January 29, 2011

The Monitor is launched at the Continental Ironworks in Brooklyn, N.Y. on January 30, 1862. Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.

It was a brisk and stormy morning. But that didn’t stop a crowd from gathering, 150 years ago tomorrow, outside a brooding warehouse-shaped building on the Brooklyn, N.Y., waterfront. They knew all about the strange vessel that was about to be launched, or at least thought they knew. It wasn’t going to float; they came to watch it sink.

It was preposterous, really: a ship made entirely of iron, and what’s more, designed to operate mostly underwater. “Sub-aquatic,” as its controversial inventor, John Ericsson, had described it. The freeboard – the part above the water – was a mere 13 inches, and it surely must have been top-heavy from the massive revolving turret sitting on its deck.

“Ericsson’s Folly,” the critics called it. But the inventor had another name: Monitor.

Well, we know it didn’t sink and we’ve read all about the battle of the ironclads – I guess I’ve written about it ad nauseam – but this is the year for this sea-changing event to receive special attention, the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Hampton Roads.

It was on March 8, 1862, that the CSS Virginia, the South’s iron-covered warship, sailed out into Hampton Roads and decimated the old wooden ships that were blockading the waterway. And the next day when the two adversaries met, fought to a thunderous draw and abruptly brought down the curtain on the era of wooden warships.

The Mariners’ Museum, home of The Monitor Center, will put on a major three-day event the weekend of March 9-11. There will be encampments, reenactments, speakers, tours and, new this year, an opportunity to play at being a spy for the Union or Confederacy.

But it’s the launch of the revolutionary warship that set the stage for the conflict. And the Yankees will be the ones to observe the event.

Today in Greenpoint, Brooklyn – where there’s a Monitor Street and Monitor School – locals are staging a parade through town to the entrance of the Continental Ironworks where the ship was built and launched. There’ll be a ceremony they and then a trip across the East River to Battery Park for a wreath-laying ceremony at the Ericsson statue there.

No doubt references will be made to the audacity of the ship and its inventor; how crowds of naval officers and their wives braved the cold, wet weather to glimpse the vessel that a navy board had described as like “nothing in the heavens above or the earth below or the waters under the earth.” And to watch it slide down the ways into – and possibly under – the water.

The cocksure Ericsson, along with some of his associates, stood defiantly at the bow for the ride down the rails, and no doubt burst into smiles as the iron ship settled comfortably in the choppy water.

It was a desperate time for the Union. Reports of the conversion of the sunken frigate Merrimack to the iron-sided Virginia had struck terror into the hearts of President Lincoln and his cabinet. Hurried calls went out for designs for an ironclad and, with great apprehension, Ericsson’s battery was chosen and built within 100 days of the signing of the contract.

And almost before the launch, the call went out from Washington: “Hurry her for sea as the Merrimack is nearly ready at Norfolk and we wish to send her there.”

There would be faulty sea trials and a near-catastrophic trip down the Atlantic, with crew dropping like dead men from boiler exhaust and the ship nearly foundering as torrents of water poured into its engine room.

As the unlikely vessel rounded Cape Charles on the afternoon of March 8, the crew could hear heavy explosions in the distance – the devastation caused by its deadly opponent.

January 22, 2012

MY RECENT STORY ABOUT FENTRESS, the one about the general store and post office, prompted an interesting response.

Joe Bell of Great Bridge passed along a story that his late father, Joseph S. Bell IV, told him. After returning home from World War II, Mr. Bell worked as a salesman for the family business.

“He said there was a customer in Great Bridge– I think it was at the intersection of Battlefield and Mt. Pleasant– who had a standing order for the maximum amount of sugar they could purchase without having to report it to the government (seems like it was 300 pounds.).

“As I remember, the proprietor had a brother who had a store going south on Battlefield, I think still in Virginia. Everyone knew all of this sugar wasn’t going for cookies!”

Oh my goodness! Could it be that our fast-growing suburban cities were once, back when they were mostly woods and farm fields, hotbeds of moonshine?

You won’t find it in official histories of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Isle of Wight – you name it, just about every rural area of what used to be called Tidewater – had thriving illegal whiskey operations during the bad-old – some might have called them good-old – days when these scrappy entrepreneurs made whiskey while the moon shone.

