High Point Confidential Magazine

HOMETOWNS 2018 A Publication of The High Point Enterprise

PUBLIS HE R:

Rick Bean rbean@hpenews.com

WRIT E R :

Jimmy Tomlin jtomlin@hpenews.com 336-888-3579

EDIT O R :

Megan Ward mward@hpenews.com 336-888-3543

A DV ER T IS ING DIREC T O R:

John McClure jmcclure@hpenews.com 336-888-3545

DE S IG N ER :

Leslie Long design@dottedelle.com 336-268-1300

This publication is produced and distributed by: The High Point Enterprise 213 Woodbine St. High Point, NC 27260 www.hpenews.com 336-888-3500

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HAVE AN IDEA FOR A HIGH POINT CONFIDENTIAL STORY? CONTACT JIMMY TOMLIN AT 336-888-3579 OR JTOMLIN@ HPENEWS.COM

The last time I had blood drawn, the doctor couldn’t believe the results. Scientific analysis revealed red and white blood cells, platelets, plasma and — here’s the kicker — newspaper ink.

I’m pretty sure it’s been there my whole life. And they say once you get the ink in your blood, it’s hard to get rid of it. Oh sure, some highly skilled phlebotomist could probably draw it out of my veins, but I suspect it would come right back. It’s one of those overlooked miracles of the human body, like when a broken bone fuses itself back together.

So whenever I look at the High Point Confidential logo — the vintage fedora with the press card tucked into the band, the pencil behind the ear, the old Remington typewriter — I fancy myself as an old-school newspaperman, one of those rumpled, ink-stained wretches from yesteryear, in the era before tape recorders and computers and digital cameras and Twitter and Anderson Cooper came along.

As a journalist, there’s something seductive about that era, and that photo — silly as it may be —takes me there.

That’s the idea behind High Point Confidential — to take you there, too. To transport High Point Enterprise readers to another place in time. To dig up the stories that made headlines in and around High Point some 60 or 70 or even a hundred-plus years ago, then dust them off and breathe new life into them.

So in March 2017, I created and began writing High Point Confidential, a history column that doesn’t read like a history column. We’re not talking about rehashed city council meetings or mayoral elections or new furniture showrooms. These are intriguing tales of crime and suspense, of unusual characters, of bizarre happenings, all taken and adapted straight from the yellowed, ink-stained pages of High Point’s history.

Most of the stories have a sensational air to them: An axe-wielding sleepwalker. A Russian spy. A convicted murderer’s unexpected pardon. An infamous massage parlor. An ambitious doctor and his escaped monkey.

Honestly, who wouldn’t want to read those stories?

So come along as we journey back in time and discover that, no matter the era, truth can be so much stranger — and so much more entertaining — than fiction. And if you’re not careful, you might just get a little ink in your blood along the way.

Enjoy,

Jimmy Tomlin

High Point Confidential

• Featured In This Issue ·

table of contents T O U CHING A NERVE

HOL Y T ERRO RS

The Horneytown Massage Parlor rubbed people the wrong way

Rowdy religious sect fanned High Point’s flames

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10

04 SL A IN B Y A S L EE P W A LK E R

26 FR I E ND L Y FI RE ?

A notorious sleepwalker had a really bad night

Fallen police officer claimed his own chief shot him

08 TH E N O T -S O -SL Y S P Y Two High Pointers foiled an infiltrator’s sabotage effort

14 W HILE Y O U WERE S LE E P I NG Barber turned razors on his own family

16 THE CA S E O F T HE ‘BLA C K H AN D’ L ET T ERS

Mysterious men terrorized High Point woman in 1919

A RINGSID E SEA T

AL O N G C AM E A S PI D E R . . .

When Jack Dempsey came to town, love was in the air

Stuntman’s perilous climb thrilled High Pointers in 1918

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28 M O NK EY ON TH E L OOSE Escape foiled High Point doctor’s transplant plans

T I R E

30 T H E P I N - U P QU E E N

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18 THE T AL E O F T HE B I G C H A I R S Did Thomasville actually have three of them?

22 A BI G -L EA G U E F IR E Finch Field grandstand went up in flames

24 WHAT HE D ID F O R LO V E

A 1922 bank robber needed money for his ailing wife

34 T H E A N SWE RE D P RA YE R

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Church’s plea in 1907 resulted in divine irony

36 NA M E Y OU R P OI SON Did bad whiskey kill Frank Bowman?

38 W H E E L I N TH E SK Y Welcome to High Point, “The Ferris Wheel Capital of the World.”

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CON F I D E N TI A L

• Chapter One ·

slain by a sleepwalker During his lifetime, O.W. Click may have been — no, he had to have been — Davidson County’s best-known somnambulist.

would regret it for the rest of his days.

arose, still fully asleep but functioning as if he were wide awake. In his somnambulistic mind, **** trouble was brewing — the intruders had As O.W. Click’s best friend, Uriah Phelps surely broken into the store, and it was up to him to For the uninitiated, a somnambulist is not knew of his buddy’s sleepwalking exploits, but fend them off. some obscure profession of the late 19th sometimes friendship is thicker than foresight. century, but rather an obscure synonym for a Click grabbed the axe and swung blow after And so it was that Phelps, the proprietor sleepwalker — and the young Mr. Click was a blow, believing he was killing the trespassers, of a small business in Tyro, called upon his most active somnambulist. Throughout the Tyro sleepwalking sidekick to help him defend the or at least injuring them enough to chase them community where Click lived, everybody knew establishment from intruders on that fateful from the building. In fact, though, the axe blows of his penchant for rising in the middle of the were striking the only other man in the room Sunday night so long ago. night, while still slumbering, and doing things — a sleeping Uriah Phelps. One well-placed It seems Phelps had ejected some rowdy he would have no recollection of the next swing severed the victim’s head and, according patrons from his business the night before, morning. to one report, sent it rolling several feet and they had vowed to get even. Fearing they across the floor.

You think you’ve had it rough when you toss would return on Sunday night — after hours and turn all night? On more than one occasion, — to exact their revenge, he enlisted Click to Newspaper accounts vary as to when Click poor O.W. Click actually sleepwalked to his awoke from his bloody rampage. One article help him protect his business. second-story window and jumped or fell to says the violence of his actions roused him The plan was for the two 20-something the ground, crashing right through the glass from his dream almost immediately, even as he men to spend the night in the establishment, and cutting himself in the process. stood over his friend’s lifeless body, the bloodtaking turns sleeping as they watched for the spattered axe still in his hands. Discovering Sometimes he got out of bed and furiously potential troublemakers. Reportedly armed what he had done, Click reportedly screamed choked family members — mysteriously with three loaded pistols, an axe and a bottle in horror, “I have killed my best friend!” explaining that the bears in Texas were chasing of whiskey for courage, they waited. him — then ran down to a nearby river before Other accounts suggest he merely went And waited. waking up. back to sleep, blissfully unaware of what had transpired until morning. Even then, when he And waited.

One night, as he slept in a room occupied by summoned neighbors to the grisly scene — the corpse of his just-deceased uncle, Click At some point, as the long night wore on with alerting them that someone had broken in and suddenly arose and, with a look of terror no sign of intruders, it is believed both men murdered Phelps — they had to convince him on his face, tried to grab his uncle’s body, fell asleep. Before long, though, O.W. Click he had done the deed himself. Finally, after before his sister and another man in the room examining the blood-stained weapon and the restrained him and managed to wake him. blood on his own clothes, and seeing no signs On other occasions, Click sleepwalked on of anyone having disturbed the locks and bars rooftops and paddled canoes in the river, on the establishment’s doors and windows, nearly drowning in one such incident.

Click acknowledged the indisputable evidence: Not only had his best friend been murdered, Eventually, he took to tying himself to the bed, but he was the unwitting culprit. so that if he got up during the night, the rope would wake him and prevent him from, say, How could he ever sleep again? climbing on the roof or jogging down to the **** river.

In late 19th-century America, the phrase “the Talk about a strange bedfellow. sleepwalking defense” had not yet entered the And yet, as curious as all of these activities lexicon, but the concept had been around a may seem, they pale in comparison to what few decades.

O.W. Click did on the night of Aug. 1, 1880, The first known case of a successful when a sleepwalking episode quickly escalated sleepwalking defense had occurred in Boston into a nightmare. On that particular night, the in 1846, when Albert Tirrell was found not young man didn’t tie himself down, and he

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CON F I D E N TI A L

guilty of killing a young prostitute named Maria Bickford, with whom he’d had a torrid affair before brutally slitting her throat one night. In that sensational, highly publicized murder trial, the jury decided — after only two hours of deliberation — that because Tirrell was a chronic sleepwalker, he could’ve killed his lover in the midst of a somnambulistic episode, and therefore should not be held accountable for his actions.

Thirty-four years later, along came O.W. Click, the Davidson County man who reluctantly admitted he had butchered his best friend with an axe. He, too, pleaded his lack of culpability in Phelps’ death, arguing that — as in all of his other sleepwalking exploits — he had no knowledge of what he was doing.

According to a newspaper account, more than a hundred people attended the coroner’s inquest and preliminary trial, most of them sympathetic to Click’s situation. One witness, a Mr. Grub, stated Click’s “lamentations were heartrending” after learning what he’d done. Other neighbors testified Click had “exhibited in the most violent manner his regret” over the killing. Clearly, the scale of public opinion tilted in Click’s favor, but would that be enough?

Attorneys representing the young man shared his long history of sleepwalking, recounting story after story about acts he’d committed under the influence of slumber — walking on rooftops, crashing through windows, choking family members, all of it.

To further investigate this intriguing tale, High Point Confidential contacted a present-day expert on the sleepwalking defense, Matthew Wolf-Meyer, a faculty member at New York’s Binghamton University who has researched and written about the strange phenomenon.

After reading accounts of Click’s experience, he agreed the young man had a legitimate case for using the sleepwalking defense.

needed for the sleepwalking defense,” Wolf-Meyer said. “There’s a demonstrated history of sleepwalking.

On top of that, you need to have conditions of stress. This guy was in an exceptional situation — he was stressed out because he was worried about guys breaking into the business. That’s right in line with other documented cases of killing someone while sleepwalking.”

Wolf-Meyer explained that when an individual is sleepwalking, some parts of his brain are awake and other parts are asleep, so it’s possible for him to look as if he knows exactly what he’s doing, but he’s actually unconscious and therefore not accountable for his actions.

“This guy was probably having a very vivid dream while he’s doing what he’s doing,” he said. “He’s technically mostly asleep, but for whatever reason he has motor control, and that leads him to attack his friend.”

Did the attack suggest Click may have harbored some kind of underlying ill will for Phelps? Wolf-Meyer says no.

“The sleepwalker is dreaming, and the content of that dream is totally different from whatever he is doing in the real world,” he said. “So in the dream, this guy might be seeing people breaking into the store, and he maps that onto the environment, including his unfortunate friend. Although we want there to be some meaning in his acts, they’re entirely based on his dream content.”

More than 135 years ago, the 19th-century legal system’s assessment of the killing lined up with Wolf-Meyer’s.

Fortunately for Click, he was able to utilize the sleepwalking defense successfully and was acquitted.

he took to tying himself to the bed... on that particular night, the young man didn˙t tie himself down, and he would regret it for the rest of his days.

Unfortunately, though, he knew the agony he surely would suffer for the rest of his life would be punishment enough.

“This case abides by the criteria

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CON F I D E N TI A L

• Chapter Two ·

Touching -a nerve-

Notorious massage parlor made headlines, then quietly disappeared.

To say the Horneytown Massage Parlor rubbed people the wrong way may be a cheeky pun, but it’s also the truth.

