The last time I was in NCNB Plaza Squeaky was still selling hotdogs there so I don't know.
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UNC, Chapel Hill, and Carborro History
- Thread starter donbosco
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The great thing about the flower ladies for me was that it was a way to buy flowers for some woman I was perhaps romancing without being 'romantic'. Since they were both cheap and well, from the flower ladies, it wasn't like going to a florist and getting something impressive. More of a 'passing by and pickked these up" casual type of thing. Who could turn down flowers from tge flower ladies?!
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Because I am old, was stupid to begin with, and ain't getting any brighter as I age, I thought I remembered a quote from "Annie Hall" that I recalled as, "So there were many young women when you were . . .." And that was an hour out of my life I'm never getting back. The actual quote was from the character played by Tony Robert's, "So there were many men interested in you?" To which the response was, "I was quite the lively dancer."
Annie Hall was a great movie. When it finally made it to TV, the local ABC affiliate in Raleigh refused to play it in the normal time slot because of it's "mature" subject matter. This was back when this ABC affiliate was still partially owned/influenced by Jesse Helms.
ETA: This was 20 years after this same TV station had no problem routinely showing episodes of "The Rifleman" and "Combat" where dozens of people per episode were gunned down as if it were no more than a Sunday afternoon stroll.
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The Flower Ladies didn’t move into the NCNB Plaza corridor willingly or by choice.
Franklin Street merchants had been after the Town Council to banish the hippie sidewalk “merchants” who were blocking the walkways, peeing in alleys, selling stuff without paying rent, etc.
The Town Council finally banned the sidewalk sellers. Either the ordnance was so poorly written that it mistakenly banished the Flower Ladies or a carve-out allowing the Flower Ladies was deemed unconstitutional or something.
I remember. They did have that side alley carve out for a while, iirc.
A friend of mine got caught up in that. He used to sell records on the street in front of Ledbetter Pickards ( is that right? I think that's what it was called.)
Those were two Chapel Hill icons; although Jim Clark cut my hair at the Tar Heel Barber Shop before he opened his own place on Elliot Road.
January 28, 2009
donbosco
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“In Chapel Hill among a friendly folk, this old university, the first state university to open its doors, stands on a hill set in the midst of beautiful forests under the skies that give their color and their charm to the life of youth gathered here… there is music in the air of the place.” — Frank Porter Graham, President of the University of North Carolina, 1931. I always appreciated this from Dr. Frank.
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Oh I remember a lady that would come to my house to cut my hair-and bring some smoke
donbosco
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My brother is 9 years older than me and was living in Chapel Hill, having graduated in 72, sold real estate, and later after taking accounting classes, earned his CPA. He was all about telling me what to do and where when I arrived in 1976. He took more interest in my life for about a year than he had ever done before or since. I think it was because he was single and I knew girls. He didn't make out with any of my friends but I managed some tet-a-tets with some of his.
He insisted that I hang out at Kirkpatrick's on Rosemary -- which was fine as I liked Tim the owner-ex-football player, and his bartenders, Mike Bledsoe, and Mike Rogers. As I understand it Kirkpatrick's was kind of the next iteration of Clarence's, which I never knew. Brother Bosco also told me that I had to get my hair cut by Jim Clark, eat at Brady's, and major in Business. I tried the first two out but soon abandoned them. Never took a Business class.
But Kirk's was some good advice -- there were plenty of characters there like Shike, T-Bone, and Cat Man even wandered through sometimes. Thel from the Bakery also stopped by. And The Shack was next door where I met Wheaties, played the puck bowling machine, and punched up "Helter Skelter" on the jukebox. Kirk's was pretty much my first true bar hang-out for my first three years or so.
He insisted that I hang out at Kirkpatrick's on Rosemary -- which was fine as I liked Tim the owner-ex-football player, and his bartenders, Mike Bledsoe, and Mike Rogers. As I understand it Kirkpatrick's was kind of the next iteration of Clarence's, which I never knew. Brother Bosco also told me that I had to get my hair cut by Jim Clark, eat at Brady's, and major in Business. I tried the first two out but soon abandoned them. Never took a Business class.
