by Charly Mann

Chapel Hill was once a truly enchanted magical place where reality far exceeded any fantasy a young boy like myself might imagine. I could walk a half a mile through the dense forest near my home and be at Gimghoul Castle, an isolated stone castle which never showed any signs of habitation, and offered the most magnificent views of Durham and Raleigh I could imagine. Next to the castle was a blood stained rock where a love duel was fought more than a century earlier. On the campus in the Morehead Planetarium there was large room that housed John Motley Morehead's magnificent working model train layout. Less than a block away in the basement of Graham Memorial was the largest collection of dolls I have ever seen from around the world in more than a half a dozen floor to ceiling glass cabinets. There was also a huge haunted mansion that lay in the woods near where Manning Drive and the Dean Smith Center are today. The most spectacular thing in Chapel Hill for a young boy was The Circus Room which was a small snack bar at the back of the Monogram Club. That building is today called Jackson Hall and is where the Office of Undergraduate Admission is located.

This is one of six separate circus animal carvings that Carl Boettcher did for The Circus Room in 1948

What made the Circus Room incredible was that it was surrounded by carvings of a circus parade and large circus animals attached to the mirrored walls. The detail and craftsmanship exceed, or equaled, any carving you will ever see at a great museum. They also captured for all time in redwood the excitement of a young Chapel Hill boy in 1900 watching a circus parade come through town. This work of art was the product of two of Chapel Hill’s greatest artists William Meade Prince and Carl Boettcher in 1948. Prince, who grew up in Chapel Hill, made a sketch of the parade for his wood carving partner. The entire diorama is seven large pieces featuring a 25 foot long circus parade, which is the most detailed and intricate part of the carving.

This is the front third of the detailed Circus Parade carving that was displayed at The Circus Room from 1949 to 1968

Boettcher was born in Wolgast, Germany in 1887 and began a career as a wood carver at a very early age. He was an apprentice to several great German wood carvers and also attended Kunstgewerbe Art School in Flensburg, Germany. In Germany he specialized in carving alters, pews, and religious icons for Lutheran churches in the Westphalia area. He came to the United States in 1923 and moved to Chapel Hill in 1942. He did several other significant pieces for the University of North Carolina including a woodcarving of the University seal, a plaque at the Bowman Gray pool, several pieces in the Morehead Planetarium, and a gate for the Forest Theater which I would love to locate.

This is among the circus animals that were part of full Circus Parade piece. Not pictured in this article was a giraffe, which was the tallest of the carvings.

Carl Boettcher died in 1950 and is buried in the Chapel Hill cemetery just steps away from where the Circus Room was located. Today his spirit lives on in the works of Chapel Hill muralist Michael Brown whose mural Parade in the Porthole Alley was directly inspired by this great work of art.

This is the Circus Room in 1949 shortly after the Circus Parade carving based on a painting by William Meade Prince was installed

This is a circus Zebra done for the Circus Parade carving at UNC. The only other piece not shown here is a large standing elephant.

The Circus Room closed in 1968 and in 1970 the Circus Parade carvings were moved to the Carolina Inn where in spite of its magnificence it did not have the same impact as before. In 1992 the pieces were once again moved, this time to the Alumni Center where they now stand at the entrance of the Carolina Club. Where once the carvings hung on mirrored walls at eye level in small snack bar open to all, they now stand in a stairway high above direct eye level against a rather bland wall in a building that reeks of exclusivity.

This is an ad for the Circus Room at UNC in 1951. There were two other snacks bars on the UNC campus then. One at the YMCA next to South Building, and the most beloved of all, The Scuttlebutt,  at the corner of Cameron Avenue and South Columbia Street.

This Kangaroo Carving from the Circus Room diorama first hung at the Circus Room snack bar. It is now a t the UNC Alumni Center near Kenan Stadium.

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by Arthur "Dan" Gifford

It's impossible for me to think of Alex Taylor without also thinking that there but for the grace of God go I.

