Pat (Alan) Thompson grew up in Chapel Hill during the tumultuous 1960s and has written a book entitled A Hollow Cup that vibrantly brings those days back to life. The book juxtaposes the racial turmoil of the time with a murder mystery and high school life, and will all resonate with anyone who knew Chapel Hill at the time. The story is largely based on real Chapel Hill people and events, yet as a work of "fiction" almost all the names of people and locations have been changed.

Following is a brief excerpt from the book that demonstrates how accurately Thompson has captured the town with the real names of places given in parenthesis.

WE SAT on a bench in front of Castle Hall (Battle-Vance-Pettigrew Dormitory), deserted now, gazing at the sporadic traffic on High (Franklin) Street. The crenellated facade of the old dormitory was pink in the fading light, and its upright stripe of bulky bay windows and diamond-shaped panes reflected the rays of the setting sun. Across the street, the flag on the pole at the Post Office was slack.

The evening had begun at Clark's (Sloan’s) Drugstore. I arrived early and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a cherry Coke. Charles and Edward walked in a few minutes later and sat down on either side of me. As I ate, we discussed the options. "Let's go to the Rat and see if the girls are there," Charles said, finally.

We left Clark's (Sloan's) and turned east on High (Franklin) Street, past the black women selling violets and marigolds and carnations. Minutes later we came to an alley between a gift shop and another drugstore, descended a set of concrete stairs and pushed through an unmarked door at the bottom of the steps.

Pat Thompson, the author of the new novel about Chapel Hill in the 1960s, as he looked in 1965 when he attended Chapel Hill High School

The Rathskellar was a dark warren of underground rooms filled with booths and tables and chairs that never seemed very clean. The walls and ceilings were rough and damp, like a grotto, and a strong odor of paraffin, from the flickering candles or embedded in the place itself, permeated the air. There were no windows and only one door, of solid oak, and a closed staircase to the right of the kitchen doors led vaguely upward. The menu was limited - hamburgers, beer, pizza. A mug of sweet tea that cost thirty-five cents was routinely re-filled by the waiters as they moved among the diners.

The girls were there. Jamie, Wendy and Grace were seated at a booth in the front room looking at menus. Jamie saw us and waved. We weaved through the tables and other customers and sat down. Wendy ordered two large pizzas and we all asked for sweet iced tea.

After the usual volleys back and forth about the older boys they were dating and the less glamorous girls we were left with, Edward addressed the table: "Who do you think has the biggest boobs in school?"

"That's easy," I said. "Nancy Campbell," naming a girl in the class ahead of us.

"What about our girls?" he asked.

"Y'all are such juveniles," Wendy said.

"Without naming names," said 'Charles, "it could be a girl sitting next to me." He nudged Grace.

"Would you shut up," Grace said.

"Could we please talk about something else?" said Wendy.

"Okay," said Edward. "Who's got the smallest boobs?"

"Again naming no names," Charles said, "it could be the other girl sitting next to me."

"Very funny," said Jamie.

"LET'S GO play some pool," Edward said. We left the bench and walked across the lawn. The Student Union (Graham Memorial) was a two-story brick building with eight granite columns and a carved balustrade where the roof line began. It had a grill, a barber shop, a bowling alley and a game room in the basement. There were offices and meeting rooms above ground, but we never went anywhere except the basement.

The pool table was in the game room. We could hear music from the jukebox as we walked down the steps. When we reached the doorway we stopped - the college boys didn't hassle us often, but it happened. There was a group of about twenty people at one end of the big room - some were dancing or standing around, others sitting in the overstuffed furniture. The-only light came from dim table lamps located throughout the room, and the jukebox.

I was surprised to find anybody there. The students were gone, and we usually had the place to ourselves in the summer. Edward started toward the crowd, and Charles and I followed.  

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by Pat (Alan) Thompson

Bob Culton was inducted into the Chapel Hill High School Hall of Fame in 1991 "in recognition of sports achievement and citizenship." Coach Culton was a man who played a large role in my young life and the lives of many others. It seems like everyone has a hall of fame now, but if anyone ever deserved induction, it was Bob Culton.

Chapel Hill High School Hall of Fame Coach Bob Culton

I moved to Chapel Hill with my mother and sister in August of 1959. We came to town so that Mom could study for her Master's degree at Carolina. We lived all over the place – Victory Village, Bolin Heights (behind The Ranch House) and, finally, in a little brick house on Valley Park Drive. I attended Estes Hills Elementary School on Estes Drive, and my class (1966) was the last to finish at the old junior and senior high schools on West Franklin Street.

Coach Culton and I spent a lot of time together when I was in high school – two or three hours a day, five days a week, from mid-August until the end of February and sometimes beyond. He was the Athletic Director at Chapel Hill High School, as well as the head football, basketball and tennis coach. He even taught me how to drive one summer – we drove around the empty lot behind the high school where the junior high football team once practiced.