But Kirk's was some good advice -- there were plenty of characters there like Shike, T-Bone, and Cat Man even wandered through sometimes. Thel from the Bakery also stopped by. And The Shack was next door where I met Wheaties, played the puck bowling machine, and punched up "Helter Skelter" on the jukebox. Kirk's was pretty much my first true bar hang-out for my first three years or so.
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SmilingJack
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Used to get my hair when I had it cut by Mac(Snipes) under Hectors. He had a globe with French Indochina instead of Vietnam on it. I saw Dean Smith and others down there as the hair cut was $2.25!
Also I once got to drink a beer in the basement of Merritts which I am pretty sure few of you ever knew was there! Take that Don! Lol
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te NC’s moonshine legend, a JoCo kingpin with cigars and Cadillacs By Josh Shaffer
At the height of his whiskey-soaked infamy, Percy Flowers earned over $1 million a year, enough to buy a fleet of Cadillacs and ride around hardscrabble Johnston County like an untouchable kingpin, a pistol in his pocket and a cigar on his lip. He owned more than 5,000 acres of farmland, all of it stocked with moonshine stills tucked in the woods, hidden inside tobacco barns and concealed under bluffs of the Neuse River — an operation so vast he bought sugar in 40,000-pound loads.
Flowers’ bootleg hooch enjoyed such a reputation that night clubs in Manhattan developed a code for the bartenders: four fingers wrapped around the glass meant fill ‘er up with Johnston County corn liquor. And yet, in more than 50 years as a notorious moonshiner, Flowers spent almost no time behind bars, partly because he paid off jurors and scared witnesses away from courthouses. When he did serve time, he served it for tax evasion.
But beyond his fearful image, Flowers enjoyed the reputation of a country-boy Robin Hood, showering his neighbors with money. For decades in Johnston County, churches got built and sharecroppers got fed thanks to his illicit liquor cash. Once, on a rare night in jail, he offered to buy T-bone steaks for all 164 inmates. “Largess, dash and arrogance characterize Flowers at work and at play,” wrote The Saturday Evening Post in 1958, profiling the moonshiner over six pages. “He is a cool gambler, hardy drinker and sports enthusiast. He likes to drive expensive, powerful cars, of which he customarily has three or four available, with the accelerator jammed to the floor-board.”
Moonshine king Percy Flowers as he appeared in a Saturday Evening Post profile in 1958.
Somehow, no book has ever told the story of Eastern North Carolina’s king of backwoods booze, an oversight that Raleigh author and folklorist Oakley Dean Baldwin has thankfully corrected. In “J. Percy Flowers, Master Distiller,” he traces the moonshine wunderkind from his first batch as a teenager in roughly 1919, when he stumbled on a still in the dark and discovered a farmhand named Lester bent over some barrels. It took a year of Lester’s teaching before Flowers could turn out a passable jug, but he managed to produce a blend that neither burned a hole through a drinker’s esophagus nor struck him blind from lead poisoning — risks of the moonshine trade.
What land Flowers could buy he leased to tenant farmers growing tobacco, cotton and corn, shielding his true source of income. What land he couldn’t buy he still managed to pull into his sphere of moonshine influence, recruiting cooperative farmers and stuffing cash inside their mailboxes in exchange for keeping mum. “While we’re dealing with a man who hasn’t had half the respect for the law a good citizen is supposed to have, he has a lot of good qualities,” a federal judge once said. “I don’t think he’s a mean man, a vicious man. If he were, he wouldn’t have as many friends. I’d like to have as many.”
Percy Flowers from Johnston County outside his country store and filling station. Courtesy of Oakley Dean Baldwin
Despite his flashy image, Flowers remained an unapologetic country boy, keeping a barn full of fighting roosters and a kennel full of fox hounds — one of which, named Coy, cost $15,000. By the Depression, Flowers was distilling liquor inside 1,500-gallon “submarine” tanks hidden underwater. He equipped his cars with short-wave radios to monitor police traffic. Every three or four months, he walked into First Citizens Bank in Smithfield with $20,000 in small bills, exchanging them for hundreds he kept locked in a safe, stacked a foot high and a foot deep. He once shot a sheriff in the bottom as he bent over a still, peppering his rear end with birdshot. He once clubbed a “revenuer” over the head with a pistol. He once threw punches at a news photographer who tried to snap his picture, telling him, “I’d give $5,000 for a shotgun. None of you better come to Johnston County.” Police once poured 348 gallons of Flowers’ whiskey down a Smithfield gutter. Yet in the courtroom, juries would deadlock. Charges got dropped. Sentences got chopped in half.