It was, as one writer put it, a “bootleggers paradise.”

Or, as a former Alcohol Beverage Control agent describes the 1940s, “It was the wild west.” One of the first Norfolk County police officers killed in the line of duty was shot by a bootlegger.

All of this is not so shocking when you consider how hard the rural South was hit by the Depression. Combine this with a defiant, independent spirit, an abundant supply of corn and sugar and many secluded streams, plus the enormous profits that were possible – and you have just the right ingredients for a thriving industry.
The process, as far as I can tell, involved mixing a“mash” of corn meal and hot water with sugar and yeast, then letting it ferment until it began to bubble furiously, then condense into a potent colorless liquid.

A generation of agents tromped through and camped out in the woods to find and catch moonshiners.

Finally, tough enforcement, the high price of sugar and the availability of cheap store-bought liquor just about killed the home-grown industry.

“As hard as it may be for old-timers to comprehend, not one local law enforcement agent, bootlegger, or free-lance distiller, knows of an operating still in the Chesapeake-Virginia Beach-Suffolk area, Pilot reporter Bob Geske wrote in 1977.

“Gone is a Tidewater industry once considered as permanent as agriculture, and much more lucrative.”“ ‘ Hell, you can’t make a dollar a gallon anymore, and with the sentences as stiff as they are, I just won’t mess with it anymore,’ said a 60-year-old bootlegger who served the Homemont area of rural Chesapeake for 35 years.”

A few days ago, I spoke with Tommy Hart, who joined the Norfolk County Police Department in 1963 just as the changeover to Chesapeake City was occurring. He spent a 22-year career as an ABC officer.

He didn’t keep records on how many moonshiners he caught, but only one, he says, ever outran him. They’d spend time in jail, go right back into business and get arrested again. Describing one such repeat offender, Hart said, “I felt bad. That’s all he knew how to do.”

But there are no hard feelings, “To this day, he sends me a pecan pie every Christmas.”

And it isn’t laced with moonshine.



Photo: Undated: former Norfolk County police officer Wilmer “Snooky” Jones after uncovering a 5-gallon jug of illegal white lightning. Courtesy of Raymond L. Harper.

January 15, 2012

Am I the only one in Hampton Roads who didn’t realize that this area had – and lost – one of the greatest basketball players of all time?

I was flipping through my new copy of the 2012 Norfolk Historical Calendar, published by the Norfolk Public Library Foundation, and found the accompanying photo of Julius Erving snagging a rebound in a Virginia Squires uniform.

The Julius Erving? Dr. J? The Virginia Squires?

Lots of folks around here remember, of course. There’s even a still-standing “Unofficial Homepage” of the Squires put up on the Web by admiring fans. And like the other stories I’ve found about the team, it’s tinged with nostalgia and, maybe, regret.

It’s a convoluted history that begins in 1967 with a team called the Oakland Oaks of the fledgling American Basketball Association, partly owned by singer Pat Boone. They were quite a team, winning the ABA championship during the 1968-69 season, with the help of superstar Rick Barry.

Trouble is nobody went to their games, and Boone and company were forced to sell the team to Washington D. C. lawyer Earl Foreman – who promptly moved them to D.C. and renamed them the Washington Caps.

There they remained for only one season, 1969-70, because Foreman was more or less forced out of town when the Baltimore Bullets of the NBA were moved to D.C. Foreman decided to make them a regional team that would play in Norfolk, Richmond and Roanoke – and renamed them again, this time the Virginia Squires.

There was one unfortunate incident before the team arrived. Barry, who made the cover of Sports Illustrated that year – in a red Squires uniform – told the magazine he didn’t like the idea of his kids growing up saying “y’all.” There were other disparaging comments about Virginia and he was quickly on a plane heading north.

But there was still great potential for the team, which recruited some of the best players from the UNC Tar Heels, discovered George “Iceman” Gervin and signed Erving, a star from U Mass. The team played Norfolk home games in 1970-71 at the ODU Fieldhouse, then moved to the just-completed Scope Arena.

