by Charly Mann

Kemp Battle Nye was a remarkable and bigger than life human being. He once told me that he lived his life by these words of Lao-Tse, the 6th century BC Chinese philosopher and father of Taoism; “The here and now is all there is. If one wishes to be memorialized, he best be about it while he lives.”

Kemp at his prime in 1958

 
Selling Records by the inch in 1957

Kemp is primarily remembered in Chapel Hill as the personality behind the large record store he ran from 1955 to 1966 that bore his name, on East Franklin Street. Kemp was our most indelible citizen because he was charming, distinguished, handsome, incredibly energetic, gregarious, and flamboyant, a bon vivant, a natural storyteller, and one of the greatest pitchman who ever lived. Remarkably these are only a small part of the extraordinary characteristics that made this man. He also was a daring Asian Adventurer in the 1930s, the assistant to a charlatan mountain doctor, a highly decorated marine officer in the Second World War, and in his last years of life, the author of at least five fascinating and semi-autobiographical books.

Kemp in 1932 after his freshman year of college

 
Kemp's very first sale in 1955 &  1948 ad for Abernethy's which seven years later would become Kemp's and The Intimate Bookstore

Kemp was born in Winterville, North Carolina, a small town south of Greenville, on December 16, 1915. Soon after his birth his family moved to the unincorporated town of Grassy Creek, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, on the Virginia border, where his father got a job teaching Cherokees. There, the family, which included three other brothers and two sisters, rarely had enough money for food. Much of what they ate they hunted or foraged for, including bear, pheasant, and rabbit.

Kemp Battle Nye - Horse Marine in Peking China, 1935

Kemp Stays Open All Night, 1964

At the age of twelve, Kemp went to work as the buggy diver and assistant to a mountain Doctor and raconteur named Doc Waddell. He was paid 25 cents a day with room and board. The doctor, Kemp learned, had five remedies for sickness – iron, strychnine, quinine, aspirin, and more aspirin. Kemp helped him combine these ingredients into eight different colored pills. The Doctor found that at least one of his pills would eventually cure almost all of his sick patients. Years later Kemp would recount his experiences with the Doctor in his first published book, Ripshin.

Kemp's Record Store, 1955
Note the sidewalks are still dirt. Next door is the Intimate Bookstore, and The Dairy Bar which had incredible donuts that I think Krispy Kreme copied.

In the late summer of 1931, at age 16, he set off on foot with $50 sewn into the linings of his pants to start school at the University of North Carolina. The 147-mile trip took seven days, and he did almost all his walking at night because of the hot weather. He got his food along the journey from roadside gardens. As a freshman he was known as a great runner, swimmer, and dare taker. He once bet a fellow student that he could swing like a monkey across the trees and vines in Cocker arboretum without touching the ground. Winning that bet got him a week’s worth of free lunches.

By 1932 the United States was at the height of the Depression, and Kemp could no longer afford to go to UNC. Wanting to see Europe, Kemp lied about his age, then seventeen, and joined the Marines. He was sent to China as part of the Horse Marine Guards that protected the United States ambassador in Peking. This elite mounted detachment Kemp said was "trained by the descendents of Genghis Khan, and fought recklessly, loved carelessly, and lived dangerously."

During this period Japan invaded China, and the weakened government of Chaing Kai Check was also fighting a communist insurgency led by Mao Zedong. When the American detachment in Peking was cut off from their supply of American money to pay their troops and employees, Kemp was smuggled through Japanese lines to rendezvous with an American ship off the coast of China. He was given $250,000 in $20 bills, which he placed on the saddlebags of his horse. On the way back he was surrounded by Japanese troops, and only avoided being killed when he got his Mongolian pony to leap over a twelve-foot embankment. Unfortunately, for Kemp, he was shot in the shoulder the next day by friendly Chinese troops who mistook him for a Japanese soldier. Luckily his wound was not severe, and he eventually got back to the American embassy with all of the money.

In 1936 shortly before Pearl S. Buck won the Nobel Prize for The Good Earth, Kemp became her lover. He was surprised that someone as distinguished as Buck would want to have an affair with a young corporal, but in later years attributed it to Agnes Smedly's insight that “Love is just good old raw sex in action.”

For several years Kemp had an Oriental Shop on the right side of his store. By the 1960s it had become the location of Court's Drug Store, which was also destroyed by the 1966 fire.

