Month: October 2016

How Wilmington’s legendary coach, Leon Brogden made superstars of a couple hometown heroes

By Bill Fields

It’s been 63 years since Sonny Jurgensen graduated from New Hanover High School, a very long time by any measure, but the Pro Football Hall of Famer hasn’t forgotten the mood of his happy days.

“They were fun times, they really were,” Jurgensen says, his accent still as soft as taffy on a beach blanket. “Lively crowds at home. A bus on the back roads to the away games. Raleigh, Durham — you did a lot of traveling. And Coach Brogden really was a special guy.”

They are in their late 70s or early 80s now, and for other men from other places, such a distant chapter might be a cloudy memory. For the boys who suited up in orange and black, who were Wildcats under legendary Leon Brogden in the 1950s, when prep athletics were king in Wilmington and fans packed the bleachers for home games in basketball and football, the recollections tend to come easily.

“We didn’t have television in Wilmington until 1954,” says Ron Phelps, 84, a member of the Wildcats’ 1951 state champion basketball team. “If you wanted to enjoy sports, you went to Legion Stadium on football Friday nights or to the gym in the winter. When we came out in our basketball uniforms, the crowd got rowdy. They’d stomp their feet in the balcony and scream and yell.”

Jurgensen, 82, was in New Hanover’s Class of 1953, a three-sport athlete who left the Port City to attend Duke and was a star quarterback in the National Football League for the Philadelphia Eagles (1957-1963) and Washington Redskins (1964-1974). Regarded by many as the best pure passer in NFL history, Jurgensen — full name Christian Adolph III — threw for 32,224 yards and 255 touchdowns in his career.

“Every pass that man threw fit the situation,” one of Jurgensen’s receivers for the Redskins, Jerry Smith, said upon his NFL retirement. “Fast, slow, curve, knuckleball, 70 yards, 2 inches — they were always accurate. If it wasn’t completed, it wasn’t No. 9’s fault.”

Not only did Jurgensen emerge from Wilmington in the post-World War II period and go on to achieve NFL success, so did Roman Gabriel, 76, who graduated from New Hanover High School in 1958. Starring in football, basketball and baseball for the Wildcats as Jurgensen had, Gabriel was quarterback at N.C. State and then enjoyed a lengthy, successful NFL career for the Los Angeles Rams and Philadelphia Eagles, earning NFL Most Valuable Player honors in 1969.

Jurgensen and Gabriel might not have achieved what they did without the influence of Brogden, an NHHS institution from 1945 through 1976 and the first high school coach to be inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1970. Proper and placid, Brogden, who died at age 90 in 2000, did not have to shout to be heard.

Brogden dressed up when he coached — always coat and tie (and hat on the gridiron) unless he was on the baseball diamond — but didn’t dress down his charges. “If we ever lost a game, he took the blame, and if we won he gave us the credit,” says Jimmy Helms, a 1958 NHHS graduate. “He was really more of a father image. He was a legendary coach but an even better man. You just wanted to please him so much. If you messed up and he was looking down at the floor because he didn’t want to see what he just saw, that was worse than being slapped.”

In an era during which teenagers tended to mind their elders, Brogden made a lasting impression on the students he was around. “To me he was just like magic,” says Jackie Bullard, another member of the Class of ’58. “He was probably the calmest, most respected person I’ve ever been around. It’s hard to explain how much that man meant to me. He coached hard without raising his voice. When he spoke, everything was quiet.”

Bill Brogden, the middle of Leon and Sarah Brogden’s three sons, who recently retired after a long career as a college golf coach, also played on two (1960, ’61) of his dad’s eight state championship basketball teams. “You wanted to play for him, and you didn’t want to disappoint him,” Bill says. “He had your respect, and when he asked you to do something, you didn’t ask why, you just did it.”

Although he did plenty of it, winning wasn’t everything to Brogden. “You hear today you’ve got to win or you’re a nobody,” says Gabriel. “With Coach Brogden, it was not about winning or losing, it was how much you enjoy preparing to do the best you can. And that carries over to your schoolwork, your whole life. If you enjoy it, you’re a winner.”

Brogden won quickly after arriving in Wilmington following a nine-year stint at Charles L. Coon High School in Wilson, winning the state basketball championship in 1947, the Wildcats’ first North Carolina title in 18 years. The city’s population grew to 45,000 by 1950, a 35 percent increase over a decade in part because of the shipbuilding during the war. That meant a lot of ball-playing kids would eventually play for Brogden and his assistant, Jasper “Jap” Davis, a star fullback at Duke whom Brogden coached in Wilson.

“You had so many kids,” Jurgensen says. “We all played. There were guys everywhere.”

