Louis Guy, will include several old friends telling stories about him, as well as an 11-minute video that was shot several years ago, with Tucker walking through West Freemason, telling stories and carrying on in his usual flamboyant manner. It also includes Tucker greeting celebrated humorist Kinky Friedman at Norfolk International Airport, wearing a t-shirt with a Friedman quip: “They aren’t making Jews like Jesus anymore.”
Tucker, born Sept. 14, 1909, went to work for the Pilot in 1947, writing carefully researched articles on local history. He had a stint writing obits and church notes, then started a regular history column, “Tidewater Landfalls,” in 1956.
“In his column, as in life, Tucker relished the rascals and embraced the ribald, and bristled at the slightest hint of pretentiousness,” Tony Germanotta and Earl Swift wrote on his passing.
He left the paper briefly in 1976, traveling to England to research the life of Jane Austin, and proceeded to write several well-respected books on her life. In all, he wrote nine books. He was deprived of a college education by the Great Depression, so one of his proudest moments was having Old Dominion University award him an honorary doctor of letters degree.
Tucker’s recollections would often teeter on the edge of naughty. Such was the case in his next-to-last column in which he offered a bawdy barnyard comedy about George Washington’s nearly impotent mule.
To Lafayette, Washington wrote that the mule “in appearance is fine; but his late royal master, tho’ past his grand climactic, cannot be less moved by female allurements than he is, or when prompted, can proceed with more deliberate and majestic solemnity to the work of procreation.”
One of my favorites is the “juicy bit of scandal” about Thomas Dale, the brutal Jamestown leader who lusted after one of Powhatan’s daughters after fellow colonist John Rolfe took Pocahontas as his wife. He asked the Indian chief to send him a comely young thing to share his bed – even though he had a wife back in England. Powhatan turned him down and the story was later published. Tucker mused that, “one can’t help wondering what Lady Dale thought about this peccadillo of her husband in the far-off wilds of Virginia.”
Tucker had so many stories up his sleeve that he could be a non-stop talker. He knew this, kidding about himself in a story he told to his good friend Louis Guy.
“George said his mother wanted him, as a child, to get to know her father, his grandfather,” Guy told me last week. “His grandfather loved to go fishing, and so she persuaded her father to take George fishing. So, grandfather and grandson go out in the boat. Hours later they come back in. and she says, “Daddy, how’d it go?’ And he said, “Don’t you ever do that to me again.’”
“She said, ‘What’s wrong?’
“He said, ‘That child talked continuously the whole time. I think he was vaccinated with a Victrolla needle.’”
Guy, who squired Tucker – who didn’t drive – wherever he needed to go, believes he followed historian David McCullough’s maxim that history shouldn’t be taught; it should be caught.
“I think that George knew how to do that,” he observed. “He hooked you, and you caught his story without realizing that you were being taught history.”

George Tucker. Virginian-Pilot file photo.

Sept. 6, 2009

In July 1829, after visiting the Gosport Navy Yard, President Andrew Jackson ordered the steamer he was traveling on to stop at a curious rocky island fortress in the middle of Hampton Roads.
The installation, then known as Fort Calhoun, rested on an island of granite boulders, thousands of them that had been hauled down by boat from quarries in Maryland. The fort was meant to add fire power to the guns of Fort Monroe, making it suicidal for invading ships to try running the gauntlet between them.
But the unfinished outpost was then virtually deserted and ruggedly appealing, with dramatic views of Hampton Roads, the Chesapeake Bay and the ocean beyond. With its gently sloping beach on the Willoughby side, the one-time war hero realized he could retreat there, ease his mind and soothe his political wounds in its gentle waters.
“The widower, aged sixty-one, was frail and in ill health, suffering from head pains and shaking with a consumptive cough,” J. Michael Cobb, curator of the Hampton History Museum, writes in a new book, “Fort Wool: Star-Spangled Banner Rising.”
“Jackson also felt overwhelmed by the numbers of politicians, constant pressures, and persistent importunities brought to him by his high office and his reputation as the representative of ordinary people.”
And so Jackson, grieving as well from the recent loss of his wife, Rachael, adopted this unlikely spec of land in the middle of Hampton Roads as his favorite retreat, where he wrote lengthy letters and made many of the decisions that marked his presidency. He brought along members of his cabinet, his family and friends.
It is one of many little-known facts about this island, which we barely glimpse on our way through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, that populate this book and drive its narrative:
--That President John Tyler, also mourning the loss of his wife, found solace on the grounds of the fort.
--That Gen. Robert E. Lee, then a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, took on the challenging task of completing the work on the island.
--That President Abraham Lincoln stood on the fort’s ramparts and watched the Union invasion at Ocean View. And that Sewell’s Point, three miles distant, was heavily bombarded by a long-range gun from the fort.
--That the original name of the fort was almost never used. Named for South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun, a state’s rights firebrand whom Jackson despised, it was mostly called “the Rip Raps,” after the rough stones that anchored it; and that, in honor of Gen. John Wool, who led the successful assault on Norfolk, the name was changed to Fort Wool.
But it was Andy Jackson’s fascination with the island retreat that made this place his summer Camp David.
He had a modest structure built on the highest point of rocks, looking east toward the ocean. He used it, Cobb writes, as “a sanctum to read books, review his correspondence, and tend to issues in a separateness that could not be found in the more accessible officers’ quarters.”
It may have done wonders for his health and extended his life. It certainly improved his mood as, with almost every opportunity, he retreated to “this beautiful spot, on the rocks, to enjoy the fine breeze and salt water bath.”
It would have been fascinating for residents, perhaps looking over at the island from Willoughby or crossing Hampton Roads by boat, to see the president’s launch standing by and gawk at his presence, not without approval.
The Norfolk and Portsmouth Herald observed that, “His hotel at the Rip Raps is a delightful summer residence, freely inviting the breeze over the waters from every point of the compass…The general has found, indeed, a most pleasant and salubrious retreat…and as it is the only retreat he has ever made in his life, we hope he will make the most of it.”
Cobb writes that Jackson “found the vast open water vistas” of the island “startling, captivating, invigorating, and inspiring.”
It would be fitting if a small replica of Jackson's hut were built there, with a telescope looking out to sea, where we, like Old Hickory, could watch passing sails and marvel at the world he saw.


Illustration: The book cover for Fort Wool: Star-Spangled Banner Rising by J. Michael Cobb. The bottom drawing depicts the long-range Sawyer gun firing on Sewell’s Point.