In 1938 Kemp became a courier for American diplomats and military personal in China. In this capacity he had many long and dangerous missions throughout Asia. At the end of one he went into a restaurant in Saigon for some chop suey, and was seated at a table next to four older Vietnamese men. He noted that a monkey was placed under their table, and saw just the top of its skull emerging from a hole at the center of the table. Suddenly a man took a large knife and whacked off the top of the monkey’s head. The four men then proceeded to eat the monkey’s brain.

Also in 1938 he bought a slave girl at a rural market, and gave her her freedom. She stayed on with him as his cook, then lover, and according to one version of the story his wife. She was beautiful, spoke very good English, and was half American. They had two children, both of whom died at the hands of the Japanese. When Kemp was sent back to America in 1940, he tried to bring his wife, but was unable to get permission to do so. Kemp was never to hear from her again, and said that for the rest of his life he was haunted by her memory.  

Crowds inside Kemp's in 1957

Kemp came back to Chapel Hill in 1940 after his discharge from the Marines and got a job working for “Ab” Milton Abernathy at his Intimate Book Store, which was located across from Graham Memorial. Kemp worked there as a typewriter repairman and clerk until he was recalled to the Marines soon after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. He served in the South Pacific during World War II, participating in some of the bloodiest fighting in the war at Saipon, Taniam, and Iowa Jima where he came under extremely heavy fire. He received two Purple Hearts for wounds he sustained in battles there. He left the marines for good in 1946 at the rank of captain.

Kemp came back to Chapel Hill in 1946, and returned to work at the Intimate as the manager of the store’s record department. By 1950 Kemp claimed it had the largest selection of phonograph albums in the South. Besides running the record shop, he also became a licensed surveyor, joining a firm called Guiterrez, Abernathy, and Nye.

In 1954 the Intimate was purchased by Walter Kuralt, and soon moved to the main part of Franklin Street. Milton Abernathy owned the old dilapidated building the Intimate was located in, and worked out an arrangement with Kemp to turn the entire building into a record store. The name of that store became Kemp’s, the greatest record store Chapel Hill has ever known. Most of us have always thought the business was owned by Kemp, but it seems it was always partly, or entirely, owned by Abernathy, and Kemp was the manager.

Kemp in 1955

Kemp's motto - "Keep Kemp's Green". The Eastgate Shopping Center Store was opened in 1961

Visiting Kemp’s Record Store was always a wonderful experience. The store was filled with records of every style and category, except rock, which Kemp abhorred. He once said he never sold "that Elvis crap". The store always had a mystical aura. There were hand carved jade and ivory figurines displayed in glass cabinets throughout the store, and there was often the smell of incense, and Tibetan or Classical Chinese music playing.  I became enamored with the store and the man when I was six, and bought in rapid succession three albums from him; the motion picture soundtrack of Oklahoma, the Overtures of Rossini, and the Burl Ives album entitled Sings for Fun. For most of the next ten years I became a fixture at the store, and a disciple of the man. I remember him telling me when I was eight that he was a Buddhist, and showing me several Buddhas that were in the store. I became enchanted with the idea of becoming a Buddhist until I was twelve, and I was astonished to find Kemp getting confirmed in Episcopal Church the same time as me.

Kemp was not really a music person, but a showman and huckster. He could have sold and promoted anything, and just happened to be in the record business. He always had a sales gimmick to get people into his store, from selling records by the inch, pound, to sales that would run all night. He would often boast if he didn’t have the record you were looking for nobody else would. Unfortunately this was not true. The much smaller album selection at McGinty’s Sports Shop, in the center of Franklin Street, almost always had a better selection of current and popular albums than Kemp's. By the late 50’s rock and roll had replaced folk, classical, and pop vocal as the most popular music in Chapel Hill, and Kemp's never adapted to this change. At the same time 45 rpm hit singles were becoming much more popular than albums, and Kemp only sold 45s for a short time. By 1964, when the Beatles became a worldwide musical phenomena, Kemp’s had become irrelevant. The Record Bar opened a store just a short walk from Kemps that not only sold 45s, but also had a great selection of rock records.

 
The ad on the left appeared on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. The ad is also for the Record and Tape Center in Durham, which had just opened. The other ad is from 1955.

A fire heavily damaged Kemp’s on May 6th, 1966. The already crumbling building was condemned, but Kemp continued selling records there until a few months later when another fire set by two teenage girls destroyed what was left of Kemp's. A few months later Kemp began selling records out of a tent he put up on the lot where his store had been, but the era of Kemp's Record Store was over. He tried for a while running the Record and Tape Center in Durham (which was later the first record store I would manage), and later had a small “Hippie” style music and paraphernalia store called Kemp's Ahead Shop.