Jurgensen, whose family operated Jurgensen Motor Transport, a trucking company that carried freight for A&P, grew up on South 18th Street about a mile from New Hanover High School. “Our neighborhood had about 30 boys within a four-block area, and we always had enough kids to make up any kind of game we could think of,” Thurston Watkins Jr. wrote in a 2004 Star-News article. “One day a red-headed kid with a big smile asked to play ball with some of us out in front of his house on a big empty corner lot. Sonny was the name of that red-headed kid.”

When boys graduated from pick-up games to organized leagues, Brogden wasted no time having an impact on them. “He would recognize guys in junior high who looked like they were going to be good athletes or good people and take them under his wing,” says Bill Brogden. “He had the junior high school coaches run his system so when kids got to high school everybody would know what was going on.”

Jurgensen noticed the continuity when he got to New Hanover. “We practiced all the fundamentals, starting when I played freshman ball,” Jurgensen says. “When you made varsity, it was the same system, which was good. But coach would adjust the offense according to what kind of players we had. We ran the Split-T and a Spread at times.”

Few details escaped Brogden when it came to preparing his players. Jurgensen developed the snap in his throwing arm — and Gabriel also developed a powerful motion — through drills in which the quarterbacks would pass kneeling and sitting. “He’d have you sit on your fanny because it forced you to turn your waist and strengthened your arm,” Gabriel says.

In Jurgensen’s junior season (1951), he was a valuable running back and linebacker for the Wildcats, while Burt Grant — who would go on to play at Georgia Tech — quarterbacked the team. During a 34-0 win over Wilson, Jurgensen scored two rushing touchdowns and recovered a fumble, made an interception and blocked a punt. Jurgensen always had a knack for the big play.

“One of the first times I saw Sonny,” says Bullard, “we were watching New Hanover play Raleigh one Friday night. I must have been in the sixth or seventh grade. We kicked off to Raleigh and they ran it back 90 yards for a touchdown. When Raleigh then kicked off to us, Sonny returned it a long way for a touchdown. It was 7-7 and I bet only 30 seconds had gone off the clock.”

With 10,000 spectators watching at Legion Stadium, New Hanover beat Fayetteville 13-12 in a battle of undefeated teams in 1951 to win its first Eastern Conference title since 1928. The following week the Wildcats beat High Point 14-13 to win their first football state title in 23 years.

The Wildcats couldn’t repeat as state champs in 1952, but Jurgensen starred at quarterback and earned All-State honors. That school year, the “Most Athletic” senior averaged 12 points a game for the basketball team and played third base and pitched for the baseball Wildcats, batting .339.

“Sonny had that big flashy smile. People idolized him,” Helms says. “He was so natural about anything he did, and he was a great basketball player. Coach would tell about when Sonny made nine shots in a row and never saw a one of them go in the basket. He knew it was going in when he shot it, so he turned and went back down the court.”

When Jurgensen was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1983, Brogden told the Star-News: “I will always remember Sonny for his competitive spirit and unusual good sense of humor. He had the ability with his personality and skills to raise the level of play in his teammates and also to stimulate his coaches. Associating with Sonny was not quite like traveling with a big brass band, but you did realize you were with someone special.”

While Jurgensen went to Duke — where he played quarterback on a team that passed infrequently and was in the defensive secondary — Gabriel was getting noticed back home for his multi-sport talents. Not as outgoing as Jurgensen, Gabriel had a personality a lot like their coach. “Roman was very serious, very humble,” says Helms. “He was the most unselfish fellow you’ve ever seen and a terrifically hard worker.”

Says Bullard, a co-captain with Gabriel in football and basketball and a close friend: “He had a lot of Coach Brogden in him. He wasn’t ‘Rah-rah, look at me, I’m Roman Gabriel.’ He was just a leader who brought everything to the table, and he expected everybody else to bring it to the table too.”

Gabriel inherited his ethic from his father, Roman Sr., a native of the Philippines. “He went straight to Alaska to can salmon to make a living,” Gabriel says of his father’s early days in the United States, “then he got into Chicago, where he became part of the railroad.”

Roman Sr. was a cook and waiter for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad after moving to Wilmington where he, his wife, Edna (an Irish-American from West Virginia), and Roman Jr. lived in the working-class Dry Pond section of the city in an apartment complex that had been built for shipbuilders. “My father and three other Filipinos who worked with him were probably the only Filipinos in North Carolina at that time,” Gabriel says. “He had a saying, ‘Never let an excuse crawl under your skin.’ That meant that because of who you are, you might have to work a little bit harder. And if you’re not willing to work hard, you don’t deserve to be good. He wasn’t an athlete, but he was probably the best cook and waiter the Atlantic Coast Line had outside of the other three Filipinos.”