Today, the good folks in Horneytown don’t seem to remember much about the small Forsyth County community’s most notorious business establishment — or if they do, they’re not talking.

“I never went there, and I wouldn’t admit it if I did,” jokes Ralph Gibson, a longtime Horneytown resident who cuts hair at Drew’s Barber Shop, in the same building once occupied by the old massage parlor. “I just remember the people in the community were in an uproar about it.”

Indeed, they were. Gibson and others chuckle about it today, but more than 40 years ago, in a small, rather nondescript building — well, except for the hot-pink door and the flashing neon “MASSAGE” sign out front — the Horneytown Massage Parlor made waves locally and made headlines nationally.

And nobody in Horneytown seemed too happy about it — except the owner, of course, and the steady stream of men who frequented his “all-girlie” massage parlor.

“The cars were there all the time,” remembers Debra Gray, who works at Scott’s Self Storage, just up the road from where the massage parlor was located.

“We used to ride by there on our motorcycles, and I remember seeing the sign and asking my boyfriend, ‘What kind of place is that?’ It just looked kind of — what’s the word? — sleazy. He said, ‘It’s probably one of those massage parlors,’ and I said, ‘You stay away from there.’ I think they were doing a lot more in there than what the sign said they were doing.”

Ah, there’s the rub — it’s what went on behind closed doors that bothered the community and ultimately led to the massage parlor’s national notoriety.

It didn’t help that this new den of sin was doing business in a place called Horneytown — which was no doubt far too titillating for even a no-nonsense news organization to ignore — but compounding the tale was the fact the Horneytown Massage Parlor hung out its gaudy shingle just a stone’s throw away from one of the community’s moral pillars, Trulite Baptist Church.

And you can bet the God-fearing parishioners at Trulite Baptist probably wanted to throw some stones at their new, naughty neighbor.

Fact is, they couldn’t even pull into the church parking lot without having to drive right by the massage parlor.

“Old Satan himself would not put an all-girlie massage parlor in front of a Baptist church or any other church, but of course his disci-

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CON F I D E N TI A L

ples would, and did,” Horneytown resident Dempsey McDaniel — then known as the unofficial mayor of Horneytown — said at the time.

The late McDaniel, a Republican state legislator and former guidance counselor at Ferndale Junior High School in High Point, had a reputation for being about as straight-laced as they come. So when “one of those unholy massage parlors,” as he called it, began doing business in his neck of the woods, he sounded the alarm on the floor of the N.C. Legislature — yet another reason the massage parlor made national headlines.

The year was 1974. Only a couple of months earlier, another massage parlor — I-85 Massage in Davidson County — had come under fire when representatives of one of its neighbors, Davidson County Community College, tried to get the business restricted or even evicted because it was “morally and ethically” unacceptable. As a result, McDaniel may have

already been sensitive to the massage-parlor controversy when one opened in his own backyard.

At any rate, McDaniel aired his grievances before his fellow legislators in the N.C. House of Representatives, where he introduced a bill aimed at regulating massage parlors. His speech, delivered on Jan. 24, 1974, instantly became one of the most unintentionally memorable — if not the most memorable — addresses in the history of the state Legislature.

“I’m terribly embarrassed to speak to this august body about the terrible things that have come to Horneytown,” McDaniel said of the massage parlor.

“Mr. Speaker, my mother — God bless her — told me that a female was always a lady, even behind closed doors. If what I’m told is true about what goes on behind those closed doors, I’m compelled to reach a conclusion that them females ain’t no ladies, and more goes on behind those doors than just hanky-panky.”

That woke up the room, as you can imagine, but McDaniel wasn’t finished. The lawmaker went on to explain that the young women working at the massage parlor disrobed their customers and stretched them out on a table.

“They tickle your toes and your feet, they knead your thighs, and — oh Lord, Mr. Speaker — they even tickle your fancy and other extremities,” McDaniel said. “These people even put up a flashing light inviting total strangers to that building. That flashing light said, ‘All-girlie massage, open 24 hours,’ and that means all night.”

Afterward, several legislators complained McDaniel’s risque speech had violated House decorum. House Speaker James Ramsey even said he had considered interrupting McDaniel mid-speech and ruling him out of order, but decided not to because that might draw even more unwanted attention.

The newswires picked up the story, and newspapers across the country ran with it: “Massage Parlor Comes To Horneytown.” “Outrage In Horneytown.” “All Women Not Ladies At Horneytown Massage Parlor.”

And in The High Point Enterprise: “The Devil Made Them Do It.” Playboy magazine made mention of the notorious massage parlor in one of its issues, and some say Walter Cronkite did the same on the “CBS Evening News.” Can you imagine the great Cronkite trying to keep a straight face while referencing the Horneytown Massage Parlor?

Among other stipulations, McDaniel’s proposed legislation — House Bill 1442 — would’ve required massage parlors to provide their local sheriff ’s office with a list of all customers’ names and addresses.

Also, massage-parlor hours would be restricted to between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., and employees would be prohibited from sexual contact of any nature with customers.

Unfortunately for McDaniel, the bill died in committee in early April.

Less than a month later, though, the Horneytown Massage Parlor was shut down anyway, when a new landlord forced the owner to vacate the property.

Some 43 years later, the building still stands on the corner of N. Main Street and Trulite Church Road, just across the county line from High Point proper, and still within sight of Trulite Baptist. Since 1974, it’s been home to numerous respectable businesses — including a furniture shop, a clothing store, a game room and, most recently, Drew’s Barber Shop — but it still hasn’t outlived its reputation from the ’70s.

“I’m told it was a really wild place back then,” Drew Harris, owner of the barber shop, says as he beckons a young man to his chair for a haircut.

“I have one customer who told me he used to go there sometimes.”

Across the room, fellow barber Ralph Gibson chuckles.

“If these walls could talk,” he says.

Alas, they cannot. What happened at the Horneytown Massage Parlor stays at the Horneytown Massage Parlor. It’s a reputable barber shop now, where you can’t even get so much as a scalp massage, but you can still get a good haircut.

And, confidentially, a pretty good story, too.

H OM E TOWN S 20 1 8

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CON F I D E N TI A L

• Chapter Three ·

the not-so-sly spy High Pointers foiled infiltrator’s sabotage efforts All he needed was a moonless night and a couple of willing accomplices, and a High Point infiltrator’s efforts to sabotage the U.S. war effort in 1918 might’ve been successful.

would be if he could destroy a facility so vital to the U.S. war effort.

After scoping out the Giant Furniture plant under the cover of darkness, Trzeciakiewicz realized the strike would have to take place on a moonless night. Windows in the building were left open at night — presumably so the guard on duty could watch for approaching intruders — so whoever staged the attack would need as much darkness as possible. The finishing room or the boiler room, in particular, would be the best places to strike, he decided.

Unfortunately for this 29-year-old Russian renegade — or was he actually a German spy? — he couldn’t find any traitors in High Point who would help him with his diabolical plans. What he found instead was a pair of High Point men who loved their country enough to rat him out to the authorities when they learned what he was up to.

Then, after so meticulously and stealthily laying the groundwork for his plot, Trzeciakiewicz miscalculated.

It happened in April 1918. The United States had entered World War I a year earlier, and manufacturers across the country were fulfilling government contracts to produce war supplies. In High Point, workers at the thriving Giant Furniture Co. used the factory’s woodworking machinery to

On April 28, a Sunday, he invited two of his Continental Furniture co-workers, L.B. Smith and O.C. Haddon, to meet him in the woods, where he confided in them and offered them $100 apiece if they would torch the Giant Furniture Co. according to his plans. For unknown reasons, he had thought the two High Point men were members of the so-called “brotherhood” of individuals who aimed to sabotage U.S. war efforts.

he discussed in great detail the fireballs he dreamed of destroying the Giant factory with. ...he would go from city to city destroying property, just as he planned to do in High Point

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Enter the aforementioned infiltrator, Isidore Trzeciakiewicz, a Caucasian stranger of medium build, brown hair and gray eyes who arrived in High Point in early April. Although he came here under the guise of looking for work, he was actually looking for trouble. Claiming to be a Pole from Russia, Trzeciakiewicz said he had been in this country since 1906 and had become a naturalized citizen in 1916 — and he had the paperwork to back it up. He rented a room on Mangum Avenue and landed a job at the Continental Furniture Co. And that’s where his dastardly scheme began to unravel.

Although Trzeciakiewicz — or, as The High Point Enterprise referred to him in one story, “the man with the unpronounceable name” — had taken a job at Continental, he really had his eye on the Giant Furniture Co. and its military propeller-blade operation. A few strategically ignited fireballs should do the job, he thought, and what a coup that

H OM E TOWN S 20 1 8

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CON F I D E N TI A L

He was wrong.

Smith and Haddon played it cool, though, never actually agreeing to go along with the infiltrator’s plan, but listening intently to all he had to say. One of the men even slipped behind a log and jotted down the entire conversation, damning statements and all, under the ruse of writing a letter. The very next day, that “letter” would be introduced as evidence in a court of law.

Trzeciakiewicz took his threats a step further, saying he would like to see President Woodrow Wilson get shot, and he would do the job himself if he got the chance.

He also boasted that he had been arrested in Connersville, Indiana for making disloyal remarks, but he had “bluffed the authorities” and gotten acquitted.

There would be no bluffing the authorities this time, though. Smith and Haddon went According to the two witnesses, Trzeciakiewicz straight to law enforcement with their intel, discussed in great detail the fireballs he and Trzeciakiewicz was arrested that very dreamed of destroying the Giant factory with. night by federal agents. He was charged under He also told them the money he promised the government’s new sabotage statute for them for doing the job would be easy to come conspiring to destroy a factory engaged in by, because there were plenty of pro-German making war materials. operatives in the area, especially in WinstonAgents found in his possession a notebook Salem. listing how many factories there were in High Trzeciakiewicz had registered for the draft as required by law, but he told Smith and Haddon that if he were drafted, he would try to get exempted — and if exempted, he would go from city to city destroying property, just as he planned to do in High Point. Next on his list was the naval air station at Pensacola, Florida.

If he did get drafted, Trzeciakiewicz continued, he said he would do as much damage as he could within the ranks, threatening to blow up American ammunition depots and shoot his own officers if he got the opportunity.

“To hell with the war,” local newspapers quoted him as telling the two High Point men.

“Why should I fight? It is a capitalists’ war.”

Point and other towns, including Thomasville.

They believed factories in those towns may have been potential targets, too.

As a last resort, Trzeciakiewicz tried to turn the tables on the two informants, claiming that they were the ones plotting to destroy the Giant Furniture factory, and that he was going to rat them out but they beat him to the punch. The authorities weren’t buying it, though, and put him in the county jail under a $5,000 bond.

The trial for the would-be saboteur would not take place until early June, but one High Point newspaper — a weekly publication called The Review — wasted no time in blasting Trzeciakiewicz and his ilk.

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CON F I D E N TI A L

“(They) have the everlasting condemnation of all loyalists,” the paper wrote, going so far as to suggest Trzeciakiewicz was a German spy. “They should be made to kiss the flag and shell out or get what is due such contemptible insects.”

Trzeciakiewicz may not have been made to kiss the flag, but after his conviction on June 5, 1918, he was made to kiss his freedom goodbye for the next three years, serving a sentence at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. By the time he got out, the war had long since ended, and his plans for sabotage had been denied.

To this day, Trzeciakiewicz remains but a small, hard-to-pronounce footnote in the annals of local history, thanks to the quick thinking and steadfast loyalty of two High Point patriots who weren’t afraid to step up and do the right thing.

• Chapter Four ·

holy terrors Rowdy religious sect fanned High Point’s flames

Anyone who complains that nothing ever happens downtown obviously wasn’t here in 1905.