In a 1950s Chapel Hill full of frat boys and others offering beer to kids, Alex Taylor and I started drinking before our teen years. He became an alcoholic, I did not. Just before Chapel Hill was hit with a 60s plague of street drugs that would kill the bodies and damage the minds of a number of friends, I went to Virginia Episcopal School and only heard the horror stories when I'd return to town during vacation breaks.  Against all that, it has often crossed my mind that had I stayed, "it coulda been me," as David Bowie said.

Alex Taylor who was a great singer, but never mastered an instrument, at his home at 618 Morgan Creek Road Chapel Hill

Maybe my escape from Alex' fate was providence. Maybe it was dumb luck, but whatever it was, I took a big hit in the gut on reading about his death at age 47 -- largely attributed to the effects of alcoholism, the stories said -- because some of my earliest happy childhood memories involved Alex.

We were born about two months apart and I first recall meeting him in kindergarten at The Little Red School House though my parents said we had played together earlier.

Alex' father and my mother were both UNC professors who practically worked in the same building in allied fields. My mother was Alice Gifford, the first professor brought on board the new UNC School of Nursing in 1950 and the person charged with obtaining its accreditation. Dr. Isaac "Ike" Taylor was a newly arrived professor of medicine at UNC who would later become the Dean of the Medical School. That connection aside, there were other social binders in play. Both my mother and Alex's father had strong Scottish ancestral links and Boston connections. My mother had grown up in Boston and was in the first Yale class that accepted women. That was a very big deal to both Alex's New England raised mother Trudy -- an early champion of women's equality -- and father, a Harvard Medical School graduate.

James Taylor left, Alex Taylor, and Kate Taylor with Alex Taylor's son Sweet Baby James - 1971 

In class, Alex and I were both hyper kids who probably spent more time sitting in The Little Red School House punishment corner than all the rest of the children there combined. We were also the cut-up bane of the parents who took turns collecting us at the end of the school day, an act we would encore during later years in such venues as Mrs. Bagby's social dance class at Chapel Hill Country Club and the bus to and from Durham Academy. Most of those disruptions involved our imitations of people, pop songs, rhythms and sounds, all of which got an early start at The Little Red School House.

On days when Alex' mother gathered him at LRSH, I'd sometimes go to his house and play until picked up by my parents and vice versa. We both lived in the country at that time, he because his parents, I would later hear, wanted to live in rural surroundings, we because it was affordable. The Taylors were far better off than most in Chapel Hill. They lived outside of Carrboro when they first moved to the area, a blue collar town then that most Chapel Hillians looked down on. As for us, we lived at what seemed like the other end of existence off East Franklin Street in a rented house above a marsh where Eastgate Shopping Center would be built years later.

Alex Taylor at microphone and James Taylor to his left on guitar as the Fabulous Corsairs in Chapel Hill 1964

That strip of higher ground was an old dairy farm owned by Seton Lloyd and his wife. They still grazed several cows that needed milking which Alex and I got to do under Mr. Lloyd's supervision while he sipped moonshine. Lloyd's main business was a Carrboro general store at 118 East Main Street that was chock full of used pick handles, horse collars, stuff the Union Army left behind and God knows what else, which included homemade whiskey on the sly. Mr. Lloyd was one of the few people in Chapel Hill that probably never had to buy gasoline since he could just exhale into his car's fuel tank. I suppose that's why Alex's and my parents declined his occasional kind offer to drive Alex home since he was "goin' that way anyhow."

Alex and I only saw each other a time or two each week during most of our elementary years since we attended our respective public schools, but we saw each other enough to pick up wherever we had left off before. That changed during seventh grade when we found ourselves on the same bus each day traveling from Chapel Hill to Durham. He attended Durham Academy on Duke Street while I went to a different private school a couple of blocks away on Duke. By that time rock 'n roll was about all that mattered to us and we were pumped for new sounds.

We found them by listening to the radio at night. Quite a few boys then twisted the AM dial when they were supposed to be sleeping to find the 50,000 watt signals that skipped in on the ionosphere when the weather got cold from hundreds or a thousand or more miles away. WKBW, Buffalo. WOWO, Fort Wayne, Indiana. WFAA, Dallas. WABC, New York were but a few of them. I think I was the first to "discover" Cousin Brucie and his odd, sing-song DJ delivery on WABC, tell Alex and then drive everyone crazy on the bus with our imitation, but the big find and fav was WLAC in Nashville.