Once, Flowers got off with three days in jail when he explained that 22 sharecropping families depended on him. Another time, in 1936, when a judge sentenced him along with two brothers, he successfully argued, “Your honor, won’t be nobody to look after the farm. Will you let us go one at a time?” Another time, he followed along behind a federal agent scouring his land for a still and playfully offered to double his salary. “If you do what I tell you,” he told the revenuer, “you can retire a whole lot sooner, with a lot more money.”
The story of Johnston County liquor escapades strikes a personal note with Baldwin, who spent a long career as a Wake County sheriff’s deputy. He met Flowers in person only once during the 1970s, when he stepped inside the moonshine czar’s country store. At the time, the future deputy was still living in his native West Virginia and had only come to Garner to visit his brother-in-law. But from behind the counter, Flowers eyed Baldwin warily, asking who he was and where he came from, uttering the phrase that makes any northerner nervous: “I knew you weren’t from around here.”
Flowers died in 1982, not too many years after Baldwin clapped eyes on him. Though he had largely run out of money, he still owned more than 200 fox hounds and dozens of fighting cocks by Baldwin’s count. Few criminals he would meet in the ensuing decades could supply a book’s pages with such delicious detail.
“This story really needs to be a movie,” Baldwin said. “One day, I think it will be.” Moonshine is, of course, now bottled and sold legally — a tradition made far less glamorous by becoming respectable. But Baldwin imagines Flowers rising out of his boozy legend, reborn as a folk hero. Imagine the tourists Johnston County could pull off Interstate 95 with a Percy Flowers Moonshine Festival, complete with virtual-reality Cadillac races and rooster fights. What fun it would be to wear a souvenir wide-brimmed hat cocked at a jaunty angle, chomp on a candy cigar and sip firewater out of a fruit jar — thumbing one’s nose at a boring, straitlaced world.
At the height of his whiskey-soaked infamy, Percy Flowers earned over $1 million a year, enough to buy a fleet of Cadillacs and ride around hardscrabble Johnston County like an untouchable kingpin, a pistol in his pocket and a cigar on his lip. He owned more than 5,000 acres of farmland, all of it stocked with moonshine stills tucked in the woods, hidden inside tobacco barns and concealed under bluffs of the Neuse River — an operation so vast he bought sugar in 40,000-pound loads.
Flowers’ bootleg hooch enjoyed such a reputation that night clubs in Manhattan developed a code for the bartenders: four fingers wrapped around the glass meant fill ‘er up with Johnston County corn liquor. And yet, in more than 50 years as a notorious moonshiner, Flowers spent almost no time behind bars, partly because he paid off jurors and scared witnesses away from courthouses. When he did serve time, he served it for tax evasion.
But beyond his fearful image, Flowers enjoyed the reputation of a country-boy Robin Hood, showering his neighbors with money. For decades in Johnston County, churches got built and sharecroppers got fed thanks to his illicit liquor cash. Once, on a rare night in jail, he offered to buy T-bone steaks for all 164 inmates. “Largess, dash and arrogance characterize Flowers at work and at play,” wrote The Saturday Evening Post in 1958, profiling the moonshiner over six pages. “He is a cool gambler, hardy drinker and sports enthusiast. He likes to drive expensive, powerful cars, of which he customarily has three or four available, with the accelerator jammed to the floor-board.”
Moonshine king Percy Flowers as he appeared in a Saturday Evening Post profile in 1958.
Somehow, no book has ever told the story of Eastern North Carolina’s king of backwoods booze, an oversight that Raleigh author and folklorist Oakley Dean Baldwin has thankfully corrected. In “J. Percy Flowers, Master Distiller,” he traces the moonshine wunderkind from his first batch as a teenager in roughly 1919, when he stumbled on a still in the dark and discovered a farmhand named Lester bent over some barrels. It took a year of Lester’s teaching before Flowers could turn out a passable jug, but he managed to produce a blend that neither burned a hole through a drinker’s esophagus nor struck him blind from lead poisoning — risks of the moonshine trade.