The July 1966 fire that destroyed Kemp's

The remains of Kemp's and Court's Drug Store (right) after the fire

Kemp's literally rose from the ashes in October of 1966 into a tent on the lot where his store had been. 

Kemp retired from the music business in 1977, and spent most of his remaining years writing books about his daring exploits in 1930’s China, and his youth in the mountains of North Carolina. His book Ripshin was published in 1993. He also assembled a book made up of some of the 15,000 photographs he took in his years in China that he wanted to call A UNC Tarheel in China. Among the photos were those of public decapitations and people frozen to death after fleeing the Japanese to the mountains of China. Kemp died on April 28, 1994. He told me that he wanted his ashes scattered on the Nankow Pass portion of the Great Wall, which is located northwest of Peking.

The Franklin Street Frenchman

Kemp referred to himself as the Franklin Street Frenchman, and often advertised his store as Chez Kemp’s. It was not uncommon to see him wearing a beret in the mid 1950s. He claimed to be a descendent of the great Napoleonic General Michel Ney (Marechal Ney is the French spelling) who served with Napoleon until his defeat at Waterloo. He was known as the bravest of the brave, and perhaps the cleverest of the clever. He was condemned to death and publicly executed for his service to Napoleon in 1815, but according to Kemp and some other serious scholars, his death was staged and he escaped to the United States, where he changed his name to Peter Stuart Nye. He lived near Salisbury, married and raised a family, and died in 1846. He told several people on his deathbed his true identity. Kemp’s own exploits in China, World War II, and in the business world, mirror Ney's traits of coolness under adversity, courageousness, and quick thinking. One of the highlights of his later years was staying at Saint-Paul de Vence, one of the most beautiful villages in Provence, with his wife Nancy.

The Franklin Street Frenchman's Chez Kemp's

by Charly Mann

Crook's Corner, which is located at 610 West Franklin Street, has been one of Chapel Hill's most acclaimed restaurants since it opened in 1982. It took its name from Rachel Crook who once operated three small businesses in the same location. She had converted a former gas station into a laudromat, a fabric store, and a produce and fish market. Besides running these stores, in 1951, this single, 71 year old woman was also a graduate student at UNC in Economics.

Site of Rachel Crook's business and residence in 1951

Unfortunately, Ms. Crook is best remembered as the victim of a horrible murder. On the night of August 29th, 1951, she was forcibly taken from her small apartment that was attached to her business, to an abandoned road about four miles south of Hillsborough, and there raped and then brutally murdered. The crime took place not far from the site of the New Hope Church. For decades it has been the folklore of Chapel Hill that her murder was unsolved, but I think there is little doubt that her killer was a Burlington bulldozer operator named Hobart Lee.

 
Rachel Crook and the restaurant named in her honor

These are the facts of the case. On the evening of August 29th Rachel was at her business. Around 8:00 PM several people along the sidewalks, and in cars leading from Crook's business, testified they heard a woman screaming from a green pickup truck that was traveling towards Columbia Street, and then down Airport Road in the direction of Hillsborough. The next morning, on August 30th, Highway Patrolman Robert Thomas found her body lying on its back in a pool of caked blood. Her face was so badly battered that it was unrecognizable. The white smock she wore was pulled up over her waist.

The SBI and Orange County Sheriffs quickly made a detailed investigation of the crime. Within a week they had arrested Hobart Lee, then 34, for the murder. The case against him seemed exceptionally convincing, and I will now detail most of the evidence.

1. Tire tracks at the murder scene matched those on Lee's truck. SBI special agent James R. Durham found that the tracks in the road next to where her body was discovered were created by three U.S. Royal recaps and one Seiberling tire. These matched the tires on Lee's truck, and were an unlikely combination to occur on any other vehicle.
2. Several of the Chapel Hill witnesses who had heard a woman screaming said the sounds came from a green truck that matched the description of Lee's.
3. There were other witnesses who confirmed seeing a truck matching Lee's near New Hope Church that evening.
4. There was blood under Ms. Crook's nails indicating she had tried to fight off her attacker. When Lee was arrested he had scratches on his arms and face.
5. Lee had a record of violent assaults and attempted rape on women dating back more than ten years.
6. When Lee was arrested he told Orange County Sheriff Sam Latta that he was so drunk on the evening that the crime took place that he had no recollection of what he did that night.
7. Lee passed through Chapel Hill twice each day on his way from Burlington to Cary where he was working on a road project. His route took him directly by Crook's store.
8. Lee never denied that he assaulted and killed Crook.
9. At the trial, his lawyer never called a single witness to counter the state's evidence or offer an alibi for Lee.
10. A heel mark was found at the scene of the crime that exactly matched one on Lee's shoe.