That’s the year a band of religious zealots known as the “Burning Bushers” arrived in High Point and turned Main Street into their own personal revival tent. Nightly street-corner services typically began quietly with prayer, Scripture and hymns, but quickly escalated to chaotic shouting, dancing, jumping and — Holy moley! — the incessant banging of such noisy instruments of praise as boards, pans, stovepipes and tin buckets filled with rocks.

And the services often lasted well past midnight, sometimes as late as 3 o’clock in the morning.

While the rowdy Burning Bushers viewed their unorthodox behavior as “making a joyful noise,” the rest of the city was, shall we say, somewhat less than joyful about the group’s clamorous style of worship.

to be very disruptive. They were constantly being arrested for disturbing the peace and just generally irritating people.”

The Burning Bushers were predestined to meet that same fate in High Point, where they arrived with a bang — actually, lots of banging — in the spring of 1905. Their services on Main Street began with only two young men and two young women, but they were plenty loud and quickly drew a crowd of onlookers, some of whom mocked them.

“They began quietly,” the Enterprise reported, “but in a few minutes the men and women were screaming, beyond anything natural, even in religious enthusiasts.”

The ranks of the small sect began to grow — to a dozen or more worshipers — and as they grew, so too did the ranks of curious spectators, who turned out nightly to witness the spectacle. The “Simply disgraceful,” wrote The Weekly High Point Enterprise, which had been critical of the Burning Bushers, eventually called out the spectators, too, Enterprise. for feeding the frenzy with their mere presence.

“An Indian war dance is as quiet as a deaf and dumb prayer meeting in comparison with some of “They enjoy seeing religious fools wallow on the ground, jump in the air, shout and scream like wild their ‘services,’ ” wrote The Greensboro Patriot, hyenas, and they go away and live on this sort of another weekly newspaper of that era. “(The amusement for a long time,” the paper wrote. “... services) are a travesty on the name of religion.”

We call upon all thinking people to shun such Other publications across North Carolina places as pernicious and loathsome.” referred to the small sect that had invaded High Point as a “disturbing gang,” “fanatics,” “boisterous What really seemed to rankle the community, though, was when preachers” and “prophets of hell.” the Burning Bushers refused The Burning Bushers — so named because to tone down their worship the group’s newsletter was titled “The Burning services, even temporarily, in Bush” — grew out of the Metropolitan Church consideration of an extremely Association, a religious community founded in ill, elderly woman who lived just Chicago in the 1890s. Individual members were across the street from where loosely referred to as “Holy Jumpers,” because the rowdy services were taking their worship included lively jumping. place. Not only did they reject the pleas of the woman’s pastor “They saw jumping as a manifestation of the and physician, they condemned her to Holy Spirit,” not unlike speaking in tongues, says eternal damnation.

Bill Kostlevy, an Illinois historian who wrote a book about the Holy Jumpers. “But they tended

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“One of the gang prayed that the sick lady, one of High Point’s esteemed citizens, be held over the bottomless pit and the devils shaken out of her,” the Winston-Salem Journal wrote. “One of the leading men also prayed that one of High Point’s most beloved and Christian ministers be sent to hell and give him the key to keep him there; that he was a long-frocked devil and was going to hell, leading all his church members with him; that all of the ministers of the town were on their way to hell.”

Kostlevy chuckles at that passage.

“They had a knack for using outrageous rhetoric,” he says.

Outrageous rhetoric, and increasingly outrageous worship services. Newspaper accounts indicate the Burning Bushers beat on pans, boards, buckets and stovepipes, hollered and shrieked, danced and jumped, strummed a banjo, threw chairs down stairs, and even tossed wooden benches. The racket reportedly could be heard up to threequarters of a mile away, and residents who lived close to where the services were held could not sleep through the noise.

One night, a man — presumably a serpenthandling worshiper — showed up with a live snake.

Despite accusations to the contrary, Kostlevy believes the Burning Bushers meant well.

“My sense is that even though they engaged in really weird behavior, they were genuinely sincere,” he says. “They were often accused of being fakers or hypocrites, but there’s no evidence that they were trying to profit from this. I do think they loved the attention, though.”

By that June, city officials had run out of patience for the Burning Bushers and arrested eight of them for disturbing the peace. Magistrates agreed not to punish the defendants, provided they knock off the noise at least until the elderly woman

recovered from her illness.

That apparently worked, but not for long. By September, the group’s two main leaders — the Rev. J.N. Ragsdale and his wife — had been arrested again on the same charges, with more than a dozen citizens having sworn out a complaint against them for being, according to one newspaper account, “an unmitigated nuisance.”

During the trial that December, numerous witnesses testified to just how bothersome the Burning Bushers had become — the shouting, the pan-banging, the condemnations, all of it.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Ragsdale testified that the group’s worship services had been greatly exaggerated, asserting their joyous outbursts were no worse than the one heard when the Prodigal Son returned

home in that wellknown parable.

According to the Enterprise, she said she and her fellow worshipers “spent their lives doing acts of charity and love to the poor and needy and had irreproachable lives.”

Religious freedom won the day — to most of High Point’s chagrin, no doubt — with the judge delivering an eloquent oration about “the right of everyone to worship according to the dictates of one’s own conscience.”

doubt as to who was inside. It read: “To hell, 20 miles. You liars, swearers, drinkers, tobacco users and adulterers are on the right road. All liars shall have a part in the lake of fire and brimstone.”

Fortunately, the group gradually began to tone down its rhetoric and its noise, to the point that it no longer made headlines.

Which, as you can imagine, was a longawaited answered prayer in High Point.

Even if that worship involves a loud, panbanging flock of holy terrors like the Burning Bushers.

A couple of years later, the local group began a publication called “The Battle Axe,” in which they espoused much of the same rhetoric they’d been shouting on Main Street. A sign outside the publication’s headquarters left little

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the circus train rolled into High Point for a two-day engagement in mid-September, Dempsey arrived in style, traveling in his own private boxcar.

• Chapter Five ·

a ringside seat When Jack Dempsey came to town, love was in the air

Jack Dempsey, the once-feared “Manassa Mauler,” who reigned as boxing’s world heavyweight champion from 1919 to 1926, has a rather unusual epitaph etched on his grave marker in Southampton, New York.

The words, juxtaposed beneath a pair of boxing gloves, read: “A Gentle Man And A Gentleman.”

With a nickname like “The Manassa Mauler,” Dempsey clearly wasn’t much of a gentle man in the ring, where the great sportswriter Red Smith once described him as “187 pounds of unbridled violence.”

When Dempsey won the title in 1919, he knocked down the much-larger defending champion, Jess Willard, seven times and broke the man’s cheekbone in 13 places.

And that was just in the first round.

Years later, though, the former champ would display his tender side — as both a gentleman and a gentle man — during a visit to High Point that would be reported by newspapers across the country.

So why was Dempsey in High Point — he had no known ties here — and what happened that made national headlines?

The year was 1941, some 15 years after Dempsey had surrendered his boxing title to Gene Tunney, but the ex-champ’s celebrity folk-hero status across the country remained intact. Late that year, to capitalize on his fame, Dempsey joined the traveling Cole Bros. Circus as a featured attraction.

When the circus train rolled into High Point for a two-day engagement in mid-September, Dempsey arrived in style, traveling in his own private boxcar. The luxurious car, which originally had been built for steel magnate Charles M. Schwab at a cost of about $100,000, included a personal cook and butler at Dempsey’s beck and call. He also had his own dressing room tent when the big

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top went up in each town — reportedly the only circus performer afforded that privilege.

In High Point, as in other cities, Dempsey was a major draw for the circus. When the spectacular circus parade commenced, the grand marshal leading all of those horses and elephants and acrobats and clowns was none other than the great Dempsey, riding a dapple gray Kentucky stallion.

During circus performances — in addition to leading the parade — the 46-year-old Dempsey took the microphone and presented a brief program to inspire children, who adored him. He also refereed local boxing and wrestling matches, and sometimes participated in boxing exhibitions.

Basically, his job was simply to show up and be Jack Dempsey — and that was usually enough to pack the big top.

Dempsey had big plans for High Point, though, and they had nothing to do with the circus.

For more than a year, Dempsey had been separated from his second wife, the beautiful actress and former vaudeville star Hannah Williams, whom he had married in 1933. In the weeks leading up

to Dempsey’s appearance in High Point, though, the couple had reconciled their differences via telephone and were eager to see one another again.

That’s what happened in High Point — a tender reunion between the rugged ex-boxer and his lovely estranged wife, as well as their two daughters, 7-year-old Joan and 5-year-old Barbara.

Unfortunately for the Dempseys, someone tipped off the paparazzi of the day, so a gaggle of breathless reporters and photographers — including representatives of The High Point Enterprise — was on hand to witness the late-night reunion.

Mrs. Dempsey and the girls arrived by train from New York shortly after 10:30 p.m., and Dempsey joined them at the depot about 10 minutes later, after finishing up the circus’ evening performance.

Young Joan spotted him first. “Daddy! Daddy!� she shouted. “Come here and give me a hug!�

Dempsey willingly obliged, then gave the younger Barbara a bear

hug, too. As he did, a broad smile covered his face as his wife came into view for the first time. “Hello, sweetheart,� he said softly. “Hello, darling,� came her demure reply.

The couple embraced, held hands, then graciously posed for a few photos with their daughters and answered a few questions about their reconciliation — “This is permanent,� they confidently told reporters — before making their way down Broad Street toward Dempsey’s private boxcar.

Then came another treat for the girls. Daddy had bought them each a pony — Ginger and Blackjack — and the girls were eager to take a test-ride. While their parents spent some time talking and catching up with one another, the girls squealed excitedly as circus attendants helped them climb on their respective ponies.

A few more photos were snapped, until the family — together once again — retreated into Dempsey’s waiting boxcar. “I’m glad we’re here,� an Enterprise reporter overheard 5-year-old

Barbara say as the Dempseys disappeared into the boxcar. “I am glad we’re here.�

Within a matter of minutes, the circus train pulled away, leaving High Point behind and heading for Charlotte, where new audiences were waiting to greet the former champion. “This is permanent,� the Dempseys had vowed to reporters, but was it really?

Alas, it was not. Within two years, the couple would divorce, and each of them would eventually remarry. The divorce was a sad footnote for the Dempseys, and especially for their two young daughters, who surely must’ve had high hopes after their brief, wondrous night in High Point.

Unfortunately for Joan and Barbara, there was another punch coming.

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Editor’s note: Some readers may find descriptions of violent acts in this article disturbing.

By all accounts, Nick Moore was one of High Point’s finest, most upstanding citizens.

Until, that is, one early morning nearly a century ago, when Moore — a well-known barber in the city’s black community — inexplicably decided to use his razors for something far more nefarious than shaving his customers’ whiskers. Moore’s vile actions jeopardized the lives of four family members, shocked the community and landed the barber in jail.

And all the while, many prominent townspeople — including even the chief of police — continued to defend the man’s good character.

It happened on Aug. 15, 1921, around 3:30 a.m., at Moore’s home in south High Point. In the still of the night, as his wife and children slept, Moore methodically walked from room to room with a razor, barbarically cutting his children’s throats — including the throat of an infant son. He then walked to the bed of his wife, Elizabeth, and slashed her throat with a second razor, before grabbing a revolver from the mantel and firing two shots into her abdomen.

The bloody assault didn’t end until Moore went after an older son. The youth initially protected himself with a brick, then scuffled with his father

before finally managing to wrestle the gun and razor out of Moore’s hands.

“The most serious cutting and shooting scrape ever recorded in the blotter at the police station,” The High Point Enterprise reported in that day’s afternoon paper.

