by Charly Mann

There are many things that people in Chapel Hill disagree on, but anyone who ever ate at the Porthole restaurant will tell you that they not only had the best rolls in the world, they were to die for.

The Porthole was located on Porthole Alley, off the 100 block of East Franklin Street. There are many things that made it unique, but only their yeast rolls made them unforgettable. In the Porthole you got a menu with a checklist where you indicated what you wanted. Two things that everyone got there was their iced-tea; which may have been the sweetest in Chapel Hill, and the rolls which you got an unlimited supply of. They were also famous for their Chef Salad, but everything on the menu tasted like the best home cooked food you ever had. It was also ridiculously inexpensive. I do not recall ever spending more than $2.00 for a meal when I ate there from the early 1950s to the mid 1970s.

The Porthole Restaurant of Chapel Hill was home of the world's best ice tea and rolls

Their rolls were always warm and right out of the oven. I had a friend who called them Hot-Buttered rolls, but to me they were Porthole rolls. Bob Vermillia managed the Porthole. I think the owner lived in Durham, and had the last name of Timmons. I remember one long time waiter was named Wallace Oldham.

The Porthole Restaurant of Chapel Hill is no more and is now the Enterprise Resource Panning Department for UNC

Since the Porthole is no longer in existence, I will share a recipe that I guarantee will rekindle the tastes of those rolls. Just make sure to have some extra-sweet iced-tea on hand to drink with them. I should also warn you that the magic of these things disappears when they cool down.

Required ingredients:

· 1 cup whole milk
· 2 pkg. dry yeast
· ½ cup butter, melted
· ¼ tsp. salt
· ¼ cup sugar
· 2 eggs
· 4-1/2 to 5 cups flour
· You will also need some additional melted butter

First warm the milk in a small saucepan over low heat. Mix 1/3 of the milk with the dry yeast in a small bowl and let sit until bubbly, about 15 minutes. In a large bowl, combine remaining milk, melted butter, salt and sugar and beat until the sugar is dissolved. Then add the beaten eggs and bubbly yeast.

Next add your flour, ¼ cup at a time, beating on high speed with a stand mixer. When the dough gets too stiff to beat, stir in rest of flour by hand, if necessary, to make a soft dough. Turn out onto floured surface and knead for 5 minutes, until smooth and satiny. Place dough in greased bowl, turning to grease top. Cover and let rise in warm place until light and doubled in size, about 1 hour. (You can also place covered the dough in the refrigerator overnight. This works really well. Let the dough stand at room temperature for 1 hour before proceeding with recipe.)

Punch down the dough and roll out on floured surface to ½” thickness. Cut with 3” round cookie cutter. Brush each roll with melted butter and fold in half to make half circles. Pinch edge lightly to hold, so the rolls don’t unfold as they rise. Place in 2 greased 13x9” pans, cover, and let rise again until double, about 45 minutes. (If you refrigerated the dough, this will take longer, about 60-75 minutes.)

Bake rolls at 350 degrees F for 20-25 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from pan immediately and brush with more melted butter. Don’t use the same butter you used when forming the rolls - melt some fresh just for this step. Makes about 24 rolls.

by Charly Mann

This is Chapel Hill Junior High School in 1962. It was located at 123 West Franklin Street, occupying half the area that is now University Square and Granville Towers. It was a cold, crowded, and dilapidated building. The school was actually heated by a coal furnace. I do not recall a school bus system in those days. I usually got to school by going in with my Dad when he went to work at the University. I had to walk home, which was quite an adventure through downtown, across campus, through the Gimghoul neighborhood, down a half-mile, poorly maintained wooded trail below the castle, and then into my neighborhood. The journey was three miles, and usually took an hour. Before the trip I always stopped at Sloan’s Drug Store, at the corner of Franklin and Columbia, to get a cherry or vanilla coke.

This is an eighth grade class that includes my friends Joe Phillips, Sandy Little, Clinton Kelly, and Claude Piantadosi. You will not see much ethnic diversity in Chapel Hill during this time. We did have a single black student in my class, a brilliant girl, named Sandra Fe Farrington.

This is a picture of Kat McKay. I am posting it only because several people over the years have commented about her unusual pose – in profile. Her parents, I believe, had a business making sandwiches that were sold at local snack bars. I believe she was in the ninth grade.

by Charly Mann

On October 12th, 1961 President John F. Kennedy came to Chapel Hill to receive an honorary degree and make a speech at Kenan Stadium. I had been an admirer of the President since 1960, when I was in the fifth grade, and he responded to a letter I sent to him about protecting Martin Luther King. For some reason on this day I worried about his safety in the motorcade he would be traveling in up Raleigh Road to get to Kenan Stadium. I knew the hilly dense woods that overlooked much of this route because they were near my house on Greenwood Road, and I hiked through them several times a week. I sensed someone could easily find places to conceal themselves in this area to take a shot at the President. Luckily nothing happened, but decades later I learned from this audio interview (see player at bottom of this article) with the then President of the University, Bill Friday, that the Secret Service had many threats on the President's life to worry about when he came to Chapel Hill.