This is Alex Taylor's first album With Neighbors and Friends released in 1971. It is his best album, and sadly no longer available.

This wasn't ordinary rock music from a far off city, WLAC spewed soul quenchers that neither Alex or I had heard before except in milder form on Durham's WSSB. "Daddy Rabbit" Bobbit and the others there were playing Frankie Lymon and Little Anthony and Micky and Sylvia before WKIX came along. Alex and I even visited "Daddy Rabbit" after school once when Alex accompanied me to my weekly choir practice at Durham's First Presbyterian Church. But WSSB's watered down stuff just wouldn't do once we got onto WLAC. It played the originals the music industry ripped-off and diluted to make commercial hits.

On that station, Hoss Allen, Big Hugh Baby and other disc jockeys played the likes of Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, Lead Belly, Slim Harpo, Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Lowell Fulson, Little Junior Parker, The Spaniels and Sonny Boy Williamson from record packages put together by Ernie's Record Mart in Nashville that we could order for not much money. Whoaaa. What a world changer.

Alex Taylor of Chapel Hill at his creative and vocal prime

You gotta remember the times. This music was beyond the Elvis and Everly Brothers Kemp Nye hated and wouldn't sell. It was light years away from the the Bo Diddly many white adults said was only fit for juke joint colored people. It was in the class of the Gandy dancer chants I'd heard and tried to imitate to Alex and some others. That is to say, it contained the key to the soul that gave Chapel Hill's Lincoln High School band that extra something that the all white Chapel Hill High School band didn't get.

Alex did get it and he put it into his music. I only wish he'd gotten the acclaim he deserved and lived to enjoy it.

Dan Gifford is an Emmy winning investigative reporter who was also nominated for an Oscar for his documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement. He is also an actor who has appeared in the films Contact, Mad City, and Malcolm X, and television shows including The X Files and The Practice.

Pictures and music provided by Charly Mann 

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by Charly Mann

For baby boomers who grew up or attended college in Chapel Hill there is only one business left on Franklin Street that is still essentially the same, Sutton's. The other core establishments that gave downtown its unique flavor, the Varsity Theater, Julian's (the original store), The Ratskeller, and Jeff's Confectionery are all gone. Jeff's was the first of these landmark businesses to close, and probably the most widely missed because it represented so many things to such a wide variety of people.

Jeff's Confectionery, Franklin Street, Chapel Hill during its prime

Jeff's was opened in 1922 by Jeff Thomas (1898 – 1957), the first in a long line of Greek merchants who would improve the quality of life in Chapel Hill. These included Pete Galifinkas who opened Hector's, a Greek fast food restaurant in 1969, Tommy Mariakakis who brought the first authentic pizza to Chapel Hill in the early 1960s with his Mariakakas Restaurant and Bakery in Eastgate, Leo (whose last name escapes me even though he was my landlord for many years), whose Leo's restaurant was a culinary treasure on West Franklin Street for many decades, and Spero Dorton, who was Jeff's cousin and owned the Goody Shop next to the Carolina Theater. In the beginning Jeff's was primarily a convenience store with a soda fountain. Next door to Jeff's, until 1932, was a much larger business called Carolina Confectionery which sold and made candy and pastries, which is by definition what a confectionery does. Soon after this business closed, Jeff's changed its name to Jeff's Confectionery, though the only major change in the business was that they added a magazine stand that took up most of one side of the store.

The is the original Jeff's on Franklin Street in 1928 which would become Jeff's Confectionery

Jimmy Mousmoules, Jeff Thomas's nephew, took over Jeff's in the early 1950s and became the face of the business until it closed in the early 1990s. Jimmy made the best fountain cokes you ever tasted, and he was especially adept at adding vanilla, cherry, or chocolate flavoring to them. He also offered a tiny sized cup for nickel drinks. For many people, like myself, who worked on Franklin street or students needing a quick and inexpensive meal, getting a candy bar, chips, or Lance crackers with a coke at Jeff's was almost a daily occurrence.