Physicians attended to the injured victims — stating they expected the mother and baby to die — while Moore was carted off to jail. Meanwhile, High Point buzzed over the news of the vicious attacks.

“Throughout the morning and early afternoon, scores of men and women visited the home … to view the blood-stained building,” The Enterprise reported.

But here’s the thing: For all of the forensic aftermath — the dying victims, the bloody razors and blood-spattered walls, the smoking gun, the

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eyewitness accounts — Nick Moore claimed to have no memory of what he so obviously had done. From his jailhouse cell, he proclaimed he must’ve become crazed in his sleep, leading to his inexplicable violent actions.

Was that true?

That’s a question only God and Nick Moore could answer for sure, but newspapers quoted doctors as saying they believed the barber had gone insane — temporarily, at least — suggesting from the outset what Moore’s legal strategy might be. Reports also indicated he’d been under a lot of stress — he’d been working long hours at his business, the Smith and Moore Barber Shop on S. Main Street — and perhaps that had led to the assault.

How else to explain such a violent outburst from a man so highly regarded throughout the city?

After all, the Enterprise described him as a man “with a quiet disposition” who, in the nearly 20 years he’d been living in High Point, hadn’t had any known run-ins with the law. Nonetheless, police charged Moore with assault with the intent to kill.

Defense attorneys argued they had introduced sufficient evidence to show that Moore was a man of good character, and that such a man would not be capable of knowingly and willfully committing the acts Moore had committed. Therefore, they said, he must’ve been asleep.

Within a couple of weeks, as all four of Moore’s family members slowly healed — the wife and baby survived after all — Moore was released under a $3,000 bond. His bond was signed by “many of High Point’s foremost citizens,” the Enterprise reported — a testament to their faith in the man, no matter his color.

Bower countered that if the jury acquitted Moore on that basis, it would set a precedent in Guilford County that any man could kill another man at night and simply contend that he was asleep, and therefore should not be held accountable.

By early October, at Moore’s preliminary court hearing, his legal strategy had become more definitive. Newspapers indicated that Moore, despite having no known history of sleepwalking, likely would rely on the “sleepwalking defense” — the notion that he’d been asleep when he committed the assaults and therefore should not be held accountable for his actions. The trial was scheduled for the following January.

On Jan. 9, 1922, spectators packed a Greensboro courtroom to witness Moore’s trial. Many of those spectators were prominent High Point businessmen who actually took the stand and testified to Moore’s good character, bolstering the argument that the barber hadn’t known what he was doing when he slashed his family members’ throats. Even Police Chief L.W. Blackwelder testified on Moore’s behalf.

Ultimately, the jury compromised. After just over an hour of deliberations, jurors found Moore guilty but recommended the judge show mercy during Moore’s sentencing — an indication that they believed the defendant’s sleepwalking story, but still felt he should be punished for his crimes.

Judge G.S. Ferguson apparently believed Moore’s story, too. The judge could’ve sentenced the High Point man to 10 years in prison for the assaults, but instead gave him only six months, explaining that the jury had recommended mercy, and he was following the jury’s wishes.

Moore, a well-known barber in the city˙s black community, inexplicably decided to use his razors for something far more nefarious than shaving his customers´ whiskers.

Newspaper accounts do not indicate what became of Moore and his family after the trial — the story ends with his sentencing. You can rest assured, though, that the kinfolk had plenty to talk about at the next family reunion.

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“You’ll swear that you don’t know anything about cutting your wife and those little children?” asked solicitor John Bower.

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• Chapter Seven ·

the case of the `black hand´ letters Mysterious men terrorized High Point woman in 1919 The first letter arrived on April 1, and poor Lucy Pratt thought it was an April Fools’ Day prank.

It’s against that backdrop that the harrowing tale of Lucy Pratt must be told. Although she most likely was not targeted by the actual Society of the Black Hand — that organization was more prevalent in states north of here — the threatening letters she received so resembled the society’s typical modus operandi that area newspapers referred to them as “Black Hand” letters.

Unfortunately for the young High Point woman, she couldn’t have been more wrong — in fact, she was very nearly dead wrong. As the cryptic letters kept coming — and the anonymous phone calls and the thinly veiled threats and the mysterious men lurking outside her house — what she thought was a harmless The initial letter of April 1 directed Lucy to go to a location in the eastern part of the city, where prank quickly evolved into what surely must’ve been she would find a pile of stones to be removed. the most terrifying six weeks of her life.

“Failure to follow out the instructions to the The year was 1919. Lucy, her husband Charles and most minute detail would mean death,” The High their two small children had lived a relatively quiet life Point Enterprise reported the letter as saying. The in their modest home on English Street, but the arrival Pratts thought the letter was a prank, but Lucy’s of spring — and a wave of chilling circumstances — husband went to the site anyway — just to see was about to change all that. what would happen — and, sure enough, he found To understand what happened a pile of stones. to Lucy Pratt, you first Lucy received another letter the next day, “stating must be made aware that her husband wouldn’t do, that she must obey of the ultra-secretive instructions if she wished to live,” the Enterprise Society of the Black stated.

Hand, a shadowy Between April 1 and April 19, the letters kept organization of coming, each one threatening harm or even death Italian origin if Lucy didn’t comply with the instructions. One that made a letter directed her to go to the Mechanicsville name for itself community, which she did, but she took her in the early 20th husband with her, prompting an angry letter century. Before that warned against bringing him again. Another the Mafia grabbed mailing instructed her to leave a photo of herself the American crime spotlight in the 1920s, beneath a bridge just outside the city; she did that, too, with law enforcement personnel staking it was the mysterious Black Hand that terrorized out the bridge to watch for the perpetrators, but to no avail. citizens through a series of kidnappings, murders and torched Lucy also received a number of ominous phone buildings. Members of the malevolent society made calls and noticed three or four men she didn’t extortion their calling card, sending threatening letters know frequently driving slowly past her house, and often ratcheting up the terror factor by placing an as if casing it to see who was home. After one ominous, coal-blackened handprint on a victim’s door call, during which the anonymous male caller — thus the “Black Hand” part of the society’s name. had asked if she was at home alone, Lucy called

the mysterious black hand terrorized citizens through a series of kidnappings, murders and torched buildings

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the sheriff, who came and watched her house stealthily from a nearby store. Within just a few minutes, though, the man called Lucy back and told her he had seen the sheriff and that he was too smart to get caught in the lawman’s snare.

The final letter arrived April 19 and instructed Lucy to go to the parlor of a Greensboro hotel on Easter Monday morning, or else “life will be short and death will be sure.” She didn’t go, which apparently angered her harassers even more. The following Wednesday, April 23, their harassment turned violent, when one of the men sped by the Pratts’ home on a motorcycle and fired a pistol at Lucy as she stood on the front porch. The bullet worked its way through the folds of her skirt and wounded her thigh. Deputies rushed to the scene and scoured the neighborhood for the shooter, but could not find him.

The Enterprise article published after the shooting speculated that the mysterious men behind the so-called “Black Hand” letters had intended to kidnap Lucy, pointing out that she was “not an unattractive woman” and that her family had money, making her a desirable target.

It wasn’t until the shooting, though, that they showed they could be dangerous.

And then something even more terrifying happened.

A couple of weeks after Lucy was shot, the men

actually did come to kidnap her. The morning of May 9, when Lucy opened a closet door to get a dress, two of the men jumped out and grabbed her, then bound her hands and feet, gagged her and placed a black cloth over her head. Lucy later told the sheriff she had kicked and screamed, but was obviously no match for the two men — nor for the large butcher knife they brandished to threaten her.

Fortunately for Lucy, though, the men apparently were their own worst enemies. As the bound and gagged young woman waited helplessly for whatever was going to happen next, she overheard the two men cursing because their two allies — who were supposed to show up with the getaway car — had been delayed for some reason. Then, when either the telephone or a doorbell rang, the two antsy kidnappers panicked and fled the scene, leaving Lucy and their butcher knife behind. When the sheriff and a deputy came looking for Lucy — having been tipped off earlier that she had received another suspicious phone call — they found her still tied up and in a semiconscious state, crying out “Leave me alone!” and “I will not go!” even as they worked to free her. When she calmed down, she told them the full story.

not everyone felt sympathy for Lucy Pratt.

Whispers across town suggested that perhaps Lucy was lying about these horrific experiences — and maybe her husband was involved in the fabrication, too — prompting Charles Pratt to write a letter to the editor of the Enterprise denying such accusations.

“I can not attempt to run down all the rumors that are started,” he wrote, “but some of them are so palpably false and mischievous that I hope to set them at rest at least. I want to assure the public that we have no desire for this publicity.”

He pointed out in his letter, for example, that a teenage boy in his neighborhood had actually witnessed the shooting with his own eyes — he’d seen the man on the motorcycle, the pistol, the smoke when the shot was fired.

“I want to ask the public to withhold judgment until all the facts are known,” Pratt wrote.

As it turns out, the case appears to have died after the publication of Pratt’s letter, as no other incidents were reported in the press. Perhaps the bungled kidnapping attempt convinced the men their efforts were doomed to fail, or maybe they worried that the sheriff was getting too close to nailing them. Regardless, it appears they moved on High Point buzzed with this latest news, of course and left their prey alone.

— and newspapers across the state reported Much to the relief, we’re sure, of poor Lucy Pratt. the attempted kidnapping — but apparently

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Big Chairs, thanks to the hijinks of some mischievous college boys.

• Chapter Eight ·

the tale of the

big chairs Did Thomasville actually have three of them?

If you haven’t heard this story about The Big Chair — and, frankly, you probably haven’t — you might want to make sure you’re sitting down.

You’re familiar with The Big Chair, of course. Standing 18 feet high, with a 10½-foot-wide seat, and perched on a 12-foot-high base, this oversized tourist attraction in downtown Thomasville is the mother of all chairs — or at least it was when it was built in 1951, though it has since been dwarfed by several other mammoth chairs around the country. It does still appear to be the world’s largest Duncan Phyfe armchair, so at least there’s that.

Now, most true Thomasville historians can tell you there were actually two Big Chairs — the current landmark, a steel-and-concrete behemoth that’s still going strong in its seventh decade, and the original chair, a Swiss leatherseated wooden chair that was built in 1922 and only lasted about 14 years before surrendering to the elements. Apparently, wood rots and leather deteriorates. Who knew?

During those 14 years, The Big Chair became quite the national celebrity, especially in 1925, when famous evangelist Billy Sunday was photographed in the chair and the photo was published in dozens of national newspapers, including on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. The chair was also featured in “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.” The current Big Chair is best-known for hosting Lyndon B. Johnson in October 1960, when he was campaigning for vice president as John F. Kennedy’s running mate. Johnson climbed onto the seat of the chair, waved to a crowd of supporters and tossed his hat into the crowd. The chair has also hosted numerous other politicians, beauty queens and even Santa Claus.

But in the long, intriguing narrative of The Big Chair, here’s the footnote that seems to have been lost to history: There may actually have been three

Here’s what happened: In 1921, Charles Sturkey, editor of a Thomasville newspaper called The Chairtown News, bragged to a South Carolina editor that Thomasville made enough chairs in a single day for every man, woman and child in town to sit down. That very well may have been true, as some sources indicate the town was producing more chairs than any other city in the country, but Sturkey couldn’t leave well enough alone.

The story goes that when the South Carolina newspaperman mentioned how impressed he was, and said he’d like to write a story about little Thomasville, Sturkey got carried away and bragged that the town was also planning to build the world’s largest chair.

That was a lie. Thomasville was building a lot of chairs in those days, but the world’s largest chair? Nope.

Nonetheless, the boast made for good copy, so Sturkey rushed back to Thomasville and shared his idea with the local Rotary Club.