So why wasn't Lee convicted? First, because the case was not tried in Chapel Hill, but in Hillsborough, at the Orange County Courthouse. The event was like a media circus. The courthouse was freshly painted and given a new floor for the trial. The jury was primarily made up of rural residents with traditional southern Christian roots, a fact that would have a large effect on the outcome of the trial. Second, Lee's lawyer used an ingenious defense under the circumstances. After the prosecution rested its case with more than a dozen witnesses and an array of incriminating evidence, Lee's attorney said he would rest his case and not call a single witness to rebut all the damning evidence or offer an alibi for his client. Instead, he made a closing plea to the jury which he began by saying all the evidence against Lee was "circumstantial," since there was no actual witness to the murder. Then he delivered more of a sermon than a summation, liberally quoting verses from the Bible and making reference to Jesus, finally culminating with a quote from the Old Testament that said it was better to let several guilty men go free than convict one innocent man. His tactics worked. In less than 90 minutes the Jury found Lee innocent, and the man who almost certainly killed Rachel Crook was free.

Orange County Courthouse 1950

Today with DNA testing I believe we could conclusively prove Lee was guilty. This might require exhuming Crook and Lee's bodies. (I suspect Lee is now deceased – he would be 93 today if still alive.) If you are interested in resolving this horrible crime I urge you to contact the Chapel Hill Police, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, or the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to see if they can re-examine the physical evidence using modern forensic methods.

In the above-illustrated portraits of Chapel Hill from 1930, you will note several groups of students hitchhiking toward Durham. In those days the streets were packed with students urging every car that went by to pick them up. If the car did not stop, it was common for the students to make rude jesters and catcalls at the driver. Durham offered these young men more restaurants, theaters, stores, and girls than Chapel Hill.

The Strowds were long time business and land owners in Chapel Hill. They had been in the livery stable business before the car business, and also had one of the town's first restaurants.  

This is the theater that everyone in crowding into in the above illustration.

By 1930 Chapel Hill had gone from being a small country village to a town that had aspects of a small city. Massive structures were being planned throughout the University including the Bell tower that was to include a large park and a pond. The sidewalks on both sides of Franklin Street had been transformed from dirt and mud to pavement. 

The north side of Franklin Street in 1930

There were a record number of students enrolled at UNC that year, 2759. The pressures of the modern world were also taking a toll on the population. For a town of less than 5000, suicide and depression were becoming a common occurrence. That year for example, L.J. Bell, a German professor who was one the most prominent members of the UNC faculty, was a suicide victim. He was only twenty-two, and had graduated with highest honors from UNC in three years at 19 in 1927. He later received a master’s degree. Besides German, he was fluent in French, Italian and Hungarian

While the above prices seem inexpensive by today's standards, by 1936 as the Depession worsened, restaurant meals in Chapel Hill were often less than half what they were in 1930.

There were other barbers offering haircuts for 25 cents in Chapel Hill in 1930. You can see this barber shop on the left-hand side of the theater in the photo in this article.

All the ads in this article are from 1930s Chapel Hill newspapers.

by Charly Mann

While Chapel Hill has a reputation for being a progressive and liberal place, it was not long ago when slaves were a fundamental part of the town and University. Many of the town's building including The Chapel of the Cross were built with slave labor. Also many students had their personal slaves with them while attending the University.

Twenty-Dollar Reward. 1839

Ran off from the university, on the night of the 20th instant, a negro man by the names of JAMES, who has for the last four years attended at Chapel Hill in the capacity of a college servant. He is of dark complexion, in stature five feet six or eight inches high, and compactly constructed; speaks quick and with ease, and has the habit of shaking his head in conversation. He is of doubtless well dressed, and has a considerable quantity of clothing. He is presumed that he will make for Norfolk or Richmond with the view of taking passage for some of the free states, or of going on and associating himself with the Colonization Society. It is supposed that he has with him a horse of the following description: a sorrel roan, four feet six or seven inches high, hind feet white, with a very long tail, which where it joins the body it white of flax colour. A premium of twenty dollars will be given for the apprehension of said slave. The subscriber would request any one who may apprehend the boy to direct their communication to Chapel Hill.