To many others Jeff's was the only place in town that offered a wide selection of men's magazines. In the 50's and 60's these magazines were pretty tame, and kids like myself knew better than to pick up anything on the "adult's only" shelf. For men who were looking for magazines that then would be considered pornographic, I have been told by several of Jeff’s former customers, that those were sold in a separate room in the back. For many women in town Jeff's reputation as a "dirty book store" prevented them from ever entering its doors. While I do not recall ever looking at a men's magazine at Jeff's in my youth, I did spend hours on the floor there drinking cokes and reading comic books. Jeff's had the best selection of comics in Chapel Hill for most of the 50s and 60s, and had a separate swivel rack stand for them.

Carolina Confectionery was a bakery and candy shop near Jeff's in the 1920s

For the majority of Jeff's history it sold beer in cans and bottles to go, and because of its proximity to campus probably sold the most alcoholic beverages in town until Chapel Hill got its first ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Commission) store in the Eastgate shopping center around 1962.

What most Chapel Hillians remember most fondly about Jeff's was not even inside the store, but was the large blackboard on the right side of the door where the s of college games were posted. In the days before the Internet people would often gather around Jeff's on Saturday afternoon in the fall to find out how their favorites teams had done.

Jeff's was also widely known as a place where one could make illegal bets on sporting events, especially Carolina games. Jimmy apparently fronted for a bookmaker in town, and he was often seen with large rolls of cash paying out winnings. Unfortunately, the few friends I knew who placed bets with Jimmy lost far more money than they ever won.

Standing in front of Jeff's Confectionery on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill in 1978

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by Charly Mann

Kate Taylor is a 60 year old late bloomer. She is the middle child, and only daughter, of the remarkable Issac and Trudy Taylor family of Chapel Hill. Now 45 years after her career in the music business started she has released one of the best albums of all original material in the new millennium. The album is entitled Fair Time! and opens with two very memorable songs. The opening number, Soap Opera Life, sounds like a #1 country hit, particularly if Carrie Underwood or Taylor Swift decided to do a cover. The next track, Things I Carry, is an instantly enjoyable affirmative rocking love song. Most of the album is an autobiographical record of her life starting with growing up in Chapel with her four brothers on the track, Sun Did Shine (On Carolina), but more accurately called Chapel Hill-Billies. Coinciding with the release of the album is a DVD biography of Kate entitled Kate Taylor: Tunes from the Tipi and Other Songs From Home that is beautifully filmed, produced, and directed by her daughter Liz Witham. Included in the film is some delightful color footage of UNC and downtown Chapel Hill from the early sixties. There is also an array of photos and film clips of the entire Taylor family growing up.

A 20 year old Kate Taylor

Kate Taylor was born on August 15th, 1949 in Boston, and grew up at 618 Morgan Creek Road in Chapel Hill on 28 acres of beautifully secluded land in a house that was designed by two of the most acclaimed architects of 1950s modern houses, George Matsumoto and John D. Latimer. She was named after Katherine Child, the head mistress of a school her mother attended in Boston. Every summer the family would leave Chapel Hill's heat and humidity to stay on the remote island of Martha's Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. It was a perfect place for  Kate and the rest of her clan, and all the Taylors would eventually make it their home. In the 1960s it was a bohemian paradise full of musicians, artists, and writers. The Taylors were all unconventional. Even their father, a respected academic, left his family and teaching position at UNC for two years, doing his service to his country by joining the Navy and being the resident doctor on a naval expedition to Antarctica. All of the Taylor children pursed music in favor of education from an early age, and all lived their late adolescent years as vagabonds.

Issac and Trudy Taylor's house at 618 Morgan Creek Road Chapel Hill, NC

Kate's older brother, Alex, was the only family member who passionately wanted to have a career as a singer, and he probably would have succeeded if he had not abused alcohol so much from an early age. James's surprise meteoric elevation to rock stardom in 1970 allowed Kate to showcase her own talents on her debut album Sister Kate, produced by James's friend and manager Peter Asher. The album is a masterpiece and tour de force of great songs, with back up musicians including Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, her brother James, J.D. Souther, and Bernie Leadon. After a brief career in music, Kate returned to Martha's Vineyard and met her soul mate, Charlie Witham , raised two daughters, and helped raise her stepdaughter. From 1976 to the present Kate has also pursued her interest in Native American art and culture. For several summers she lived with her family in a tipi on Martha's Vineyard.  She and her husband revived the ancient craft of wampum bead making which the native peoples once used as a means of communication.