Fortunately for Sturkey, the Rotarians loved the idea — they saw it as a great way to promote the town’s rich chairmaking heritage — and they got the ball rolling. By February 1922, Thomasville Chair Co. and Standard Chair Co. had signed on to build the chair, and the project was completed six months later. The straight-back chair stood 13½ feet high, with a 6-foot-wide seat, and reportedly contained enough lumber to make 100 regular-sized chairs.

More importantly, the chair began attracting attention for Thomasville — “The Chairtown of the South,” people called it — as newspapers across the country began requesting photos of the colossal curiosity.

A short newsreel segment about the chair’s construction was shown in movie houses across the nation.

The chair made its local debut in September during a parade kicking off the Davidson County centennial celebration and the county

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fair. Following that, the chair was set to be installed in the town commons, very near where the current Big Chair stands today, but because it had created such a sensation, the chair was first taken to Charlotte to be exhibited in the Made-In-Carolinas Exhibition, and then to Raleigh for exhibition at the North Carolina State Fair.

That’s where Thomasville’s first Big Chair met its demise.

Although the fair ended Oct. 20, another week would pass before a truck was dispatched from Thomasville to retrieve the chair — and by then, it was too late. The chair, which had been on display near the main entrance of the fairgrounds, was nowhere to be found.

After an extensive search, the remains of the chair finally turned up on the campus of nearby North Carolina State College, where it apparently had been carried — and ultimately vandalized — by a band of mischievous students. According to various newspaper accounts, the chair had been “completely disjointed,” “badly damaged,” “very much mangled” and “wrecked and dismembered.”

The seat was missing entirely, and the name “Pap Riddick” — referring to the school’s president, W.C. Riddick — had been scrawled on the back of the chair.

The chair’s remains were taken to Plant C of the Thomasville Chair Co., and the sad news of the chair’s demise quickly spread through town.

“While local citizens realize that it was only a college boys’ prank,” one local newspaper wrote, “they think that it was carrying the thing quite too far to destroy such a piece of workmanship.”

State fair officials refused to accept responsibility for the damage because the Thomasville delegation had waited so long to return for the chair, but Riddick said the college would pay for the damage if the perpetrators couldn’t be identified. The cost of building the chair was only $260, according to newspaper accounts.

Given the extensive damage to the chair, it seems plausible, even probable, that Thomasville’s first Big Chair was replaced rather than merely repaired. One article

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even stated the chair had been “badly damaged so that it probably cannot be used for the purpose for which intended.”

In that scenario, then, the first Big Chair installed at the town commons in 1922 was actually the second Big Chair — the first one having been vandalized beyond repair — meaning that the current landmark is the third incarnation of the Big Chair.

And thankfully for Thomasville, this chair is such a solid construction of steel and concrete that college boys couldn’t carry it away if they wanted to.

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• Chapter Nine ·

along came a spider Stuntman’s perilous climb thrilled High Pointers in 1918

of Strother — wrote a book about “The Human Spider” and his adrenaline-filled life.

Hollywood’s “Spider-Man” may have been No. 1 at the box office, but a century ago, a real-life SpiderMan was the main attraction in downtown High Point.

“The things he did, it almost seems like they were made up, but it’s all documented,” Deekens says. “He climbed all kinds of prominent buildings, and thousands of people would come to see him.”

On Jan. 5, 1918, a young showman named Bill Strother — who billed himself as “The Human Spider” and thrilled audiences across the country by scaling skyscrapers — came to town and climbed what was then the tallest building in town, the five-story Bank of Commerce building on N. Main Street.

The building still stands today — we now know it as the Wright Building, from its days of housing the Wright Clothing Store — but if you tried to climb the building today, you’d probably get yourself arrested.

In the early 1900s, though, “buildering” — the practice of scaling tall buildings, typically without ropes or any sort of safety precautions — was a common form of entertainment, and high-rise Houdinis such as Strother drew large crowds as they barnstormed from one city to the next, showcasing their fearless feats.

“I think he was the original SpiderMan, long before the Spider-Man of television or the movies,” says Donna Strother Deekens of Midlothian, Virginia. A few years ago, Deekens — a distant cousin

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It’s not known how many spectators turned out that Saturday in 1918 to watch Strother and another daredevil, George “The Human Fly” Polley, scale the building that’s sometimes referred to as High Point’s first skyscraper.

The High Point Enterprise reported in that day’s paper that the two men were going to climb the building — “right up its bare walls, with no hoisting apparatus other than their hands and nerves” — but unfortunately, subsequent editions of the paper did not include an account of their perilous performance.

We do know, however, that the Spider and the Fly were scheduled to climb the building twice that day — once in the afternoon and again in the evening — and that, when they reached the top, they planned to perform a breathtaking chairbalancing stunt along the edge of the roof.

We also know the type of showmanship Strother typically displayed as he climbed, giving us a good indication of what he likely did in High Point. As he ascended, alternating between ledges and windowsills for footholds and

handholds, Strother often pretended to lose his grip as if he was about to fall, but then amazingly locked his fingertips onto the edge of a windowsill or ledge at the last possible moment to save himself. Sometimes he would do a headstand on a windowsill and even allow his arms and legs to flail free of the building, so the only thing holding him to the structure was his head. Once he reached the top, in addition to chair-balancing stunts, he was also known to ride a bicycle precariously along the edge of the roof.

“And if the building had a flagpole on the roof ” — which the Bank of Commerce building did, according to vintage postcard pictures of the building — “he would work the pole into his bit,” Deekens says. “He’d go up and perch himself on top of the pole, pull out a newspaper and smoke a cigar. He was really quite the showman.”

On some occasions, “The Human Spider” was also a blind spider, climbing various buildings while blindfolded for added drama, so he may have done that in High Point, as well.

As in other cities, Strother’s appearance in High Point was a fundraiser for a war relief fund initiated by the national Order of Elks, with proceeds going toward the establishment of base hospitals overseas.

Born in 1896 in Stantonsburg (near Wilson), Strother was known as an active tree-climber — and eventually an active building-climber — in his hometown. By the time he arrived in High Point, at age 21, he was a “buildering” veteran (though he was still a couple of years away from his greatest conquest, the nearly 60-story Woolworth Building in New York City). High Point was one of many North Carolina cities he visited during his barnstorming tour, which also included climbs in nearby locales like Lexington, Greensboro and Winston-Salem.

Strother wasn’t exactly a physical specimen — mediocre height, wiry, about 135 pounds — and he typically climbed in street clothes, plain leather shoes and a derby, making him look even less imposing. However, he would end his career in 1926 with more than a thousand successful climbs, and despite being slight in stature, he claimed to be fearless when he was in action.

“It’s a dangerous business, though,” he once told a reporter, “and death always climbs with you.”

If that’s true, death must’ve climbed with Strother that day in High Point. Fortunately, though, “The Human Spider” scurried quickly — and safely — to the top of the building, leaving death behind him once again.

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•C

Ten r e t p ha

·

G I B A IRE F E U LEAG

Finch Field g randstand went up in flames Summer conjures up fond memories of hot summer nights at the ballpark — the crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the smells of freshly popped popcorn and ballpark hot dogs.

American Legion and Pony League baseball games and little else.

There was, in fact, an American Legion game the night of July 6, an extrainning playoff battle that ended only a couple of hours before the postmidnight fire began. The hometown Post 41 squad sent the fans home happy with a 2-1 win, but the joy at Finch Field would be short-lived.

At Thomasville’s Finch Field, though — where generations of spectators have spent many an evening watching the boys of summer play — not all the memories are pleasant. One Around 1:30 a.m., a huge fire was reported at the stadium, and firefighters memory, in particular, stands out as the darkest night in Finch began arriving shortly thereafter, stunned to see the nearly 50-year-old Field’s 82-year history: grandstand in flames.

The night the stadium’s glorious old grandstand burned to “All I remember is a wall of fire,” says 75-year-old Ralph Johnson, a former the ground. volunteer with the Hasty Fire Department who was one of the first to Could it have been an accidental electrical fire caused by, say, a faulty outlet or a frayed power cord? Or was the cause more sinister than that? Did someone — as many people in Thomasville believe — intentionally torch the grandstand?

That’s been a topic of discussion for decades, and there’s still no definitive answer — and likely never will be.

The date was July 7, 1983. The storied HiToms franchise — which had featured such future stars as Curt Flood and Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews — no longer played at Finch Field, having left after the 1969 season. By 1983, the cityowned stadium was, as current HiToms president Greg Suire describes it, “basically on life support,” primarily hosting

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respond.

“It was all the bleachers on fire from one end of the grandstand around to the other side, and a couple of light poles were on fire, too. It was all in flames. Biggest outdoors fire I saw. I’d seen forest fires before, but nothing to compare with the wall of fire we faced when we got there that night.”

Firefighters from several area departments battled the blaze for about 30 minutes — and some stayed until well past dawn, putting out spot fires — but there was no hope for the wooden grandstand.

“Once that thing got lit, there was no stopping it,” says Suire, who didn’t live here in 1983 but has heard numerous stories about the fire since his involvement with the HiToms. “That thing just went up.”

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And the tin roof on top of the grandstand went down.

Other losses that night included the public address system, light fixtures, umpiring equipment, concession-stand items and most of the Post 41 team’s equipment, which had been stored in a room at the field following the game earlier that night.

Newspaper accounts indicate the team’s wooden bats burned, the aluminum bats melted and the catcher’s equipment was destroyed. The fire scorched the infield grass along the dugouts, but did not damage the playing field itself.

The one bright spot, Johnson says, was that buildings next to the stadium — including his own business, Johnson Veneer — were not touched by the fire.

“It was getting pretty close to my building and another one, but they never caught on fire,” he says.

“We managed to save everything but the ballpark.”

Another bright spot? No injuries.

Once the fire was extinguished, the focus turned to determining what had happened. Initial reports indicate fire officials did not suspect arson, but eventually, the blaze became increasingly suspicious.

“They think it was set on fire, but nothing was ever proved,” Johnson recalls. “They never made any arrests.”

Suire has heard the story — from several sources — of a man who lived near the stadium and had some sort of feud that night with stadium officials. He supposedly issued threats.

“Apparently, he was pigeonholed as the person who burned the stadium down,” Suire says.

But again, nothing was ever proved, no arrests were ever made, and today — some 34 years later — the Finch Field fire remains an unsolved mystery.

What is clear, however, is how the fire scarred the Thomasville community. Even if the stadium was “basically on life support” at the time, it housed a lot of wonderful memories. So as word began to spread the next morning, countless residents came to see what was left of the old grandstand. Some came to reminisce, others to mourn.

“I remember driving by there the next morning and it was like, where did it go?” recalls Thomasville’s Kim Walser, who had been at the American Legion game the night before and had attended many a HiToms game during her childhood. “That was a really sad day.

We were just there the night before, and the next morning it was gone.”

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• Chapter Eleven ·

what he did for love It’s hard not to feel sorry for poor Grady Ferguson, a bank robber who was forced into crime by an unexpected tragedy.

By all accounts, the 27-year-old Ferguson came from a respectable family in Randleman, where he grew up. He wasn’t wealthy, but he had earned what money he had, having worked off and on at a local cotton mill before opening up a cold-drink stand in town. And he must’ve been on top of the world in November 1920, when he married his sweetheart, young Cornelia Ivey, shortly after her 18th birthday.

Only a year later, though — on Dec. 10, 1921 — Ferguson’s blissful world fell apart when Cornelia was severely burned in an accident at the couple’s home. As she was washing clothes, she got too close to the fire beneath the washpot, and it ignited her dress. She was rushed to Guilford General Hospital in High Point with lifethreatening burns over much of her body.