Whenever I hear the words "strict disciplinarian" his image pops into my head but, when I think about it, there wasn't really that much discipline going on because nobody wanted to cross him. There was plenty of "team" discipline – laps and wind sprints and push-ups – but individual displays of defiance requiring a response from him were rare. There was no dialogue – communication was one-way (I can still hear his favorite admonition: "Just be quiet!"), and it was only the minimum necessary to get his point across. At a time when questioning "authority" was becoming commonplace, no one questioned his. We were still adolescents, of course – we called him "Party Bob" behind his back (way, way behind his back) because of the stern demeanor, but everyone who played for him respected him.

In those days we always had pretty good basketball teams, and tennis was just for fun, but I believe that Coach Culton really cared about football. Unfortunately, we usually weren't very good as opposed to, say, Lincoln High School, who was always in the state playoffs. One of Lincoln's teams, I believe it was in 1962, won the state championship, undefeated and unscored upon. We never managed anything like that but we came close to a championship once.

1964 Chapel Hill High School football coaches. Front row right is Bob Culton next to Joe Augustine. Behind them are Barney Garret and Owen Hale.

We practiced and played our home games back then at Lions Park in Carrboro (Lincoln played there, too), but there were no locker facilities there, so every day we dressed in the locker room at school and boarded an old yellow bus for the ride to the field. Coach Culton had one varsity assistant, Joe Augustine, who, interestingly, was the President of the Chamber of Commerce in his spare time. There were no weight rooms or training tables or summer flag leagues – we were expected to show up on August 15 in decent shape and ready to play.
The high school program, of course, was overshadowed by the University's teams. Even when we played well, the crowds were sparse. As Jack Williams, Sports Editor for The Chapel Hill Weekly, once put it: "The Wildcats are the New York Mets – in reverse. The more the Mets lose, the bigger the crowds. But here, the more the Wildcats win, the emptier the stands."

The 1964 Wildcats, led by Captains Donnie Clark and Danny Leigh, carried high expectations. The '63 team had won seven games and finished second in the conference, and most of those players returned for the '64 season. Chapel Hill had not been to the state playoffs since 1948. We managed to lose our first three games by a total of ten points, including Coach Culton's first-ever loss to Oxford, the team that he had coached before coming to Chapel Hill in 1955. We didn't lose again until Thanksgiving Day.

On the left is 1964 Chapel Hill High School football team co-captain Donnie Clark next to Coach Culton 

The stars of that team, besides Clark and Leigh, were Tim Farmer and David Gibson and two transfers from Lincoln High School, Arthur Dockery and Gene Hines. We outscored our opponents 218-87, and advanced to the Western Regional finals against Waynesville High School, a team from the western-most part of the state. It was a home game for us, but different from all the other home games we had ever played. The two teams met on Thanksgiving afternoon at Kenan Stadium. Only a few sections were filled, of course, but it was the biggest crowd we ever had.

The great 1964 Chapel Hill High School football team that included two black players who had transferred from Chapel Hill's all-black Lincoln High School.

When I was a kid, every Saturday afternoon when Carolina was playing at home I waited – along with other young, non-paying fans – outside the double gates on the north side of the stadium. When the first half was over, the gates were thrown open and we entered with a rush, dispersing throughout every aisle and section of the great concrete structure. Sometimes I found a seat and sat down. More often I perched on one of the steps at the bottom of an aisle. When the game was over, I stepped onto the field, moving carefully among the cleated giants, imagining that I was one of them. The Waynesville game was as close as I was going to get to that dream, and I think a lot of my teammates felt the same way.

We lost, 20-13. I can't remember much about the game except that the Waynesville players looked more mature than we did. Several of them had full beards, and there was some muttering about "post-grads" in the locker room after the game, but I don't recall much grousing. We had played well for our coach, and gone further in the playoffs than any team from our conference in years. Coach Culton was named Coach of the Year, but he didn't have much time to enjoy it – basketball practice began the Monday after Thanksgiving. As it turned out, that team, too, came within a single game of playing for a state championship. We beat Waynesville by thirty points in the first round of the state tournament, but somehow it didn't make up for that loss at Kenan Stadium on Thanksgiving Day.

* * * * *

We lived wonderful lives in Chapel Hill in those days, free of the restrictions that children encounter today, and I have long wanted to do something to try to preserve that sense of freedom before those of us who knew it are gone. So: I've written a  novel entitled A Hollow Cup – the place, New Hope, and the characters and the plot are all imaginary, but I've tried to capture the pace of our lives in the little college town that we loved so much. Hardcover and softcover are available now on Amazon. BN.com and the eBook should be out shortly. The plot is love and murder, and the themes are loss of place and culture and the politics of race. Set primarily in the 1960's, A Hollow Cup is a mythical rendering of "the Southern part of Heaven" before it began to disappear.