Kate Taylor and her late husband Charlie Witham, with daughters Aquinnah, Aretha, and Liz Witham

In 1976 brother James produced her excellent second album, Kate Taylor.  This album features a duet with James of It's In His Kiss (The Shoop Shoop Song), originally a 1962 hit for Betty Everett. This is the only top-forty single Kate has had in her career.  In 1978 Kate went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama to record her third album, It's In There and It's Got to Come Out, produced by Barry Beckett and using the famed Muscle Shoals Sound rhythm section.  In 1999 her husband Charlie brought her and James together again to record a beautiful rendition of the Robert Burns 1788 poem, Auld Lang Syne, which was long ago made into song. It was subsequently issued on Kate's 2002 album, Beautiful Road.

Kate Taylor and her brother James Taylor October 1968, when James was recording his first album in London for the Beatle's Apple Records

The Taylor family is certainly the most noted and written about in recent Chapel Hill history. Even without James's celebrity status, Dr. Taylor's contribution as dean of the UNC medical school and the children's uniquely privileged and unconventional upbringing make all seven members of this tribe fascinating. It is noteworthy in Chapel Hill if even one child raised by a UNC professor does not attend college, but in this case all five did not. Also amazing is the array of musical talent that each of the five children have. There are debates among Chapel Hillians about each member's abilities, such as who had the best voice -- Alex usually wins this title, most gifted songwriter -- James hands down, best performer -- unquestionably Livingston, most balanced and underrated, and usually rated the second best singer -- Hugh, and for me the one I can never hear enough of -- Kate.

Kate Taylor and her brother Alex Taylor

Kate's new CD "Fair Time!" now available at katetaylor.com.
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Kate's new DVD Kate Taylor: Tunes from the Tipi and Other Songs from Home now available at DocuTunes.TV.

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by Charly Mann

We all have a neighborhood we came from. It is from here we go off into the world, and come home to. For me this is the Whitehead Circle neighborhood of Chapel Hill where my father lived at 426 Whitehead Circle from 1964 until 2003. It was from here that in the 10th grade I left from the back yard to descend down an embankment to the 15-501 bypass and begin my daily 16-mile sojourn hitchhiking to Durham High School. (In those days it did not seem to be a problem to go any public school in the state as long as you could get there, and I then had more friends in Durham than Chapel Hill). It was also here that I lived when I started my freshman year at UNC in September of 1968.

Top two photos are of William Robert Mann's home (front and back) from 1976. This one is from 2009.

The Whitehead neighborhood sits between Mason Farm and Purefoy Roads. It is a beautiful place where the majority of the homes lie in a wooded circle. Most of the houses were architect designed in an assortment of modern and traditional styles. All of the homes were built in the 1950s and early sixties. As you walk the area the most noticeable quality is all of the tall oaks and pines that shade almost the entire neighborhood.

419 Whitehead Circle, Chapel Hill, NC

My Dad and I rarely went anywhere in the car. You could walk to campus in fifteen minutes and almost anywhere else in town in twenty. My father was friends with everyone on Whitehead Circle.

Melissa Long and Dr Long's house at 424 Whitehead Circle, Chapel Hill, NC

This neighborhood will always be a part of me and is where many of my memories are from. Whenever I come back to Chapel Hill I always take a drive or walk there, and leave feeling relaxed and happy. Everything is so familiar, even though it has sometimes been five years between visits.

Kai Jurgensen house, 410 Whitehead Circle, Chapel Hill, NC

I feel privileged to have lived on Whitehead Circle and these photographs and this song are a way to share with you, and for me, to relive, this special place.

400 Whitehead Circle, Chapel Hill, NC

Whitehead Circle is named for Richard Henry Whitehead who was made first dean of the UNC medical school in 1890. Even though Whitehead only stayed in Chapel Hill for fifteen years (in 1905 he became dean of the University of Virginia medical school), he established the medical curriculum that ensured UNC would have a first rate medical school.