During the 1971-72 season, Erving became an instant sensation, scoring more than 27 points per game, many of them in high-flying acrobatic fashion. He would often launch himself into the air somewhere around the free throw line, ending 15 feet later at the boards with a resounding slam dunk.

“Dr. J” – he had been given the name in high school – helped legitimize the ABA. He went on to collect four MVP awards and become the fifth highest scorer in professional basketball history, finishing with over 30,000 points.

But Erving’s career as a Squire was all too brief. After a 1972-73 season, in which he scored 31.9 points per game, the cash-strapped team sold him to the New York Nets. He’d go on to fame and fortune with the Philadelphia 76ers. The decision to sell him for cash appears to have been the beginning of the end of the team.

It seems that every time Foreman, the owner, needed money to pay the bills, he’d sell off one of his most important assets, a star player. In 1974 it was Gervin, to the San Antonio Spurs. It backfired, of course, so angering the team’s fans that attendance plummeted.

Fans were not the only ones disgruntled with the team. At one point the city ordered Scope gate receipts withheld because the owner wasn’t paying rent on time. Virginia National Bank was suing for money owed. Some players found that their paychecks bounced.

A group of investors took over in November ’75 but couldn’t save the team. The Chamber of Commerce sponsored a drive to sell tickets. “In my opinion, the time has come for the public to decide if the Squires stay or go,” Chamber president W. MacKenzie Jenkins Jr. said. “If the people aren’t for the Squires, then the team ought to fold.”

But by then the public and the league had lost interest. In May of 1976, the Squires were no more.


Photo: Julius Winfield Ervin, “Dr. J,” clears the boards in the uniform of his first professional team, the Virginia Squires. Virginian-Pilot photo.

January 8, 2012

It’s hard to realize how different things were.

It was 1940 and Frank Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey often performed at the Cavalier Beach Club and the Surf Club at the Oceanfront. Young people could go to the Beach almost any night of the week and listen to the big bands playing at the boardwalk night spots. And, like Sinatra, get away from it all.

But in Norfolk there was no escaping the war that was about to engulf the country. A young teenager watched as more than 100,000 sailors began pouring into the city and changing it, fast, from reputable to disreputable.

“It was a pretty seamy place,” says Brad Tazewell, who grew up on Pembroke Avenue in Ghent. “Main Street had some of the country’s finest brothels and certainly some of the finest and seediest bars, and my father thought this was probably not a good place for a 14-year-old to grow up in with all those things going on.”

Tazewell was sent away to a private school in Alexandria. Then, three years later, like almost everyone else he knew, he went to war.

Maybe it wasn’t because of the heat in Texas where he trained, but Tazewell soon decided to apply for a position with what would become the famed 10th Mountain Division’s Ski Troops. After training in Colorado, they sailed for Italy in December 1944 and soon found themselves snowshoeing up treacherous hills against Nazi troops.

In a series of daring assaults, the division pushed the Germans back, but at a cost of heavy casualties.

“I was a radio operator, which was a mixed blessing,” says Tazewell. “The good side was you always knew what was going on. The bad side was you had to carry this radio in a backpack, which weighed about 25 pounds. You were always right next to the company commander, and in World War II they all had their insignia painted on the front of their helmets.
The commander was usually up front – we’d go on patrol and we’d often get shot at. In fact I had two company commanders get shot right next to me.”

They began a major assault on April 13, 1945 – the day after President Roosevelt died – and on that day, as they advanced up a hill, a machine gun opened up on them, killing the commander and a nearby sergeant.

Tazewell, now 85, is sitting in a conference room at Clark Nexsen, an architecture and engineering firm in Norfolk, wearing a crisp blue shirt and UVA tie. He points to his left arm near the elbow.

“I got shot in the arm and the hip. I was lucky that the people that picked me up turned out to be from MCV [Medical College of Virginia]. They patched me up in a field hospital and I went home in a hospital ship.”

Tazewell was back in the states still recovering from his wounds when the war ended and got home shortly after VE (Victory in Europe) Day.

He went to the University of Virginia under the GI Bill and would become one of the most prominent architects in the region, helping change the look of that once seedy place.

Sailors celebrating VJ Day on Granby Street in 1945.