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by Charly Mann

Charly (Charles) Mann and his father, UNC math professor William Robert Mann in 1952

Chapel Hill was blessed with an abundance of great fathers in the 1950s. Somehow these men who had grown up in the Great Depression and most of whom were veterans of World War II were all kind, honest, decent, and selfless individuals. They all enjoyed their work, but loved their families even more. These guys were authority figures who did not often have to give instructions. Through their own actions you knew what was expected. They really did inspire by example. Besides my own wonderful Dad, I saw these characteristics in the fathers of many of my closest friends including, Henry Brandis, who was Dean of the Law School, Bob Cox, who was a downtown merchant, David McGowan, who was a pharmaceutical salesman and reminded me of Fred McMurray on My Three Sons, George Prillaman, who ran UNC Food Services such as Lenoir Hall and was the personification of cool, and Sandy McClamroch who was the Mayor of Chapel Hill for most of the 1960s and owned WCHL yet was as laid back as Ozzie Nelson in the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett. These men were great to be around and each left an indelible impression on me about how to be a responsible adult and father.

George Prillaman managed the UNC food services in the 1950s and 60s. In his spare time he always had a project going from turning his garage into a large entertainment area to restoring a vintage Model T. He was also perhaps the only owner of a Ford Edsel in Chapel Hill.  

As Chapel Hill entered the 1960s families spent a lot less time sitting and talking around the dinner table at night. Television became the center of family gatherings and friends and myself began seeing the people on television more as role models than our own parents. My own dad was never really interested in television and rarely watched it. By the mid 1960s we no longer even had a television in our house, which coincidentally was the same time that I went from being a "C" student to an "A" student. For the rest of his life he only had a television once more, and that was a gift I gave him in the mid 1970s. Within a few years he gave it away.

Sandy McClamroch was not only Chapel Hill mayor for most of the turbulent 1960s, but also owned WCHL and a number of apartments in town, yet he was so easygoing it was hard to believe he even had a job. 

As my own adolescent turmoil began to surface I often rebelled against my father and his generation by letting my hair grow long, deriding the sentimental music he listened to, and blaming his generation for all the injustice and hypocrisy I saw in the world. Somehow I knew better, and was confident my generation would make the United States a better and safer place to live. I now know I was wrong and I would love to have more men like I knew then as our leaders and fathers today.

This is a photo of UNC Law School Dean Henry Brandis from 1959. I was friends with his son Hank and often had breakfast at their house on Arrowhead Road.   

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by Charly Mann

 
This is menu from the Poet's Corner. It was Chapel Hill's first upscale gormet restuarant and was located in a large basement space below University Square in the early 1970s. It was owned and operated by Ralph Macklin. The furnishings and decor were similar to a private London men's club. The food was fabulous, but perhaps a little too esoteric for the times. Soon after the demise of Poet's Corner, La Residence opened where the Fearrington House is now located. It paved the way for Chapel Hill to become the fine dining capital of the South. 

Over the last several months I have enjoyed meeting with a large number of former Chapel Hillians. Invariably our conversations would turn to their most cherished culinary delights of the town. Among their favorites were The Ramshead Rathskeller, La Residence, Harry’s, The House of Chu, Ye Old Waffle Shop, The Dairy Bar, Landlubber’s Seafood, and The Poet’s Corner. Only the Waffle Shop and La Residence remain among these revered institutions, though there is some chance The Rathskeller may someday reopen (the planned re-opening has been pushed back several times and the "new" owner has not replied to my recent inquires about the project's status). I have already written articles on the Rat and Harry's for Chapel Hill Memories, and plan to do an in depth one on La Residence in the future, but to rekindle your appetite here is a visual taste tribute to all of these restaurants.

La Residence has been rated as one of the 10 best restaurants in the United States. The late Bill Neal and his incredible wife, Morton, opened the restaurant in 1976. Over the years it has had three locations, but has always maintained its high quality of food. La Rez, as its aficionados call it, is now owned and operated by Frances Gualtieri. I have been fortunate to dine at this wonderful restaurant at least 50 times since it opened and have never had less than a 5 star meal there.

This is a picture from inside The Dairy Bar on the 200 block of East Franklin Street in 1957. At this time I was seven and often rode my bike there to get one or two of their light doughnuts that they kept in a row of shelves behind the front cash register. They were 5 cents each and much like today's Krispy Kreame doughnuts, but not so sweet and had a better flavor. Two hard working brothers who lived in Glen Lenox, as I recall, ran the business. They were open at 6:00 AM each day and stayed open until 11:00 PM, which was several hours later than anywhere else in Chapel Hill in those days. There was a beautiful mural on the back wall. It was also a great place to get an ice cream cone, sundae, or milkshake. Many students and townspeople dined there, and until Hardee's opened downtown in the mid 1960s it was probably the town's favorite place to get a hamburger. Today McAlister's Deli is located where the Dairy Bar once stood.