I got up very early on the day of the speech to get good seats for it, and enjoyed seeing the President, and our equally charismatic then governor Terry Sanford, who introduced him. Luther Hodges, a long-time Chapel Hill resident and previous governor, was also there. He was then Kennedy's Secretary of Commerce.

Three years later there was a memorial for President Kennedy at Kenan Stadium, featuring Ted Kennedy and other members of the Kennedy family, which I also attended.

Following is the text of President Kennedy's Speech that day.

Mr. Chancellor, Governor Sanford, members of the faculty, ladies and gentlemen:

I am honored today to be admitted to the fellowship of this ancient and distinguished university, and I am pleased to receive in the short space of 1 or 2 minutes the honor for which you spend over 4 years of your lives. But whether the degree be honorary or earned, it is a proud symbol of this university and this State. North Carolina has long been identified with enlightened and progressive leaders and people, and I can think of no more important reason for that reputation than this university, which year after year has sent educated men and women who have had a recognition of their public responsibility as well as in their private interests.

Distinguished Presidents like President Graham and Gray, distinguished leaders like the Secretary of Commerce, Governor Hodges, distinguished members of the congressional delegation, carry out a tradition which stretches back to the beginning of this school, and that is that the graduate of this university is a man of his Nation as well as a man of his time. And it is my hope, in a changing world, when untold possibilities lie before North Carolina, and indeed the entire South and country, that this university will still hew to the old line of the responsibility that its graduates owe to the community at large--that in your time, too, you will be willing to give to the State and country a portion of your lives and all of your knowledge and all of your loyalty.

I want to emphasize, in the great concentration which we now place upon scientists and engineers, how much we still need the men and women educated in the liberal traditions, willing to take the long look, undisturbed by prejudices and slogans of the moment, who attempt to make an honest judgment on difficult events. This university has a more important function today than ever before, and therefore I am proud as President of the United States, and as a graduate of a small land grant college in Massachusetts, Harvard University, to come to this center of education.

Those of you who regard my profession of political life with some disdain should remember that it made it possible for me to move from being an obscure lieutenant in the United States Navy to Commander-in-Chief in 14 years, with very little technical competence. But more than that, I hope that you will realize that from the beginning of this country, and especially in North Carolina, there has been the closest link between educated men and women and politics and government. And also to remember that our nation's first great leaders were also our first great scholars.

A contemporary described Thomas Jefferson as "a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance the minuet, and play the violin." John Quincy Adams, after being summarily dismissed by the Massachusetts Legislature from the United States Senate for supporting Thomas Jefferson, could then become Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and then become a great Secretary of State.
And Senator Daniel Webster could stroll down the corridors of the Congress a few steps, after making some of the greatest speeches in the history of this country, and dominate the Supreme Court as the foremost lawyer of his day.

 This versatility, this vitality, this intellectual energy, put to the service of our country, represents our great resource in these difficult days. I would urge you, therefore, regardless of your specialty, and regardless of your chosen field or occupation, and regardless of whether you bear office or not, that you recognize the contribution which you can make as educated men and women to intellectual and political leadership in these difficult days, when the problems are infinitely more complicated and come with increasing speed, with increasing significance, in our lives than they were a century ago when so many gifted men dominated our political life. The United States Senate had more able men serving in it, from the period of 1830 to 1850, than probably any time in our history, and yet they dealt with three or four problems which they had dealt with for over a generation.

Now they come day by day, from all parts of the world. Even the experts find themselves confused, and therefore in a free society such as this, where the people must make an educated judgment, they depend upon those of you who have had the advantage of the scholar's education.I ask you to give to the service of our country the critical faculties which society has helped develop in you here. I ask you to decide, as Goethe put it, "whether you will be an anvil or a hammer," whether you will give the United States, in which you were reared and educated, the broadest possible benefits of that education.

It's not enough to lend your talents to deploring present solutions. Most educated men and women on occasions prefer to discuss what is wrong, rather than to suggest alternative courses of action. But, "would you have counted him a friend of ancient Greece," as George William Curtis asked a body of educators a century ago, "would you have counted him a friend of ancient Greece who quietly discussed the theory of patriotism on that hot summer day through whose hopeless and immortal hours Leonidas and the three hundred stood at Thermopylae for liberty? Was John Milton to conjugate Greek verbs in his library when the liberty of Englishmen was imperiled?"