Shortly before noon, he strolled into the Peoples Bank of Randleman, where he apparently was a customer, and asked for a canceled check. When the two tellers behind the counter turned their backs to look for the check, Ferguson quickly hopped on the counter and clambered over the lattice frame of the cage. As the tellers turned to see what was making so much racket, Ferguson pointed a revolver at their heads as he scooped up wads of cash.

“Don’t say a word,” he snarled. “I need this money for my sick wife, who is in a hospital in High Point.”

With those words — and with nearly $500 in his pocket — Ferguson cautiously backed out of the bank, still aiming his gun at the tellers. Once out the door, he turned and fled on foot, and the tellers sounded the alarm. By the time police arrived, though, Ferguson was nowhere to be found.

For several months, Cornelia lay in the hospital as doctors treated her burns and did their best to keep her alive. Ferguson dutifully visited his wife often and, according to hospital officials, paid his medical bills on time, without fail. Doctors said the young man visited Cornelia on May 23, 1922, and nothing seemed amiss about his demeanor.

The next day, though, Ferguson snapped, pulling off a daylight heist that one newspaper described as one of the boldest bank robberies in North Carolina history. Despite being well-known in Randleman, Ferguson didn’t even try to disguise himself.

“The young man’s spectacular holdup hit the little town like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky,” wrote the Western Sentinel, a Winston-Salem publication. “The citizens are stupefied; they cannot begin to explain the act of Ferguson, who has lived here all his life and has never before been guilty of any unlawful conduct.”

Law enforcement in Randleman and surrounding municipalities set up a dragnet to nab the daring young bandit, but Ferguson proved too elusive for them. A few nights after the holdup, nurses at Guilford General called city police and reported seeing a man lurking on the grounds outside the hospital — they guessed it was Ferguson, trying to get in to see his wife — but he vanished before police got there.

A few days later, a man resembling Ferguson pulled off a similar heist at a bank in Summerfield, making off with about $1,500, and then the fugitive sightings ceased. The lack of reports caused family members to speculate Ferguson may have killed himself, distraught over his wife’s deteriorating health and over his own rash actions.

They were wrong.

On June 4, Ferguson resurfaced — in New Orleans, of all places — a broke, and broken, man. He walked into a police station — with only two pennies to his name, according to one newspaper account — and identified himself as William Grady Ferguson of Randleman, North Carolina. He confessed to the bank robbery, explaining he needed the money to pay his wife’s hospital bills.

Cornelia Ferguson was hospitalized at Guilford General, shown here.

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“My wife is sick,” he told New Orleans police. “I want to see her and am ready to face the music.”

Ferguson vehemently denied any involvement in the Summerfield heist, claiming he’d been on the lam in Georgia when that holdup took place.

A week later, a Randolph County deputy who’d been dispatched to New Orleans returned with the fugitive, stopping in High Point before proceeding to the Randolph jail in Asheboro.

Apparently, the deputy was so moved by Ferguson’s heart-wrenching saga that he allowed the young man to visit his bedridden wife for an hour before taking him to jail.

The reunion was “very affecting,” according to one newspaper account.

A couple of days later, after a number of relatives and friends paid his bond, Ferguson got out of jail and headed straight back to the hospital to see his wife again.

the young man´s spectacular holdup hit the little town like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky

Within a month, Cornelia would die of her injuries, surely breaking her devoted husband’s heart.

All that remained for poor Ferguson was his court appearance. Two months after Cornelia’s death, he pleaded guilty to the holdup and was sentenced to three years in the state penitentiary — a relatively light sentence newspapers attributed to the number of Randleman citizens who testified to Ferguson’s otherwise good character, and to a judge who was sympathetic to the young man’s plight.

It’s not clear what became of Ferguson after his prison term, but what is clear is the fact that his crime was, in one sense, a crime of passion. Yes, he stole money from the bank, but it was only because young Cornelia had stolen his heart.

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• Chapter Twelve ·

friendly fire?

Fallen police officer claimed his own chief shot him The tragic tale of how High Point’s first police officer was killed in the line of duty is as much a mystery as it is history.

It happened one Saturday night more than a century ago outside a local movie theater, where Officer James W. Witcher helped break up a fight between two men. In the midst of the scuffle, the young officer took a bullet to the abdomen, and later died. Those facts are indisputable.

That, however, is where the history becomes a mystery. Who actually fired the fatal shot that night? Was it an unidentified man in the crowd, as a number of witnesses later testified? Or was it — as Witcher claimed on his deathbed — the chief of police? Those are questions history has never been able to answer definitively.

The date was Sept. 13, 1913, and the location was a movie theater at the corner of Washington and Dewey streets, in the heart of the city’s black community. When the fight erupted around 10 p.m., another officer initially broke up the fight and apprehended the alleged instigator, Lorenzo Turner. According to newspaper accounts, the prisoner resisted arrest and managed to break free from the officer, prompting Witcher and Police Chief Ben C. Ridge to come running.

They grabbed Turner roughly, trying to subdue him as he thrashed wildly in an attempt to flee.

That’s when a gunshot rang out in the night, and Witcher fell to the ground. Reports indicate the fallen officer told his chief almost immediately, “You stood by me, but you shot me.”

Was that true? Had Ridge, a law enforcement veteran who’d been High Point’s chief of police for three years, accidentally fired a bullet into his own officer’s stomach? He denied the allegation, claiming he hadn’t even drawn his gun from its holster.

In fact, the bullet actually tore through one of Ridge’s fingers before hitting Witcher, making it less likely the bullet had come from his own weapon. But does that necessarily exonerate the chief? Or could he have accidentally shot himself, too, before the bullet found its way to Witcher? Stranger things have happened in the midst of a scuffle.

Bolstering the chief ’s denial were the numerous witnesses who stated that an unidentified white man in the crowd of mostly blacks — a crowd of as many as 200 people — had fired the shot and then fled the scene. Others claimed it was a black man in the crowd. No arrests were made.

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It was also reported the chief showed witnesses the cartridges of his gun and they were all intact, indicating he hadn’t fired any shots.

Meanwhile, Witcher was rushed to High Point Hospital, where he underwent surgery.

Back in his room after the operation, the young officer continued to maintain he’d been accidentally shot by Chief Ridge. And shortly before his death, he even relayed a message to his wife that she should sue the city for $10,000 on account of his death.

Witcher died early Monday morning, Sept.

15, about 30 hours after being shot. He lies buried in the cemetery at Hickory Chapel Wesleyan Church.

The ensuing coroner’s inquest lasted more than two days and included the testimony of nearly 40 witnesses. Evidence also included a bloodstained pistol ball and a cartridge shell that were found on the ground where the shooting occurred and were presumed to have been from the fatal shot.

A cartridge was also introduced that had been taken from the chief ’s gun, “and to all appearances (it) was like the shell and ball found,” one newspaper reported. “Chief Ridge swore, however, that he did not fire, nor did any swear that he did, and the jury

was left in a quandary.”

To further muddy the waters, two previously reported facts were disproved during the inquest. The report that the chief had shown witnesses his intact gun cartridges was not true — it was the third officer on the scene who did that — and witness accounts of a white man fleeing the scene after the shooting were also proved false.

All of which baffled the jury even further and led to this disappointingly ambiguous verdict: “The deceased came to his death by a pistol shot wound fired into his body from the hands of some person unknown to this jury.”

Ironically, when High Point Confidential contacted two of Witcher’s grandchildren — James “Bud” Witcher of High Point and Phyllis Witcher Sykes of Greensboro — neither had ever heard about their grandfather’s claim that he’d been shot by the police chief. They only knew he’d been killed trying to break up a fight outside a theater.

Now they know what the slain officer alleged from his deathbed, but — like the rest of us — they still don’t know who put him there.

Officer James Witcher In the midst of the scuffle, an officer took a bullet to the abdomen, and later died.

Who actually fired the fatal shot that night?

Was it an unidentified man in the crowd, as a number of witnesses later testified? Or was it — as Witcher claimed on his deathbed — the chief of police?

And apparently never will.

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Th r e t p Cha

• n e e irt

E H T N O Y E K N MO LOOSE •

tor’s c o d oint P h ig H d ns e a l l i p o f t e n Escap transpla

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Remember five years ago, when a monkey involved in medical research escaped from the Wake Forest School of Medicine’s primate center? The frisky little fugitive ran loose for nearly two weeks before finally being captured in Davidson County.

Well, not to brag or anything, but High Point had its own monkey on the lam some 90 years before Wake Forest’s great escape during the summer of 2012.

The year was 1922, and High Point wasn’t exactly a hotbed of monkey habitation. So you can imagine readers’ surprise on the morning of Nov. 16, 1922, when they saw a frontpage story in The High Point Enterprise with the intriguing, must-read headline, “Monkey Escapes; Gland Operation Is Now Delayed.”

Um, monkey? Gland operation? Who wrote this article — H.G. Wells?

No, actually, it seems that one of the city’s most prominent and well-respected physicians, the surgeon Dr. T.M. Stanton, had acquired a monkey with the intention of performing a transplant procedure. Specifically, his plan was to transplant the glands of the monkey into a human being — the first such operation attempted in North Carolina, according to the article.

Of course, that tidbit alone conjures all sorts of questions: Where and how did Stanton, based in a burgeoning furniture town, manage to buy a monkey? Did he already have a willing guinea pig — er, um, human patient — lined up to receive the monkey glands? Speaking of which, exactly which monkey glands are we talking about here?

And why would a human being need or want them? Unfortunately, the brief article didn’t address any of those issues.

And, ultimately, none of that mattered, because the monkey escaped.

According to the Enterprise, Stanton kept the monkey in a box in his yard, although subsequent articles in other papers reported it was actually a cage. Descendants say Stanton lived on Edgedale Drive, so does that mean there was a monkey running loose in Emerywood?

Perhaps.

However, Stanton also owned a large tract of wooded property between High Point and Jamestown — he built a log cabin on the land — and he was known to keep his beloved hunting dogs in pens there. So it’s conceivable he might’ve kept his monkey in one of those pens, too — separate from the dogs, of course.

Regardless, wherever the monkey escaped from, Stanton offered an unspecified reward for its capture, and reports indicate teenage boys all over town were scouring wooded areas trying to find the little runaway.

Newspapers across the state had fun publishing the quirky article with such amusing headlines as “Monkey Dodges Doctor’s Plans,” “Ape Saves His Glands From High Point Man,” “Monkey Seeks Safety Rather Than Operation,” and our personal favorite, “Has Anyone Seen A Stray Monkey?”

If the monkey was found, it was never reported.

Stanton vowed at the time that he would acquire another monkey if necessary — “the operation will be carried out,” the Enterprise stated — but if that happened, it was never reported, either.

High Point Confidential quizzed four of Stanton’s descendants — a niece, a nephew and two

grandchildren — about their ancestor’s monkey business in 1922, but they were unfamiliar with the anecdote.

“I know a good bit about Uncle Doc,” says Stanton’s niece, Suzanne Stanton of Cary, “but I never heard anything about a monkey. That’s the funniest thing, but I’ve never heard of it.”

So what, exactly, was Stanton up to?

We can’t know for sure, but based on our research, we can make an educated guess.

It seems that monkey glands were all the rage in 1922, and a Russian-born surgeon named Dr. Serge Voronoff was the movement’s, um, gland poobah. Voronoff believed the human

voronoff claimed monkey glands offered many potential benefits to humans including improved vision & prolonged life

Want more evidence?

On Dec. 6, 1922 — less than three weeks after the news broke about Stanton’s escaped monkey — a newspaper article told about a number of skits that had been performed the previous night at a High Point Kiwanis Club meeting, and one of the skits spoofed Stanton’s failed experiment.