What land Flowers could buy he leased to tenant farmers growing tobacco, cotton and corn, shielding his true source of income. What land he couldn’t buy he still managed to pull into his sphere of moonshine influence, recruiting cooperative farmers and stuffing cash inside their mailboxes in exchange for keeping mum. “While we’re dealing with a man who hasn’t had half the respect for the law a good citizen is supposed to have, he has a lot of good qualities,” a federal judge once said. “I don’t think he’s a mean man, a vicious man. If he were, he wouldn’t have as many friends. I’d like to have as many.”
Percy Flowers from Johnston County outside his country store and filling station. Courtesy of Oakley Dean Baldwin
Despite his flashy image, Flowers remained an unapologetic country boy, keeping a barn full of fighting roosters and a kennel full of fox hounds — one of which, named Coy, cost $15,000. By the Depression, Flowers was distilling liquor inside 1,500-gallon “submarine” tanks hidden underwater. He equipped his cars with short-wave radios to monitor police traffic. Every three or four months, he walked into First Citizens Bank in Smithfield with $20,000 in small bills, exchanging them for hundreds he kept locked in a safe, stacked a foot high and a foot deep. He once shot a sheriff in the bottom as he bent over a still, peppering his rear end with birdshot. He once clubbed a “revenuer” over the head with a pistol. He once threw punches at a news photographer who tried to snap his picture, telling him, “I’d give $5,000 for a shotgun. None of you better come to Johnston County.” Police once poured 348 gallons of Flowers’ whiskey down a Smithfield gutter. Yet in the courtroom, juries would deadlock. Charges got dropped. Sentences got chopped in half.
Once, Flowers got off with three days in jail when he explained that 22 sharecropping families depended on him. Another time, in 1936, when a judge sentenced him along with two brothers, he successfully argued, “Your honor, won’t be nobody to look after the farm. Will you let us go one at a time?” Another time, he followed along behind a federal agent scouring his land for a still and playfully offered to double his salary. “If you do what I tell you,” he told the revenuer, “you can retire a whole lot sooner, with a lot more money.”
The story of Johnston County liquor escapades strikes a personal note with Baldwin, who spent a long career as a Wake County sheriff’s deputy. He met Flowers in person only once during the 1970s, when he stepped inside the moonshine czar’s country store. At the time, the future deputy was still living in his native West Virginia and had only come to Garner to visit his brother-in-law. But from behind the counter, Flowers eyed Baldwin warily, asking who he was and where he came from, uttering the phrase that makes any northerner nervous: “I knew you weren’t from around here.”
Flowers died in 1982, not too many years after Baldwin clapped eyes on him. Though he had largely run out of money, he still owned more than 200 fox hounds and dozens of fighting cocks by Baldwin’s count. Few criminals he would meet in the ensuing decades could supply a book’s pages with such delicious detail.
“This story really needs to be a movie,” Baldwin said. “One day, I think it will be.” Moonshine is, of course, now bottled and sold legally — a tradition made far less glamorous by becoming respectable. But Baldwin imagines Flowers rising out of his boozy legend, reborn as a folk hero. Imagine the tourists Johnston County could pull off Interstate 95 with a Percy Flowers Moonshine Festival, complete with virtual-reality Cadillac races and rooster fights. What fun it would be to wear a souvenir wide-brimmed hat cocked at a jaunty angle, chomp on a candy cigar and sip firewater out of a fruit jar — thumbing one’s nose at a boring, straitlaced world.
donbosco
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Speaking of drinking…
Question. I love The Dead Mule Club, even tended bar there briefly. And I remember Oxbow Music - bought tickets for shows there from time to time. But wasn’t there a beer bar in this little house on Franklin Street before Oxbow?
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I seem to recall a bar there. Briefly. But that may not mean as much as it used to. Oxbow had a nice run.
Speaking of drinking…
Question. I love The Dead Mule Club, even tended bar there briefly. And I remember Oxbow Music - bought tickets for shows there from time to time. But wasn’t there a beer bar in this little house on Franklin Street before Oxbow?