This is a great institution with a great tradition and with devoted alumni, and with the support of the people of this State. Its establishment and continued functioning, like that of all great universities, has required great sacrifice by the people of North Carolina. I cannot believe that all of this is undertaken merely to give this school's graduates an economic advantage in the lifestruggle.

"A university," said Professor Woodrow Wilson, "should be an organ of memory for the State, for the transmission of its best traditions." And Prince Bismarck was even more specific. "One third of the students of German universities," he once said, "'broke down from over-work, another third broke down from dissipation, and the other third ruled Germany." I leave it to each of you to decide in which category you will fall.

I do not suggest that our political and public life should be turned over to college trained experts, nor would I give this university a seat in the Congress, as William and Mary was once represented in the Virginia House of Burgesses, nor would I adopt from the Belgian constitution a provision giving three votes instead of one to college graduates--at least not until more Democrats go to college. But I do hope that you join us.

Letter I received from John F Kennedy about a year before this speech

This university produces trained men and women, and what this country needs are those who look, as the motto of your State says, at things as they are and not at things as they seem to be. For this meeting is held at an extraordinary time. Angola and Algeria, Brazil and Bizerte, Syria and South Viet-Nam, Korea or Kuwait, the Dominican Republic, Berlin, the United Nations itself--all problems which 20 years ago we could not even dream of.

Our task in this country is to do our best, to serve our Nation's interest as we see 'it, and not to be swayed from our course by the faint-hearted or the unknowing, or the threats of those who would make themselves our foes. This is not a simple task in a democracy. We cannot open all our books in advance to an adversary who operates in the night, the decisions we make, the weapons we possess, the bargains we will accept--nor can we always see reflected overnight the success or failure of the actions that we may take.

In times past, a simple slogan described our policy: "Fifty-four-forty or fight." "To make the world safe for democracy." "No entangling alliances." But the times, issues, and the weapons, all have changed--and complicate and endanger our lives. It is a dangerous illusion to believe that the policies of the United States, stretching as they do world-wide, under varying and different conditions, can be encompassed in one slogan or one adjective, hard or soft or otherwise-or to believe that we shall soon meet total victory or total defeat.

This is the program from the John F. Kennedy tribute at Kenan Stadium on May 17, 1964

Peace and freedom do not come cheap, and we are destined, all of us here today, to live out most if not all of our lives in uncertainty and challenge and peril. Our policy must therefore blend whatever degree of firmness and flexibility which is necessary to protect our vital interests, by peaceful means if possible, by resolute action if necessary. There is, of course, no place in America where reason and firmness are more clearly pointed out than here in North Carolina. All Americans can profit from what happened in this State a century ago. It was this State, firmly fixed in the traditions of the South, which sought a way of reason in a troubled and dangerous world. Yet when the War came, North Carolina provided a fourth of all of the Confederate soldiers who made the supreme sacrifice in those years. And it won the right to the slogan, "First at Bethel. Farthest to the front at Gettysburg and Chickamauga. Last at Appomattox."

Its quest for a peaceful resolution of our problems was never identified in the minds of its people, of people today, with anything but a desire for peace and a preparation to meet their responsibilities. We move for the first time in our history through an age in which two opposing powers have the capacity to destroy each other, and while we do not intend to see the free world give up, we shall make every effort to prevent the world from being blown up.

 The American Eagle on our official seal emphasizes both peace and freedom, and as I said in the State of the Union Address, we in this country give equal attention to its claws when it in its left hand holds the arrows and in its right the olive branch. This is a time of national maturity, understanding, and willingness to face issues as they are, not as we would like them to be. It is a test of our ability to be far-seeing and calm, as well as resolute, to keep an eye on both our dangers and our opportunities, and not to be diverted by momentary gains, or setbacks, or pressures. And it is the long view of the educated citizen to which the graduates of this university can best contribute.
We must distinguish the real from the illusory, the long-range from the temporary, the significant from the petty, but if we can be purposeful, if we can face up to our risks and live up to our word, if we can do our duty undeterred by fanatics or frenzy at home or abroad, then surely peace and freedom can prevail. We shall be neither Red nor dead, but alive and free--and worthy of the traditions and responsibilities of North Carolina and the United States of America.