Because his dad loved baseball, Roman Jr. did too, getting tips as a young boy from a former major leaguer who lived nearby, George Bostic “Possum” Whitted. Brogden noticed Gabriel when he was a 10-year-old Little Leaguer, and the boy developed into a high school first baseman who could hit for power, slugging a 500-foot home run in a game at Fayetteville that old-timers still talk about. By the time he got to high school, basketball had become his top passion.

With Gabriel a key factor, the Wildcats won the state hoops championship in 1956, ’57 and ’58 and captured the state AAA baseball crown in ’56 and ’57. Twice they were N.C. runner-ups in football. Jurgensen came back to visit his former team. “When I was in high school, Sonny would come out to practice and help Coach Brogden and Coach Davis a little bit,” Gabriel remembers. “I’ve never seen anybody who could throw it like Sonny, a tight spiral every pass.”

Gabriel and his teammates in the different sports logged a lot of miles riding in the school’s well-used athletic bus. “We thought we were going to have a wreck because Coach Jap would drive and Coach Brogden would sit behind him and have a conversation,” Gabriel says. “He would be driving the bus with his head turned talking to Coach Brogden.”

“We took turns sitting in the back,” says Bullard, “because you always got a little nauseated from the fumes.”

Bothered by asthma as a child, Gabriel grew into a 6-foot-3, 200-pound force on the field and court after a growth spurt and summer of working with weights going into his senior year at New Hanover.

“Roman got to be a big guy for high school as a senior,” says Bill Brogden. “He was hard to handle inside on the basketball court.”

Gabriel proudly points out that he out-jumped a 6-9 Durham center on an opening tip-off, and his athleticism was enhanced by the coaching acumen of Brogden. “He did a lot of studying, and he tried to figure out how to win,” Bill Brogden says. “He was always drawing some kind of play on a napkin. He was so into his job, it was like he was way before his time.”

The Wildcats’ three straight basketball championships during Gabriel’s NHHS years were helped by the team’s use of Brogden’s innovative spread offense, which North Carolina coach Dean Smith credited as an inspiration for the famed Four Corners that he began using successfully in the early 1960s. Brogden tweaked his tactic a bit, depending on the makeup of his team. A formidable rebounder, Gabriel was also a good lob passer to Bullard.

“It was pretty much the Four Corners, and we won the state championship playing it,” says Bill Brogden. “If you had a good ball handler and were a good free-throw shooting team, nobody could beat you. They couldn’t catch up.”

Before Army football flanker Bill Carpenter became well-known as the “Lonesome End” during the 1958 and ’59 seasons, Wilmington utilized a similar ploy. “Howard Knox, our No. 1 receiver, lined up way out near the sideline,” Gabriel says. “He and I had hand signals. He didn’t come back to the huddle on certain plays.”

Ten years after Gabriel’s final fall wowing the faithful at Legion Stadium, on Oct. 22, 1967, he squared off against Jurgensen in a Rams-Redskins contest at the Los Angeles Coliseum — the first time the two faced off in the NFL. Brogden flew out to watch, dining with Gabriel the night before and having breakfast with Jurgensen on game day. As if ordained by the man each admired so much, who watched a half from each side of the stadium, the game ended in a 28-28 tie.

It is one of Gabriel’s favorite memories of Brogden, but here’s another.

Gabriel had read that Boston Celtics star Bob Cousy smoked a cigar to relax before a big game. On the morning of the 1958 N.C. state championship, Gabriel bought five cigars for the Wildcat starters gathered in his hotel room. A knock on the door, and it wasn’t room service.

“What are you doing smoking cigars?” Brogden asked.

“Ask Gabe,” Bullard said.

“Coach,” said Gabriel, “I saw in a sports magazine where Bob Cousy smokes a cigar to relax before a big game, and you know how successful the Celtics are.”

“If it’s good enough for Bob Cousy, it’s good enough for my boys,” Brogden said. “But don’t get sick.”  PS

A pair of colorful and passionate marine archaeologists bring the Civil War to the surface

By Jim Moriarty

Imagine Indiana Jones in a wetsuit and a mask instead of a leather jacket and a fedora. Forgo the melting faces of Nazis and the Thugee priest with that whole snatch-your-heart-out-of-your chest thing. Make it something more along the lines of a couple of guys with ribcages expanded from a lifetime of breathing underwater, advanced degrees on the walls and cabinet drawers stuffed full of charts and maps — guys who live and breathe a passion for finding and preserving the bits and pieces of our collective barnacle-covered heritage, even if they do get their air out of a tank. The deputy state archaeologist-underwater, John W. “Billy Ray” Morris III, and his archaeological dive supervisor, Greg Stratton, spend most of their workday researching databases at computers in a World War II-era cinderblock building tucked so far back in the live oaks near the entrance to Fort Fisher there’s a sign on the door that says:

Keep this Door Closed!

Snakes and other critters

are

Coming into the Building

So, at least they’ve got the reptiles covered, Indiana Jones-wise.

