by Jay Bagwell - Chapel Hill High School Class of 1964

I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was and still is a beautiful place, located in the middle of the state. Whenever I think back about the town, I always remember it as being green with large trees, manicured lawns and lots of flowers and gardens.

Chapel Hill is the home of the University of North Carolina, the oldest state-owned university in the country. Its campus begins just the other side of Franklin Street with a low stonewall marking the boundary line. It is as if the University grew right up next to the town, which I guess is what happened; a real kind of chicken or the egg situation.

Looking down Raleigh Road from South Columbia street in the early 1960s

Large expanses of green covered the campus with brick sidewalks crisscrossing the lawns’ manicured expanse. Growing up I used to think that if I only could have just one penny for every sidewalk brick then I’d be a very rich man.

I still harbor that same wish today.


Yes, growing up in Chapel Hill was a great experience. Being a university town, you were surrounded by a lot of smart people and that’s always an advantage. I grew up with children whose parents worked for the University, along with others whose parents didn’t. All in all, the University was a constant presence in our lives. Like I said, the campus was just a stonewall away from the main street of town.

I guess what I remember most about the town has to be its people. When you walked down Franklin Street, they always made eye contact with you. Nodded and acknowledged your presence, and soon, you found yourself doing the same. When you walked down Franklin Street you spoke to everyone and everyone spoke to you. Simple greetings like, “Good afternoon,” and “How are you?” Even as a kid, you learned to acknowledge the presence of others.

Another memory was the Vietnam protest and how the people of Chapel Hill showed their feelings about the war. You see, each day they would line up along Franklin Street, students and town folk alike. That line would start at the Post Office and stretch down the sidewalk for a whole block of Franklin Street. No one said anything. There were no chanters. Few ever carried signs or banners. You just stood there in line, facing the shops along the way. Like I said, the people standing there were a cross section of Orange County at the time: men and women, students and townies, farmers and professors, shoppers and shopkeepers, even children. How long you stood there in line was up to you: five minutes, maybe fifteen, or even an hour. It didn’t matter. After you stood in line for what you thought was the right amount of time, you’d go on your way. People knew what you were doing standing there. It was a powerful form of protest.

The downtown Chapel Hill Post Office on Franklin Street in 1949

Anti-Vietnam-War protesters camped out in front of Chapel Hill Post Office 

As a kid, I always liked going up town. One of my favorite destinations was the Intimate Book Shop. After all, this was a university town. When my mother went shopping, she’d always drop me off there. The Intimate was located in one side of an old two-story wooden building at the east end of Franklin Street. The place was lined in books. Books filled the shelves and every corner. The wooden floors were old and oiled; warped by time. There were a number of comfortable chairs where you could sit and read. Yes, you could just walk in, sit down and read books to your heart’s content. You didn’t have to buy any! Of course, they did like it when you bought their books, but they seemed to look at reading as something of a “loss leader.” I spent many a Saturday reading books in a far corner of the store removed from the day-to-day. The Intimate helped me establish a habit that continues today: buying books. This way I can really enjoy them, by being able to refer back to them over and over again.

Next door to the Intimate was a record store called, Kemp’s. I discovered this unique oasis as a teenager. Owned by a gentleman named Kemp Nye, his record store was the destination of any recording artist visiting the campus. They all ended up at Kemp’s. Plastered on the walls were autographed album covers, along with concert and promotional posters. Kemp’s was another world, one of college students and hipsters. The store was filled to the brim with 33-rpm albums, sorted by music style, not by artist. This meant that you had to search for the album you wanted and as often happened came across one more to your liking. The store also boasted four listening booths. You could pick out the album you wanted, go into the booth, put it on the turntable and listen away. The booths and Kemp’s sorting system really gave you the opportunity to listen to music you normally would never get near. The listening booths also meant that you carefully inspected any record you bought to make sure it didn’t have bad scratches from too much sampling. Another habit that I’ve kept to this day.

Kemp taught us all about music and jazz. My friends and I would hang out and play the records – old blues recordings, folk music and early rock n’ roll. You name it and Kemp introduced us to it.

He used to have these great sales. The store would fill with customers and people would pile up on the street outside waiting to get in. I remember there was a sign painted over the store’s entrance. It read: “Keep Kemp’s Green. Bring Your Money.”

Kemp used to always refer to me, Alex and James as “Doctor” -- a reference to Ike Taylor, Dean of the Medical School, and their father. I thought it was cool to be considered part of the Taylor clan.

Kemp lived in China before the Revolution and had all these old picture albums. I enjoyed looking at his black & white photos of The Great Wall, Peking, and views of life in China. It was rumored that he was an ordained Buddhist monk and had a network of contacts that the CIA used for getting current information about what was happening in Red China at the height of the Cold War. He also was reputed to have one to the finest jade collections outside of China. The collection disappeared mysteriously the night the old wooden building -- containing Kemp’s and The Intimate -- caught fire and burned to the ground. Some say that Kemp set the fire for the insurance, but this was never proven. After the building burned, Kemp’s moved to a smaller location back on the corner of Rosemary Street, while The Intimate moved further west on Franklin Street, and changed its name to The Intimate Bookstore. I continued going to both stores but it was never the same.

Downtown Chapel Hill in its heyday 

Another thing my friends and I liked doing on Saturdays was taking in a movie. There were just two theaters to chose from: The Varsity and The Carolina Theatre. This was before the introduction of the Multiplex Theater, so each featured only one movie a week. You could go into the first show at one o’clock and spend the entire day there, not coming back out until 5:30 or 6:00. It cost fifty cents to get in, and a large drink and box of popcorn cost about seventy-five cents. A good deal especially when compared to today’s prices.

These Saturday movies made for good baby sitters and spending the day watching the same movie -- repeatedly -- taught you to look closely at the screen. We liked to find the con trails in the sky, or tire tracks in the desert sand of the westerns and gladiator movies that were our favorites. The camera would be tracking the progress of a wooden wheel as it rolled along the ground and there it would be: an automobile tire track. We’d laugh and consider it a real selling point for an otherwise bad “B” movie.

My friends and I also became quite adept at our weekend raiding parties with the trash dumpsters on campus; especially the one behind the Chemistry Department. The treasures we unearthed would in today’s world, cause alarm. Bottles of ether, mercury, potassium permanganate and even volatile magnesium were just a few of our finds from digging around in the garbage; not to mention the assorted beakers, test tubes, rubber hoses and rubber stoppers we liberated. We were able to set up a pretty impressive chemistry lab from these University discards. And the mineral deposits behind the Geology Department helped fill out our rock collections. Our dumpster diving allowed us to walk away with excellent examples of different varieties of quartz, mica, obsidian, pyrite, geodes and even fossils.

Yes, it was cool growing up in Chapel Hill, though we all grew up a little fast because of the University influence.

Early in his career as a political commentator -- before he became a senator -- Jessie Helms used to refer to Chapel Hill as “the Southern Capital of Liberal Atheism.” We always felt that if it upset Jessie, you knew Chapel Hill had to be a pretty neat place.

Photos are from the Charly Mann Archive

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