Chapel Hill on the day President Kennedy Died

by Charly Mann

I’m a Tarheel Born, The University of North Carolina fight song was supposed to have been written and added as a tag to the University alma mater, Hark the Sounds in about 1928, however this postcard from 1908 makes me believe that the song must be much older. The lyrics to Hark the Sounds were written by a student, William Starr Myers, in 1896. The melody of Hark the Sounds is from a 1857 ballad called Annie Lisle. More than fifty other Universities use the same tune for their alma mater. Maybe UNC should think about coming up with a unique tune for their song.
 

by Charly Mann

In December of 1956 when UNC started their run for the National Championship, and the most incredible season in college basketball history, I was nearing my seventh birthday. The population of Chapel Hill was less than 8,000, and it seemed that every face in town was a familiar one. Woollen Gym, where the Tarheels played their games, held about 5,000 people, and I recall that almost anyone in town who wanted tickets to the games got them. Woollen Gym was twenty years old in 1957, and most of the bleachers were on rollers and could be collapsed and pushed away from the court when there wasn't a game. What made the season that year memorable to me at first, was that the first and last home games of the season were going to be against South Carolina teams. My Dad, then a math professor at UNC, was from South Carolina, and we visited relatives there often, so this was special to me. The first home game was against Furman in early December, and the last was against South Carolina – then in the ACC – in late February. During games I would spend much of time with a group of my friends walking up and down the bleacher stairs, and sitting from time to time in various empty seats. I cannot recall spending much time watching the games. UNC played eight home games that season, and won them all.

Coach Frank McGuire, with players Lennie Rosenbluth, Pete Brennan, Tommy Kearns, Joe Quigg, and Bob Cunningham

Everyone in town started paying a little more attention to the team after they won the ACC tournament and went on to the NCAA tournament. Most of those games I recall hearing on the radio. The national championship games in Kansas City are somewhat indelible for several reasons. First I found out that if UNC made it to the championship game they would probably be playing against a giant. I was curious to see a picture of this man, and saw in a newspaper he was black. This really surprised me. UNC had no black players, and did not have one until ten years later with Charlie Scott in 1966. In fact I do not recall any black students, or any blacks every attending any basketball games that year at Woollen Gym. My nearby elementary school, Glenwood, certainly had no black students. The following day I remember how excited everyone got when UNC won the NCAA semi-finalgame against Michigan State in triple overtime.

The next day all everyone in Chapel Hill was talking about was how there was little chance UNC could pull off another miracle. This was because the game was being played in Kansas, the home state of The University of Kansas that we would be facing that night. And also, of course , the giant, Wilt Chamberlain, who people were calling the best basketball player of all time was on the team we would be facing. This was going to be a battle of David and Goliath, and this Goliath was 5 inches taller than anyone on the UNC team. In fact he was eight inches taller than UNC’s best player Lennie Rothenbulth.

I remember my Dad remarking at the beginning of the game how the UNC coach, Frank McGuire, had chosen UNC’s shortest player, 5 foot 11 inch Tommy Kearns to match up with Chamberlain for the tip off to start the game. Of course Kansas won the toss, but just as amazingly, UNC jumped to a big lead which they maintained till halftime. The TV announcer explained that UNC had three of its players defending Chamberlain most of the game, which was working well for the Tarheels. The second half was awful for me, Kansas got the lead, and with less than two minutes left UNC’s star player, and leading scorer, Rosenbulth fouled out of the game. Then providence, or something that just never happens, began to happen. Kansas missed all of their foul shots in the final minutes, while UNC scored a basket and a free throw to tie the game up, so it was on to overtime. Next there were two overtimes in which each team played very slow and cautiously. In the first each team only got one basket, and in the second neither team scored. The real game was played in the final overtime, and there was lots of action, with both team scoring several baskets and free throws, and with about thirty seconds left, Kansas had a single point lead. In the last seconds I vividly remember a UNC player being fouled and making both free throws to give UNC the lead. Kansas had one final chance to score, and I held my breath, but somehow a UNC player got the ball that was being thrown to Chamberlain and UNC had done it, the national championship, with two triple overtimes, two nights in a row, and an undefeated 32-0 season.

Up until that time Chapel Hill was hardly on the national map, and I’m not sure if it was after the game, but from then on Chapel Hill had something to be really proud of and to remember. 
 

This is an authentic autographed photograph of the 1957 Championship team submitted by Francie Ellis. It was signed for her father, Fred Ellis.

These license plates were popular in Chapel Hill for at least a decade. I remember one displayed at the entry of Max Snipes’s Barber Shop on Franklin Street for years.

by Charly Mann

Fowler's Food Store was the first supermarket in Chapel Hill, and was started in the 1920’s by the Fowler Family. It was located on West Franklin Street. Fowler's had the best selection of frozen foods and produce in Chapel Hill, until the early 1970s, when large grocery chains began opening larger supermarkets. It was particularly famous for its high quality fresh meats and outstanding butchers. From time to time the store carried a small selections of other items, including popular 45-rpm records. The  town’s only record store throughout the 1950s and 60s, Kemps, never carried 45s, or much selection in rock and roll LPs. I bought my first Elvis Presley record there in August of 1956, Hound Dog backed by Don’t Be Cruel.

                         Fowler's AD from 1963

Fowler’s had a great home delivery service, which many people used from time to time, including my family. You simply called in your order, and it would soon be delivered to your home. The Fowler family sold their store and got out of the grocery business in the mid-1970s.