Morris is North Carolina’s fourth head of underwater archaeology. He met the first one, Gordon Watts, when he was 15 years old. “I was putting my wetsuit on to go surfing right behind that window right there,” says Morris, pointing out the back window of his office. “Gordon came wandering out and said, ‘What are you doin’?’ and I said, ‘I’m going surfin’ dude. What are you doing?’ and he said he was the underwater archaeologist for the state of North Carolina. I said nobody’s got that job.” 

Now, Morris does and it’s as good a fit as a dive skin. You might as well say he began prepping for it before he was in grade school. His uncle David Midgely was an underwater demolition team diver in the Navy who took his young nephew under his wing, holding him below the surface with one arm and sharing his breathing regulator with him with the other from the time Morris was 5 years old. After getting a degree at UNCW and a master’s in marine archaeology from East Carolina University, Morris built a globetrotting career out of combing through other people’s wreckage. Bermuda. France. Jamaica. Trinidad. Tobago. Ecuador. El Salvador. California. Canada. Labrador. Mexico. Nevis. St. Eustatius. The Bahamas. Spain. And, most especially, Florida, where he created the Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program. “If I’ve missed any, they’ll come back to me,” he says.

“I spent 15 years every summer working for the Naval History and Heritage Command on the CSS Alabama off the coast of Cherbourg in France,” says Morris. “Then I spent five years hanging out in Bermuda working on a Spanish messenger vessel called a patache. We recovered that entire vessel, which is kind of a rarity.” Fresh from graduate school, Morris worked on one of Lord Cornwallis’ scuttled ships in Yorktown. “We did a bunch of crap with BBC and National Geographic for that one,” he says. “But, the project that will always stick with me is the Alabama. To get to dive on that wreck was really special, plus we got to live in France three months out of the year. I had absolutely no complaints about hanging out on the French coast every summer.”

The Alabama, commanded by the legendary commercial raider Raphael Semmes, was sunk by the USS Kearsarge in a celebrated naval battle in 1864. Éduard Manet recreated the engagement in a painting that hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “It was 220 feet deep,” says Morris of the Alabama wreck. “We did the work with the French Navy because it’s inside a French exclusion zone for a nuclear submarine base. Gordon Watts was the project director. Because of the depth we had to wear two tanks on our backs, two tanks under our arms and another one on our stomachs. You only had an hour and 15 minutes that you could work on the site before the current got so bad it would blow you to England.”

Just a routine day at the office, except maybe for that time Morris’ regulator blew at 200 feet. He and Watts buddy-breathed their way to safety. “I don’t think Gordon’s heartbeat even went up,” says Morris. “When we got back to the boat I suggested it was time for a few adult beverages.”

It was, after all, France. “We would stagger three dive teams five minutes apart. First group would start something, second group would do most of the work, third group would clean up. We managed to intersperse it with cheese and red wine. I was not one of the divers that drank a glass of red wine and then dive, but the French Navy guys, they’d polish off a couple of glasses while they were suiting up. I’m like, how can you do that? They’d say, we’ve done it from birth. Those guys were really, really good.”

The wreck in Bermuda was a small messenger vessel that went down in 1582. “I made a series of research models that are on exhibit in the National Museum of Bermuda,” says Morris. “When conservation is completed we’ll put the ship back together as a focal point for the museum’s display. They took one of the site drawings I made and used it for the back of the $50 bill in Bermuda, which was really cool. I called my parents and told them. When it came out they gave me bill 00001 and I insured it and mailed it to my mom. She gets it and she’s like, ‘Your picture’s not on it, Bill.’ ‘That’s the Queen,’ I said, ‘I drew the picture on the back, Mom. They like me there but not that much.’”

If Morris is built like a linebacker, the position he played at Wilmington’s John T. Hoggard High School, Stratton looks like he could play tight end for his beloved University of Texas Longhorns. Born and raised in Beaumont, Stratton was living in Austin before moving to North Carolina. “I came to this later in life,” he says of his archaeological career. “I was a home builder and I was in the military for eight years before that. I waited until both my children graduated high school. I decided to go back to school for what Dad wanted to do. Loved history. Loved archaeology. Started looking around for a degree that has it and I ended up at East Carolina.” And, ultimately, in an office that’s hardly more than a few football fields away from the largest collection of Civil War shipwrecks in the United States.

The Cape Fear Civil War Shipwreck Discontiguous District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Wilmington’s two channel passages (there’s only one now) at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, separated by the navigational obstacle of Frying Pan Shoals, was the lone holdout in the South’s desperate attempt to thwart the Union’s naval blockade. The wrecks of the ships designed specifically to slip through the blockade, along with a few unlucky Union blockaders, remain in the shallow waters so near to shore it seems as though you could wade out and touch them.