In that skit, the newspaper reported, Stanton “was called upon to perform a very delicate monkey gland operation. After much effort to pull in a monkey cage, and with a patient on the operating table, the whole thing had to be declared off, because the monkey was of the wrong sex.”

While that anecdote obviously doesn’t prove anything, it certainly adds credibility to the notion that Stanton’s planned operation involved the monkey’s sex glands rather than, say, the kidneys or spleen. Whatever he was doing, though, the tale of Stanton and his escaped monkey is a littleknown anecdote you won’t find anywhere in the annals of High Point’s medical history.

And, confidentially, maybe that’s a good thing.

aging process could be halted or even reversed by grafting monkey testicle tissue onto the testicles of men — yes, you read that right — citing such potential benefits as better memory, improved vision, a heightened libido, the elimination of schizophrenia and, ultimately, prolonged life. Legions of men, eager to find the fountain of youth, signed up for the unorthodox procedure — even the great escape artist Harry Houdini and professional boxer Jess Willard expressed interest — and Voronoff made a fortune.

The following year, Voronoff ’s work would be lauded by hundreds of the world’s leading surgeons at the International Congress of Surgeons. Skeptics would eventually win the day and Voronoff would fall out of favor — his theories, after all, proved to be mere snake oil rather than a magic elixir — but in 1922, he was still a rock star.

Given that history, it’s not unreasonable to believe Stanton was attempting to emulate Voronoff and give High Point its own fountain of youth. The timing of Stanton’s experiment and Voronoff ’s success seems too coincidental to believe otherwise.

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Dr. Serge Voronoff is pictured on the right.

• Chapter Fourteen ·

the pin-up queen In 1941, Miss High Point College did her part to boost sailors’ morale

Officially, Alice Chandler McEwan didn’t contribute anything to the war effort during World War II. She didn’t join the military or serve as a nurse. She didn’t repair airplanes, nor was she one of those “Rosie the Riveter” women who helped build ships and produce war supplies. She was just a comely coed who graduated from High Point College and became a third-grade schoolteacher.

But for six months leading up to the country’s official declaration of war, the young woman served as chief morale booster for the men of the USS Enterprise, an aircraft carrier based at Pearl Harbor.

She didn’t know any of the men personally, but they all knew who she was, thanks to a certain photograph that caught their collective eye.

¨Nice girls didn´t go to Hollywood in those days.

I thought it was quite exciting, but my parents didn´t think so.¨ The year, of course, was 1941. Young Alice Chandler, a High Point native, had just graduated from her hometown college, where she’d been hand-picked as Miss High Point College by none other than legendary filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. In fact, DeMille was so taken by the coed’s beauty that he invited her to Hollywood for a screen test — and yes, she was ready for her close-up — but, alas, her parents would have none of it.

“Nice girls didn’t go to Hollywood in those days,” says McEwan, now 96 and living in Cynthiana, Kentucky. “I thought it was quite exciting, but my parents didn’t think so.”

Nonetheless, McEwan’s allure would give her

another shot at fame. When the editors of Look magazine called, seeking young women for an upcoming feature titled “Most Beautiful College Girls of 1941,” High Point College naturally sent them a photo of McEwan. If she was pretty enough for Cecil B. DeMille, she was surely pretty enough for the editors and readers of Look. So in the magazine’s June 17, 1941, issue, she was one of 74 college coeds featured in the two-page spread, and readers were invited to vote for one young woman to be Look’s “Queen of Queens.”

“I got letters from all over the world because of that picture,” McEwan says with a chuckle. “I got proposals of marriage. One man said he was coming on his motorcycle to marry me.”

But the letter McEwan remembers most came from Hawaii, where the sailors aboard the USS Enterprise had laid eyes on the young beauty from High Point College and crowned her their queen right then and there.

Not only did they cast their votes for McEwan, they also wrote an enthusiastic letter directly to her and requested a photograph they could pin up somewhere within the ship. She happily obliged with a photo and a letter of her own, in which she thanked the boys for their support and told them a little about herself: Light brown hair.

Blue eyes. Five-foot-four. Age 20. Aspiring schoolteacher.

“Wish I could take the trip my picture will take and see that part of the world,” she wrote. “The sound of Pearl Harbor really fascinates me.”

The infatuated sailors latched onto those two sentences and wrote another letter to Look, begging the editors to fly their favorite pin-up to Pearl Harbor. The

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magazine had published celebrity articles such as “Look Takes Lana Turner to the Rockies,” so why not “Look Takes Alice Chandler to Hawaii”?

And what did the editors think of that idea?

We’ll never know.

“I was hoping to fly out and meet them all, but then Pearl Harbor happened,” McEwan explains. “I was so afraid for those boys on that ship — I was afraid they were all blown up.”

As fate would have it, though, the USS Enterprise was not at Pearl Harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 — the aircraft carrier was a couple hundred miles west of the base, returning from a mission. Ironically, the ship was supposed to have been back the day before the attack, but it was slowed by rough seas.

As the war commenced, McEwan lost touch with the men of the USS Enterprise.

Life was coming at her fast in her new hometown, Wilmington, where she taught school, got married and began having children.

¨I got letters from all over the world because of that picture. I got proposals of marriage.¨

Back in High Point, though, McEwan’s mother — Margaret Davis Chandler — initiated her own relationship with the Enterprise sailors.

“Since I haven’t any boys to do their bit with you,” she wrote, “if you don’t mind, I would like to adopt you for the duration, and if you receive this letter and answer it there might be some cookies or something in it for you.”

The sailors enthusiastically accepted her offer.

“Mom,” they wrote, “we think it grand of you to so generously hint of cookies.

Of course, we do not wish to appear mercenary about it, but we could really go for some cookies.”

It would be decades before McEwan would reconnect with anyone from the USS Enterprise. In the mid-1990s, when she was in her 70s, she received a phone call from a Smithfield man named Joe Grimes. As the crew’s primary letterwriter in 1941, he still had some of McEwan’s letters stashed away in a box of his old Navy stuff, and when he found them, he decided to try and find her so they could reminisce.

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“I was so thrilled to hear from him,” McEwan recalls. “He was so nice, and that was such an exciting time in my life.”

Grimes has since died, and now his son Warren cherishes those old letters, because they give him a glimpse of what his father’s life was like during the war.

And now he, too, keeps in touch with McEwan.

“She was so nice to those guys on the Enterprise and meant so much to them,” he says. “I just feel like her story needs to be told.”

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We do, too. More than 75 years later, Miss High Point College of 1941 is finally getting her close-up.

email: FriendlyTrany@northstate.net

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• Chapter Fifteen ·

the mississippi murderer High Point man helped killer win a full pardon

****

Henry Perry and Ed Smith met around 1915 or so in the One day in late January 1924, a Mississippi Delta, where Perry’s stranger arrived in High Point. A tall, growing construction company had slim, black man in his mid-30s, the just landed a sizable job. Smith, a outsider just showed up on a train poor, black laborer in need of work, one day, unannounced, and started joined Perry’s construction crew. walking.

“They clicked right off the bat,” In time, the man would become says Perry’s daughter, Irma Perry a familiar citizen in High Point — Sohnchen of High Point, who would friendly, well-liked, hard-working and meet Smith years later. loyal to his friends and family. On Perry found Smith, who was about that day, though, when he stepped seven years his junior, to be a hard off that train, no one knew who he worker, and unfailingly dependable. was or where he’d been.

Though uneducated, Smith was They didn’t know he had come here knowledgeable and handy when it from Mississippi. came to construction, and Perry They didn’t know he’d been serving tabbed him early on as his project a life sentence at the notorious foreman and right-hand man. Later, Parchman prison farm — the when Perry traveled to bid on Mississippi State Penitentiary’s jobs, he often took Smith with him maximum-security facility — busting — that’s how much he valued his rocks on a chain gang. employee. Before long, their work relationship had grown into a fast They didn’t know he’d been friendship, as well. convicted of murder several years earlier, for shooting a woman dead at point-blank range. He had confessed to the crime and hadn’t even tried to defend himself in court.

Nobody in High Point knew any of this except for one man — a white man, ironically, who happened to be one of the stranger’s closest friends and who, out of his love for this convicted murderer, had just helped him win a full pardon from the governor of Mississippi.

Trouble came knocking in the fall of 1918, when the woman Smith had been seeing didn’t take kindly to his attempts to break up with her. One evening, the woman served her man a slice of cake, then told him — after he’d already eaten it — that she had laced the cake with her own blood to put a curse on him.

Smith, angry and horrified, grabbed his gun and shot the woman on the spot. He then waited for the police, confessed to the crime, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in

prison. He didn’t even request an attorney — he just calmly accepted his fate and headed off to Parchman, presumably to spend the rest of his life on a chain gang.

The tragic turn of events broke Perry’s heart, according to his daughter.

“Poor Daddy,” she says. “It just about killed him.”

Perry’s construction company, however, would carry on without its right-hand man. And in the fall of 1922, the company would land one of its largest contracts yet — a huge water and sewer line project in High Point, North Carolina, the city that would become Perry’s new home. **** Shortly before relocating to High Point, Perry ran into an old friend from college, a Mississippi attorney named George Shaw.

During their college days, Perry had helped Shaw pass a math class he was struggling in, and Shaw reminded his old friend of his kindness.

“You know, Henry,” he began, “I told you then that if there was ever anything I could do for you…”

“Boy, could you!”

Perry interrupted, and proceeded to tell Shaw about his poor friend, Ed Smith, laboring his life away at Parchman. Maybe as an attorney, Perry suggested, Shaw could at least look into the case and see if anything could be done. Shaw readily agreed, and enlisted the services of his law partner to assist him.

Ed Smith pictured with one of Henry Perry’s children.

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At first glance, they were not optimistic. Inmates serving life terms rarely received pardons anyway, they told Perry, and Gov. Lee Russell had already come under scrutiny for granting a number of what they called “promiscuous pardons.” Nonetheless, they appealed on Smith’s behalf — first to the State Board of Pardons, which rejected the request in April 1923, and then to the governor.

In their appeal to the governor, the attorneys cited a most unusual mitigating factor in Smith’s case — self-defense. It was unusual because Smith clearly had not fired his gun in selfdefense, but he thought he had.

Their argument was this: The shooting had occurred in Leland, Mississippi, in the heart of the state’s Delta region, which they described in their appeal as “a veritable hot-bed of superstition, witchery and hoodooism.” The poor, ignorant blacks living in that region accepted such beliefs as fact. Especially relevant to Smith’s case and the woman lacing the cake with her blood, the attorneys wrote, blacks believed “that when a woman resorts to this method of witchcraft, that the man is under her complete control forever after and he can’t escape the consequences.”

As a result, they argued, Smith felt threatened by the woman’s actions, just as he would have felt “had she been advancing on him with a red-hot pitchfork … or slashing at his throat with a razor. … He killed because he was in the clutches of an inexorable fate; he killed in necessary self-defense to break the charm and escape from her clutches.”

The wheels of justice turned slowly, but the governor finally looked with favor upon Smith’s case. On Jan. 18, 1924 — his final day in office — he granted Smith’s pardon, allowing the confessed murderer to go free.

“Ed was two miles away from prison, busting rock on a chain gang, when they came to tell him he was going home,” Sohnchen says. “I just can’t fathom what that moment must’ve been like.” **** One moment Sohnchen can fathom is the one when Smith arrived in High Point and found his old friend, Henry Perry. The attorneys had written Perry a letter telling him they had just put Smith on a train bound for High Point, but Smith got here before the letter did.

“Daddy was sitting on his front porch when he saw Ed rounding the corner,” she says. “He couldn’t believe his eyes at first that that’s really who it was, but the closer he got, he realized it really was Ed. He jumped up and ran out to the street and hugged him.