In 1790 there were 2060 slaves living in and around Chapel Hill. By 1860 fully one third of the population of Orange County were slaves. In Chapel Hill most slaves did household work or labored in carpentry and construction. The University also had slaves as cooks and maintenance workers.

On the positive side, almost a quarter of a century before the Civil War, on October 22, 1834, the largest student group at UNC, the Dialectic Society, said that slavery should be abolished. Three years later, on March 11, 1937, they even proclaimed that the slave-holding states of the South should not secede from the Union.

A fascinating fact of North Carolina history is that even when slavery was legal there was a sizable free black population in the state. More than 20,000 of the free blacks even had the right to vote until 1835.

UNC Students in 1876 with black servant sitting in front

By 1876 slavery was illegal. Students now had "Negro servants" who did exactly the same work as student slaves had done before the Civil War.

by Charly Mann

Many of our best memories of Chapel Hill occurred in a favorite bar. Throughout the decades there have been more than one hundred wonderful taverns that have each catered to a specific group of residents. The pinnacle of bar diversity occurred in the 1970s.

The Bacchae was located behind the Zoom-Zoom and offered many items from the Zoom's menu.

A favorite of the preppie crowd was The Shack located on Rosemary Street. It was located in a dilapidated wooden building covered in kudzu and had a dirt floor. A couple of scenes from the movie Three in the Attic were filmed there.

The Electric Company was the most progressive gay bar in the South during the 1970s. Many gay men said it was the first place where they felt comfortable expressing their sexuality.

The Cave is Chapel Hill's oldest bar, dating back to 1968. It is located down a small alley in the center of Franklin Street. They feature a wonderful array of great bands in the evening. It is also famous for being dog friendly, even providing water dishes for your canine sidekick.

My favorite bar during this time was Town Hall. It was huge and had a large stage where concerts were held almost every evening. It was the primary venue for local bands, and often hosted major touring acts as diverse as John Stewart, The Dillards, Taj Mahal, and George Hamilton IV. It was also the best pick-up spot in town.

Finally there was Clarence’s Bar & Grill, a long time favorite of the red-neck and hard-hat crowd.

by Charly Mann

This is the original Pickwick that stood on the north side of Franklin Street, and burned down in 1922.

Charlie Chaplin was the biggest movie star in the world in February 1928 when this opened in Chapel Hill. Look at competing entertainment in Durham (see Ziegfield Follies ad below) and the Pickwick (just below the Ziegfield Follies ad) the same week and their price of admission.

1928 marked the last full year of economic prosperity Chapel Hill until 1948. It was also a major turning point in the local theater business. The Pickwick Theater had been the mainstay for entertainment in the village from 1909 to 1927. It was originally located in a modest wood frame building on the north side of Franklin Street. In 1922 a fire destroyed it, and a few years later it moved into an elaborate large brick-framed structure across the street. It was there that the community enjoyed vaudeville style acts, jazz band concerts, and the new medium of silent motion pictures. By 1928 movies popularity far exceeded that of live shows in the village. In 1926 a new theater opened, the Carolina, which was specifically designed and wired for showing movies. It also had exclusives with most of the major Hollywood studios to exhibit their films. By 1928 the Pickwick had gone bankrupt, and was being run by a man with no entertainment background. If you wanted to see a first rate live performance you had to go to Durham. Since few people had cars, this meant hitchhiking to the shows.

Ad for the Pickwick in its heyday, 1916.

Pickwick goes bankrupt soon after Carolina Theater opens.

 
This is for a 1928 vaudeville show in Durham. Note that the ticket prices are ten times more expensive than movie admission in Chapel Hill.

Playing the same week of February 1928 as Ziegfeld Follies in Durham.

The Pickwick Theater closed in 1948. In 1952 the J.B. Robbins Department Store opened in the same location. In the 1970's it was a music club and bar called the Town Hall. Today the building houses a number of merchants including Johnny T- Shirt.

Inside the Pickwick

Announcement of the opening of the Carolina Theater in 1927

Line to get into the Carolina in 1934

This is the Pickwick shortly before it closed for good in 1948.

Broadcast radio also began becoming popular in 1928, and was another cheap alternative to paying for an expensive live show. By 1930, even the  luxurious vaudeville theatre in Durham had become a cinema.