Blockade running was a dangerous, and lucrative, business. “Fifty percent of a blockade runner’s cargo had to be military in nature. That was Confederate law,” says Morris. “It took the boat owners and the captains about 30 seconds to realize this was the most lucrative trade on the face of the planet. You can look in the records of the Wilmington Journal or Charleston or Mobile. If you wanted the latest Paris fashion or good Scotch whisky, they brought that in and that was personal profit. There were captains that made so many successful runs they were wealthy men the rest of their lives. So, you got the best engineers, the best captains, the best sailors on those boats.”

The blockade runners were unarmed, fast and camouflaged. “These were the cigarette boats of their day, 221 feet long, super advanced,” says Morris. They had iron hulls, coal-fired steam engines and state-of-the-art paddlewheels. Nothing the Union had could catch them. “They went out to island entrepôts in Bermuda or Nassau or Havana, loaded up and sprinted in. They were painted a really, really pale gray. The masts and the funnels would either fold down or telescope down. The upper decks would be painted white. There are records of some of them being painted a dark red with gray camouflage patterns. I was sitting in a bar down on the waterfront in Colombia and I saw a cigarette boat that was painted red with dark gray stripes on it and I thought about the blockade runners because I didn’t think that cigarette boat was painted that way for show. I didn’t have the audacity to walk up and ask them if I could take a picture.”

So thoroughly researched are the Civil War wrecks that of the 27 blockade runners and seven Union blockaders from Lockwood’s Folly to Bogue Inlet, there are only seven Morris figures he couldn’t go out to in their 23-foot Parker with the 250 horse four-stroke engine and lay his hands on — and that doesn’t include a pair of ironclads and a couple of post-war vessels. The laying on of hands is pretty much how Stratton came upon their last discovery, or more properly rediscovery, the Agnes E. Frye, a blockade runner built in Scotland and named after the wife of its commander, Naval Lt. Joseph Frye. Since the wrecks can be either buried under the sand or resurrected by any passing tropical storm, relocating the Frye was an archaeologist’s treasure trove. So poor was the visibility, Stratton found the Frye, whose holds may yet contain undisturbed cargo from the ship’s fourth attempt at evading Union pursuit in 1864, by “starfishing” on the bottom. “We found her with a side scan sonar,” he says. “I was the first one to drop in. The first thing I found was a piece of the hull. It took all the skin off my knuckles.”

While the current cause célèbre of North Carolina shipwrecks is Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge, site work there has slowed while preservation catches up. “For every dollar you spend in the field,” says Morris, “the rule of thumb is that you’ll spend 40 in the lab. Half of the Queen Anne’s Revenge is up, the other half is still down there. It’s going to be decades before all that stuff is conserved. The lab is really focusing on catching up on a lot of the material because that’s an extremely significant wreck.” In addition to Morris and Stratton, the Fort Fisher office has two other archaeologists, Chris Southerly and Nathan Henry, who work on conservation and environmental review projects.

The hiatus from the leftovers of North Carolina’s most famous pirate has allowed Morris and Stratton to focus their attention on the blockade runners, including the goal of creating a kind of Civil War dive park, or at least the beginnings of one, on the blockade runner Condor. “I’m a real big believer in creating a sense of stewardship through education,” says Morris. “Those wrecks don’t belong to me. They belong to every single person that lives in North Carolina. It’s our shared heritage. I want to encourage you to go out and dive on it. I want you to be as moved and as impressed as I am. I want people to go look at these, but I want them to do it responsibly.”

Condor is a more desirable choice than, say, the Agnes Frye for several reasons. “The wrecks north and east of the river mouth, I’ve seen 15-16 feet of visibility,” says Morris, far better than the murkiness of the water where Frye ran aground. Condor, which went down on its maiden voyage, is also in better shape. “The engines are still in place. The paddlewheels. The rudder is still hung. Condor is not only well-preserved, but she’s got this staggeringly cool story,” says Morris. The ship was carrying more than just war materiel. Its human cargo was the spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow, the Black Rose of the Confederacy. After passing military secrets that aided the South in the first Battle of Bull Run, Greenhow was kept under house arrest in Washington, D.C., then released and ultimately dispatched to Europe by Jefferson Davis on a diplomatic and fundraising mission. Returning on the Condor, Greenhow knew if she was captured, she’d be executed and, when the ship ran aground, she tried to escape in a rowboat. It capsized and she drowned, weighed down by the gold sovereigns sewn into her petticoats.

“I’m really looking forward to doing this,” says Morris of the dive park. “The wreck is, I think, one of the coolest out there. It will happen. I’ve just got to go through the hoops of getting the Coast Guard’s permission and getting the money to buy the buoys. I’m hoping to have the whole thing done by next summer. I’m figuring with the dive slates and everything, it’s going to cost $10,000 or less.” Funding gratefully accepted.