First Dean of the University of North Carolina Medical School, Richard Henry Whitehead (1865-1916)

Whitehead Circle has had many distinguished residents. I will include a small sampling of them here:

Edgar Alden, UNC music department chairman, violin professor and expert glider pilot, with his wife Dorothy, one of Chapel Hill's best violinists, and their daughters Meredith and Priscilla Alden. Alden founded and was the original conductor of Chapel Hill’s Village Orchestra. Dorothy Alden started, and was the conductor of, Chapel Hill's Young People's Orchestra.

Many houses on Whitehead Circle are set back deep in the woods

Walter Spearman (1908-1987) who was the most acclaimed professor in the UNC School of journalism and a distinguished actor in many productions by the Playmaker's Theater. During his 45 year teaching career he may well have been UNC's most beloved professor.

Michael Barefoot founder and owner of the United States largest gourmet food store, A Southern Season.

407 Whitehead Circle, Chapel Hill, NC

Dr. Carl W. Gottschalk, physiologist and internationally known kidney researcher, was a professor of medicine at the UNC medical school from 1952 until his death in 1997. He was also a collector of rare books, and left his collection to UNC's Rare Book library. It contains 12,400 items dating from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.

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by Charly Mann

Mildred Council is the founder, owner, and creator of the recipes that have made Chapel Hill’s Mama Dips into one of the most celebrated restaurants in the United States. When I talked to Mrs. Council recently she said that she makes comfort food based on her recipes. Her philosophy is to use only fresh ingredients, and each day they usually have at least eighteen fresh vegetables to include with their meals. She also points out her food is true country food, but contrary to what many people think, it is not greasy since the country people she learned to cook from were poor and did not have access to much fat.

Mama Dip's Country Kitchen Rosemary Street, Chapel Hill, NC

Mildred was born in 1929, the youngest daughter of a sharecropper who lived in Chatham County about four miles east of present day Fearrington Village. Her family usually made their meals from what they grew. The house had no indoor plumbing and young Mildred started cooking and creating her own dishes at a very early age. She got the nickname “Dip" because she was considered tall by her other family members (she is six feet, one inch) and with her long arms she could easily scoop up a dipperful of water from their rain buckets.

Enjoying a Mama Dip's breakfast including salmon cake and hash browns

When she was sixteen, in 1945, her family moved to Chapel Hill, and two years later she married World War II veteran Joe Council. In the early 1950’s she began her career as a professional cook first with the Patterson family in Chapel Hill, then with the Carolina Coffee Shop, followed by two UNC fraternities, and finally in 1957, she and her mother-in-law started a small take-out meal business. By 1976, she had been out of the food business for almost twenty years when she started Dip’s Country Kitchen on just $64. Her business was an immediate success and her reputation spread throughout the country by newspaper and magazine articles, as well as her own best selling cookbooks. By 1998 she had bought the land across the street from the original location she had been renting, and built her own resturant, renaming it Mama Dip’s Country Kitchen.

Mildred Council and her best selling Mama Dip's Kitchen cookbook

Mama Dip’s, reputation has been accentuated by features on the Oprah Winfrey show, and glowing reviews by the New York Times, and has become a favorite tourist destination in Chapel Hill. Among most Chapel Hillians though, both black and white, their enthusiasm for this now legendary establishment is more negative than positive. Among my own family members Mama Dip’s remains a favorite, but most of my friends and other people I have spoken to recently say it has become overpriced, that the food is often bland, and the service ranges from mediocre to awful.

Early advertisement for Dip's on south side of Rosemary in Chapel Hill before it moved across the street and became Mama Dip's

In spite of the realities of the restaurant today, Mildred Council started with nothing and through her own hard work and creativity made a successful enterprise that is truly a family business. All of her children and most of her grandchildren work for her now, or have worked at Mama Dip’s in the past. Mrs. Council is also a well respected community activist and is now raising funds to help build self-worth among adolescent children from single family and financially deprived homes, by teaching them cooking and auto-repair skills.

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