They had a glorious reunion.”

Irma Perry Sohnchen holds a photo of her father.

Smith remained a model citizen in High Point until his death in 1954. To Sohnchen’s knowledge, no one ever knew about his murderous past, outside of her own family. She still has a copy of the pardon, as well as the letters between her father and the attorneys who won the pardon.

Today, at age 80, Sohnchen looks back with nothing but love for the man she says was almost like a second father to her, especially after her own dad died when she was only 7.

“Ed was Superman,” she says. “When he died, I cried like a baby.

He was a member of the family. It was like my daddy dying all over again.”

She also holds a special place in her heart for her father, and marvels at the love he had for his black friend from Mississippi, especially at a time when such deep friendship between the races was uncommon.

“Daddy loved Ed so much,” she says. “I mean, how many people do you know who have gotten somebody pardoned for murder?”

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Smith settled in High Point, living at first with Perry’s family, then marrying and having a family of his own. Even after moving across town, he spent many a day at the Perry household, where he was one of the family. He also joined the work crew for the water and sewer line project, becoming Perry’s right-hand man again.

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“Daddy always said Ed could lay more pipe than any piece of machinery he ever had,” Sohnchen says.

Through the years, whenever there was a water line break, the city would call on Smith, because he knew where all the shutoff valves were.

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If you doubt the Lord moves in mysterious ways, you would do well to consider the mysterious circumstances of late 1906 and early 1907 in High Point.

• Chapter Sixteen · Church’s plea in 1907 resulted in divine irony

During those years, the eastern stretch of Washington Street served as the heart of the city’s black community, dotted with residences and businesses that ranged from grocery stores and restaurants to a barbershop, an opera house and an amusement hall.

Business was good along Washington Street — so good, in fact, that the community’s barber, Jesse Edmondson, decided in the fall of 1906 to spread his wings and become the proprietor of the opera house, too, which at the time was North Carolina’s only black-owned opera house.

the answered prayer

This raised a few eyebrows at A.M.E. Zion church, where some of the older, more pious women of the congregation apparently didn’t approve of the type of entertainment the opera house was attracting. Nonetheless, in an effort to appease God — or at least those holierthan-thou sisters — Edmondson pledged to donate a certain percentage of his profits to the church, and that seemed to placate the sisters.

Until, that is, rumors began to circulate that Edmondson might’ve been, shall we say, fleecing the flock by shortchanging his donations. True or not, the scuttlebutt did not sit well with the sisters who, according to one newspaper account, initially showed their displeasure by shunning the opera house and walking on the opposite side of the street.

When that didn’t work, they sought divine intervention.

“They began praying over the matter,” a local newspaper reported, “and when Jesse still remained obdurate, they moved the prayer meeting next door to the objectedto hall and nightly (and loudly) sent up petitions that Jesse might be taken home to glory.”

Yes, they prayed for Edmondson’s death — and they weren’t even discreet about it.

With that many saints beseeching God to smite him down, Edmondson reluctantly turned over proprietorship of the opera house — after running the place for only a

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few weeks — and returned to the sisters’ good graces.

The story didn’t end there, though.

Edmondson may have abandoned the opera house, but the establishment was still there — and now with a new proprietor, a man named Lee Flake, who not only made good money there, but who also kept all the profits for himself.

Under Flake’s management, the opera house — which included a “juke joint,” or dance hall — developed an even sketchier reputation, coming to be known for its drunken, rowdy patrons and frequent fights. In February 1907, an argument over whiskey resulted in a shooting death at the establishment. The next month, Flake actually promoted a show under the auspices of the church and pledged a portion of the proceeds to the house of worship … but he refused to pay up, and found himself being hauled into court.

on Washington Street, not far from Flake’s property. The wooden house burned quickly — “as rapidly as a tank of kerosene oil,” The Enterprise reported — and the fire soon leapt to several neighboring houses and businesses, including Flake’s. For nearly two hours, firefighters battled the intense blaze, which consumed about a three-acre chunk of Washington Street. The fire was reportedly so hot that it burned one of the firefighters’ hoses,

Surrounded by so much sin, do you think the sisters of the church prayed for Flake to be “taken home to glory,” as they had done with Edmondson?

No, they did not. Instead, they prayed — frequently and fervently — for fire. Not the fire of the Holy Spirit, but a literal fire — a raging inferno, frankly — that would reduce Flake’s two-story establishment to a pile of sin-stained ashes. You know, a hellfire-andbrimstone kind of fire.

And on the night of March 23, 1907, their prayer was answered.

On that Saturday night, around 10 p.m., an oil lamp exploded in a small house

rendering it useless.

“The whole business district almost burned down,” says High Point historian Glenn Chavis, who has researched and written extensively about the history of High Point’s black community. “It was an awful fire.”

For those who had prayed for the fiery death of Lee Flake’s juke joint, the Washington Street conflagration must’ve seemed like manna

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from heaven. His building, valued at approximately $4,000, was destroyed, along with everything in it — and he had no insurance, according to newspaper accounts of the fire. “Lee Flake Is Ruined,” the Enterprise declared in a headline.

There would be no celebrations or prayers of thanks on this night, however, for the fire that had ruined Flake had mysteriously crossed the street — despite there being no wind at the time, according to a newspaper report — and ignited the very church from which so many prayers had been lifted for a fire to destroy Flake’s controversial establishment.

The old, wooden church, valued at approximately $5,000, was “devoured to destruction,” according to the Enterprise.

The irony of the church’s fiery demise was not lost on local newspaper reporters, one of whom wrote, “Now they are wondering whether they are to be expected to give thanks for the granting of their prayer, or whether the powers of darkness got sarcastic and gave them vengefully all they asked and a lot more thrown in.”

Either way, they no doubt learned a lesson that night that would stick with them for years to come: Be careful what you pray for, because you just might get an answer.

Did Frank Bowman really die of heart disease, or was there something more sinister at work?

Unfortunately, history doesn’t answer this question for us. But in October 1907, when Bowman died one night in his bed — somewhat unexpectedly, and under very unusual circumstances — the question was front-page news in High Point.

On the morning of Oct. 2, 1907, The High Point Enterprise — which was a weekly publication at the time — reported in a brief article that the elderly black man had been found dead in his bed. According to the article, Bowman — who for several years had been the coachman for prominent High Point banker and businessman J. Elwood Cox — likely died of heart disease.

Dr. Garland Gerran

name your

poison • Chapter Seventeen ·

One week later, however, a lengthy front-page article in the Enterprise boldly questioned the nature of the man’s death. “Did Frank Bowman Die From Natural Causes Last Sunday Night?” the main headline read. Beneath that, a smaller headline added, “Or Was He Poisoned in a Drink Handed Him?” Yet a third headline concluded, “The Matter Should Be Investigated.”

Bowman was buried the day after his death, the newspaper stated, “but if the Enterprise is not very much mistaken, his body should be resurrected and an autopsy held.”

Here’s why: According to the article, a girl named Carrie, who lived with Bowman and his wife, told neighbors that on the afternoon before Bowman’s death, a black man came to the house and gave Bowman some whiskey. Soon afterwards, Bowman became “rather uneasy” and begged his wife not to leave him alone. Though he was acting strangely, the girl said his behavior was different from that of a typical drunk man.

Bowman reportedly died in his bed about 10 o’clock that night, though his death was not discovered until an hour or so later. He was pronounced dead

by Dr. Garland A. Gerran, a respected doctor in High Point’s black community.

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Did bad whiskey kill Frank Bowman?

According to the article, Gerran suggested an autopsy might be in order to determine the cause of death — if for no other reason, to rule out the possibility of foul play — but Bowman’s widow strongly objected, and the doctor acquiesced to her wishes.

“Dr. Gerran says he suggested an autopsy so there might not be any cause for complaint, as the laws are very strict on the matter,” the Enterprise reported, “but after being assured by parties there that nothing wrong had been done and after the wife objected he left the house, so the doctor did his duty as he saw it, also that Bowman had been treated by him for indigestion and that at the time he thought it not improbable that heart trouble caused his death.”

The article does not mention the name of the man who gave Bowman the whiskey, nor does it indicate whether Bowman’s wife or Carrie even knew who he was. Had the man intentionally poisoned Bowman’s whiskey? Had Bowman’s wife, who insisted there be no autopsy, been in on the deed? Or was it simply a bad batch of whiskey that was no fault of the man who provided it? Or was it, as was originally thought, heart disease?

More than a century later, these questions remain unanswered, as no follow-up articles about Bowman’s death appeared in the Enterprise. We can only assume the body was never exhumed, thus leaving the cause of Bowman’s death a mystery.

According to the article that was published, the mystery especially disturbed people within the city’s black community, who “will never be satisfied about the matter until it is cleared up.”

Apparently, then, they were never satisfied.

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• Cha

ght i E r e pt

een ·

N I L E E WH

Y K S E H T

r ri s n Fe w o its had 1907 t n i Po el in High whe

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Welcome to High Point, “The Ferris Wheel Capital of the World.”

It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?

Oh sure, we’ve still got that other claim to fame — “Furniture Capital of the World” — but it could’ve been Ferris wheels if a High Point inventor named F.E. Thomas had gotten his way.

Thomas didn’t invent the original Ferris wheel — they don’t call it a Thomas wheel, after all — but in 1907, he received a patent for his modified design of a Ferris wheel, which he planned to manufacture in High Point.

In fact, the prototype was assembled and erected in High Point, and hundreds of the locals rode it and proclaimed it a great success. Then the giant wheel was dismantled, packed up and taken to Norfolk, Virginia, where it was to be a featured attraction at the much-ballyhooed Jamestown Exposition.

And then … well, it’s not clear what happened then. Newspaper articles about the majestic High Point Aerial Wheel, as it was called, seem to have dwindled to nothing for some reason. What is clear, though, is that High Pointers had extremely high hopes for the new Ferris wheel from the

moment they first heard about it.

News of F.E. Thomas’ invention began leaking out in the spring of 1907, when newspapers reported he had received a patent for an amusement wheel which could “revolutionize the Ferris or aerial wheel business at fairs and expositions.”

Thus was born the High Point Aerial Wheel Co., which was chartered in May to manufacture and sell aerial wheels. The following month, it was announced that the High Point Aerial Wheel would make its debut in July, and the town buzzed with excitement.

Finally, one evening in late July, the magnificent ride was unveiled — to oohs and ahs — on a large, vacant lot behind the old Hunt Hotel. According to newspaper accounts, the wheel was 60 feet from the ground at its highest point and featured 14 cars, each of which could carry two or three passengers. The ride dazzled the eyes with its array of bright flashing lights.

As for the ride itself, one article pointed out that “the rider goes up and down instead of around and over, as is the case of the Ferris wheel.”

The first rider was High Point’s own Miss Helen Brockett, who had the distinction of christening

the aerial wheel. From her seat at the ride’s zenith, she broke a bottle of lithia water against the iron structure and loudly proclaimed, “Noble wheel, I christen thee High Point!”

For the rest of the evening — and for several nights to come — High Pointers by the hundreds rode the giant wheel over and over.

“The wheel was universally pronounced a success,” The High Point Enterprise reported, noting that everyone seemed to enjoy seeing High Point from a different perspective. “The

night-time views of the city were most pleasing from so elevated a point of vantage.”

Even as the first aerial wheel was enjoying its 15 minutes of fame, a second wheel was reportedly being built here, and the potential seemed — if you’ll pardon the pun — almost dizzying.

Alas, it was not to be, and it’s not clear why. More than a century later, Ferris wheels still enjoy immense popularity, but it appears the High Point Aerial Wheel — again, pardon the pun — never really got off the ground.

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