In the meantime, Morris and Stratton are hooking up with their counterparts from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to do the site map on another blockade runner, Virginius, also captained by Joseph Frye but not, technically speaking, a Civil War wreck. Built in the same Scottish shipyard and roughly at the same time as the Anges E. Frye, Virginius never made it into the American Civil War. “She was actually running guns for another war down in Cuba eight years later,” says Morris. “Virginius gets captured off Jamaica by a Spanish gunboat and they take her back to Cuba. They execute Frye and most of his crew.” The British then intervene and eventually a U.S. vessel goes to Cuba and brings Virginius back under tow. They sail into bad weather and Virginius goes down eight miles from the Agnes E. Frye. “I don’t know what the odds are to have two blockade runners both built on the Clyde River, both commanded by the same guy, sink within eight miles of each other after running blockades in two separate conflicts,” says Morris.

Virginius is 10 miles out in 40 feet of water. Another dive park? “That wouldn’t be my call,” says Morris. “It’s outside of state waters.”

But he can dream. PS

At the height of the Jim Crow era, little Jackson Hamlet’s Ambassadors Club hosted R&B and rock ’n roll’s greatest stars

By Bill Case

Maybe there had been some trouble with the law back in Georgia. Maybe there’d been a fight and someone died. Could be that’s why he hightailed it out of the state and made his way to the Sandhills in the 1920s. And maybe that explains why the strapping 6-foot-5, 250-pound John Nelson began using another name — Sam Arnette. One thing was certain: If he was a fugitive, Moore County was the ideal place to live on the lam, since law enforcement was only a sometime thing. Whatever the murky circumstances of Arnette’s past, he made his presence felt in the African-American enclave of Jackson Hamlet, sandwiched between Aberdeen and Pinehurst.

When Sam arrived on the scene, the community’s several hundred residents provided a significant portion of the workforce serving Pinehurst’s renowned resort. Maids, caddies, cooks, gardeners and waiters all called Jackson Hamlet home. The paychecks may not have stretched very far, but they were going to be spent somewhere. If a person of brown or black skin color fancied a bite to eat in a restaurant, however, that was a problem. In North Carolina’s mid-20th century segregated society, blacks were not welcome in any bar, restaurant, or other public accommodation where whites were present.

Black businessmen filled the void. Tiny pocket stores providing groceries and other necessities popped up in Jackson Hamlet. In the late 1930s, Sam Arnette embarked on his own entrepreneurial voyage, opening a combination filling station and restaurant on the Aberdeen-Pinehurst Road, now N.C. 5. Sam’s Cafe became a favorite meeting spot for folks swapping gossip and family news while dining on fried chicken and pork sandwiches cooked by Myrtle Houston, who would become Arnette’s second wife.

On Sept. 25, 1944 an earth-shattering explosion rocked Arnette’s business, breaking store windows and the glass in the gas pumps. Remnants of military blasting materials were found in the debris, and Sam suspected white officers from nearby Camp Mackall who had been refused service at Sam’s Cafe were responsible. Given what the higher-ups deemed to be inconclusive circumstantial evidence, the officers were never prosecuted.

After the war, Arnette’s cafe faced a different danger — competition. Just yards away, the House of Blue Lights opened, sporting a jukebox. For a nickel, recordings from a new wave of swinging black musicians like Billie Holliday, Louis Jordan and Joe Turner spun on the turntable. Couples strutted their stuff on the joint’s compact dance floor. Deep in the piney woods, accessed by a rutted sand path barely wide enough for one car to pass, James “Babe” Gaines operated yet another sweet juke joint he called Cabin in the Pines, and Jake Lawhorn’s Paradise Grill opened too.

Recognizing that the war’s end would cause business to boom at the resort, Arnette made a savvy investment that set him apart from his business competitors in the community. He reasoned new service jobs would mean new workers who would require new housing. When the opportunity arose to purchase a 25-acre grape vineyard across the Norfolk and Southern Railroad tracks on the eastern side of the highway from Sam’s Cafe, Arnette jumped on it. For an investment of $74 an acre, he became the land baron of Jackson Hamlet. New homes sprouted up where, even today, Arnette Street crosses the tracks into the “Arnette Subdivision.”

Sam kept two acres adjacent to the Norfolk and Southern tracks for something else he had in mind. Noting the popularity of the juke joints, he reckoned live music would have surefire appeal. Top black musicians were already performing in a network of bars, clubs and restaurants throughout the South, collectively known as the “Chitlin’Circuit.” Sam figured his land would be an ideal location to build a nightclub that could become a regular stop on the circuit. There were several African-American neighborhoods in the county to draw from, and if the area’s young ladies came, then the black soldiers from nearby Camp Mackall would likely break down the doors to join them.

Arnette’s dream nightclub, the Ambassadors Club, caught the eye of all who happened by. The building’s very design announced that this was a place where music was played and heard. Viewed from the road, the structure’s peculiar curvature at its south end gave the impression of a gigantic alabaster double bass lying strings-up on the ground.

Precise details of the club’s history are scarce. In the 1940s and ’50s the local white-run newspapers tended to ignore the goings on in areas where blacks lived, be it Jackson Hamlet, Taylortown or West Southern Pines. Fortunately, there are still some folks around old enough to remember Sam Arnette and his club.

Ida Mae Murchison, a 96-year-old resident of the Pine Lake facility in Carthage, is beset with the typical infirmities expected for a nonagenarian. But Mae’s mind remains sharp and when she talks about Sam Arnette and the club, her face lights up like a schoolgirl’s. Murchison broke the color line at the Carolina Hotel by becoming its first African-American chambermaid in the mid-1940s, but her moonlight job was as Sam’s ticket seller at the Ambassadors Club. She remembers collecting $2 a head, though the amount varied depending on the reputation of the performer. As many as 250 patrons would pay their way inside, a fire code being a quaint concept. Admission was good for a night of entertainment and dancing along with sandwiches prepared by Myrtle Houston in the club’s modest kitchen. Beer and wine could be purchased at the bar, tended by Mae’s husband, Brice. Long-time civic activist Carol Henry remembers that when a big show was held at the Ambassadors Club, “you couldn’t get in.” Cars filled the parking lot and spilled up one end of the road and down the other. Though the raised stage was large enough to accommodate the big bands of the ’40s, after the war, the combos tended to have three to five members, a trend that would have been welcomed by Sam Arnette and other club operators on the Chitlin’ Circuit. As Billboard Magazine reported, “the nut (i.e., guarantee) for a small unit is much lower than for a 20 piece band.”

According to Murchison, the dance floor was where the action was. There weren’t many wallflowers at the Ambassadors Club. Dressed to the nines — men in coats and ties, women dolled up in their best dresses — couples reveled in the acrobatic maneuvers characteristic of the popular swing dances. The better men dancers would lay down spectacular tap routines. A fringe benefit of Mae’s job was that Sam permitted her to dance the night away gratis once she’d collected the evening’s take. And make no mistake; Mae considered this a major perk. Husband Brice, was stuck behind the bar, so she danced with friends. She chuckled recalling her prolonged and energetic night of dancing with a local doctor who was so exhausted at the end of the evening he was forced to postpone a scheduled tonsillectomy the following day.

Asked whether stronger alcoholic spirits than beer and wine were illegally sold at the club, even at 96 Mae could not quite bring herself to confirm any bootleg activity went on. “I heard tell something about that,” she said demurely. Her 72-year-old son, Butch Murchison, was too young during the club’s heyday to be an eyewitness, but he doubts Sam or his father made liquor available on the premises, although he said both knew where it could be had on short notice. Virtually every restaurant and hotel selling beer or wine in Moore County had a way to find the hard stuff for thirsty customers. “Nobody felt there was anything wrong with selling liquor,” Butch recalls of the prevailing sentiment. On the rare occasion when a raid was planned by the authorities, it was not unheard of for some friendly public employee to provide advance notice of the impending bust.

Anytime young men (particularly soldiers on leave) are mixed together with women and alcohol, there is some risk of a disturbance, but the Ambassadors Club had surprisingly few. If an incident did occur, Sam was armed with a pistol. Though he never actually fired it, if the circumstances demanded he was known to occasionally employ it as a blunt instrument. Myrtle Houston packed heat too. According to another long-time Jackson Hamlet resident, Lillian M. Barner, who remembers Sam’s wife well, “You didn’t mess with Myrtle.”

Advertising acts for the Ambassadors Club was a two-man job. Arnette had taken a liking to Butch, not even a teenager yet, and the pair would drive Sam’s shiny ’53 Buick to African-American neighborhoods to tack up posters heralding the coming attractions. The tight-knit communities took it from there, spreading the news by word of mouth. Arnette made a lasting impression on his young sidekick. “Sam was totally no nonsense when it came to his business. No fooling around. When the radio was on, he always turned it to the news. He wanted to know what was going on in the world. Later, when I became involved with my own businesses, I was influenced by his example,” said Butch.

Securing the services of out-of-town African-American performers involved more than simply paying their performance fees. None of the hotels allowed blacks, so local Jackson Hamlet residents often housed the artists during their gigs. Sam’s house, across the road from the Ambassadors Club, provided extra beds for band members to crash. The Murchisons were among the families that guested musicians, and wide-eyed young Butch relished listening to tales of their adventures on the road.

Before the Chitlin’ Circuit came along, it was difficult for black artists and bands to find places to perform, particularly in the South. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway were exceptions whose music found favor with white audiences in the 1930s and ’40s. But performers of “race music” (mainly blues and R&B) were mostly shut out from touring until black promoters and club owners in the South created enough of a network that artists could hop from town to town playing in a series of grueling one-night stands.

The business model followed by the artists comprising the mid-century Chitlin’ Circuit matches the one still motivating the music industry today. Live shows were designed to increase the demand for the performer’s recordings; the hoped-for jump in record sales would presumably cause a corresponding boost in attendance at future shows. If fortunate, a black singer might sell enough records to land a spot on Billboard Magazine’s R&B chart. But since black artists of the late ’40s and early ’50s couldn’t expect to attract large numbers of whites to their music, their prospects for major commercial success were limited. Young talents like Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Fats Domino and James Brown barnstormed the South, playing black nightclubs and roadhouses, hoping to net a couple of hundred dollars from each gig, or at least enough to move on to the next town on the circuit. All of them performed in Jackson Hamlet at the Ambassadors Club, and all are enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The vivacious Ruth Brown became a mainstay on the circuit. When Atlantic Records released her song “Teardrops from My Eyes” in 1950, it quickly ascended to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart. It was not long before “Miss Rhythm” was the acknowledged queen of R&B. Music critics said that in the South, Ruth Brown was “better known than Coca-Cola.” When she recorded Bobby Darin’s composition “This Little Girl’s Gone Rockin’” in 1958, the song crossed over and climbed high on the pop charts.

Florida native Ray Charles hit the circuit in the early ’50s. His piano and vocal style blended gospel, jump blues, jazz, country and boogie-woogie in a new, irresistible sound. His 1954 R&B hit for the Atlantic label, “I Got a Woman,” brought Charles to the pinnacle of that genre. “What’d I Say,” released in 1959, established the man known as “The Genius” as a pop sensation as well. Charles is well-remembered for a stand he took in the battle for civil rights. In March 1961, he balked at playing a date in Augusta, Georgia, when he learned that blacks and whites were going to be separately seated. Mae Murchison’s most vivid recollection of Charles’ appearance at the Ambassadors Club occurred in the parking lot when she witnessed an angry Ray cussing a blue streak after running his hand over a fresh dent in his sedan.

Born and raised in New Orleans, piano man Antoine “Fats” Domino first came into the public eye in 1949 with his R&B record “The Fat Man.” Later efforts like “Ain’t That a Shame” (1955) and “Blueberry Hill” (1956) became massive cross-over pop hits after more mainstream artists’ (Elvis Presley and Pat Boone) renditions of R&B music paved the way for white acceptance of Fats, Ray, Little Richard and other stalwarts of the Chitlin’Circuit. Suddenly they were being hailed as pioneers of a new form of music — rock ’n’ roll. Fats later remarked, “Everybody started calling my music rock ’n’ roll. But it wasn’t anything but the same rhythm and blues I’d been playing down in New Orleans.”

While the gigs of these greats at the Ambassadors Club were memorable, it was the electrifying performance of young James Brown and his Famous Flames that most vividly sticks in Mae Murchison’s mind. A chill went up her spine when she saw “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business” on his knees shaking off his cape and pleading for the love and attention of all the young women in the house as he belted out “Please, Please, Please” to thunderous applause. Though performers often venture into the crowd to sing, the irrepressible Brown took things one step further, leading the Flames outside the club to the railroad tracks, the audience in tow, to listen in rapture as Brown’s high-powered voice echoed through the pines of Jackson Hamlet. Given that three other joints were located just a stone’s throw away from the club, the band’s foray onto the tracks gave a number of folks the unexpected privilege of watching the unbridled James Brown in action. Talk about advertising!

Just at the time many of the club’s performers were breaking through to a wider audience, Sam Arnette died, on Nov. 28, 1954, at the age of 59. It was not long before it closed down for good. Its demise didn’t mark the end of great music in the building, however. After the club property was sold to the Jones Temple Church of God in 1962, the church conducted rousing revivals featuring performances of gospel stars like the Dixie Hummingbirds and Shirley Caesar.

After several decades, the church abandoned the property and the building was razed. A passerby today won’t find any vestige of the old club or any remembrances of the many greats who preformed there: Cab Calloway, Louis Jordan, Ruth Brown, Ray Charles, Fats Domino or James Brown. Most of the buildings that housed the other joints are long gone, too. The lone exception is Sam’s gas station and cafe on Rt. 5 at the west end of Jackson Hamlet — the one that nearly blew up in 1944. A curtain store occupies the space.

Butch Murchison believes that the heyday of Sam Arnette’s Ambassadors Club was, “the happiest time for people who weren’t happy otherwise.” All that remains is the sound of a voice high up in the pines.  PS

Pinehurst resident Bill Case is PineStraw’s history man. He can be reached at Bill.Case@thompsonhine.com.