This is a page from a Rat (Rathskeller) menu from 1995 that features their famous Gambler. It was then described as a Chapel Hill tradition much like The Old Well and Kenan Stadium. The Gambler was 5 ounces of skirt steak served with their beloved tossed salad along with french fries, sautéed onions, and garlic bread. I have a fairly extensive collection of Rat menus going back to 1955. Several years ago a couple of former employees of the Rat, Ranch House, and the Zoom Zoom shared with me not only the recipes for some of their best loved menu items, but details about how they were actually made in their kitchens.

Landlubber's was a Calabash style seafood restaurant and located a few miles out of town on Highway 54 East that was very popular through 1980s. Today Squids offers the same kind of food at a significantly higher relative price.  

Harry’s sandwiches always had great names. This is their collection from 1970. In those days these prices were not considered inexpensive.

Ye Olde Waffle Shop has been a breakfast tradition in Chapel Hill since the early 1970s. They really do have great homemade waffles and there is no where better on Franklin Street to get eggs any style, hash browns, wonderful coffee, and read a newspaper.

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By Bill Anthony UNC Class of 1965 (all photos provided by Charly Mann)

“Plain as an old shoe; honest as an old field pine; tough as a top sergeant; blunt as the crack of doom; impulsive to a hurt; generous to a fault; quick to fly off the handle and dangerous as an axeheive when he does; quick to confess he was not himself when he did it – though it is hard to imagine who he was because, God knows, he could not be anybody else; wrathful as an Old Testament prophet, truthful as a sinner brought to repentance by an inward grace, overflowing with notes that are always set to music, full of lightning as a cloud in a storm and full of the calm that follows; an artist with the thunderbolt and a master of the still, small voice full of earthiness without a trace of vulgarity, and full of flare as a lightwood knot.”

UNC Chancellor Robert House in his office in 1966

These words were used by Professor Albert Coates ’18 to describe his friend – and a friend to all who were privileged to know him – Chancellor Robert Burton House. I was not one of those so graced – though God knows I tried. Entering Carolina in the fall of 1961 as a wide-eyed freshman from High Point, I was eager to absorb all that UNC and Chapel Hill had to offer. It didn’t take long to develop a feel for those experiences which were on the “must do” list. Shop at Kemp’s, go to a home football game, have a beer and pizza – or perhaps a Gambler - at the Rathskeller and sign up for a Classics course taught by Chancellor House. Life didn’t get much better than that in the early 60s!

Chancellor House loved to play the harmonia and often was a guest performer with well-known groups that played in Chapel Hill

My first year was a bit of a struggle, due in part to the challenge of General College courses I was taking. However, most of my difficulties were self-inflicted because of poor study habits combined with considerable excellence in the partying department. As a dorm rat, no reason to have a good time with college buddies was too insignificant, whatever the resulting amount of GPA damage might be. However, there was the promise of a Chancellor House class come Sophomore year – if I could just make the cut and stay in school!

As the end of second semester approached, word got out that Chancellor House would be retiring a second time as a University employee in June of 1962. The first time was as Chancellor, the second from his teaching responsibilities. So close to my grasp, the opportunity to take one of his courses slipped away. Oh, he remained a fixture in Chapel Hill during the years following retirement – but incidental contact was just not the same as having the opportunity 3 times each week to hang on his words of wisdom and wit. In an attempt to make up for that hole in my education, here for all to consider and appreciate are a few of his personal accomplishments and significant contributions to UNC.

This is a photo of Robert House in 1934 when he was the Dean of Administration at the University of North Carolina

• Born in Thelma, Halifax County, in 1892.
• Graduated with honors from UNC in 1916 and inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, serving as chapter president his senior year.
• Received Master of Arts degree from Harvard in 1917.
• Served with the American Expeditionary Forces as a Lieutenant in the Army (Infantry) during World War I in 1917-18.
• Served as executive secretary of UNC during 1924-34.
• Appointed dean of administration in 1934.
• Selected as the first chancellor of the University in 1945, serving in that capacity until his retirement in 1957.
• Returned to the classroom and taught both English and Classics as one of the most popular professors on campus until his second retirement in 1962.

Robert House loved Chapel Hill and UNC and graduated at the top of his Carolina class in 1916

Former Consolidated University President William C. Friday ’48 said of House “I don’t know of a man who more symbolized Chapel Hill in my experience than Bob House – intellectual, urbane but still simple, an incredibly friendly man. There was never a time when you didn’t enjoy being with Robert House. He was always fun. But he was always work, too. A lot of people didn’t give him credit for what he did here. But I can tell you from first hand, close-range observation that Robert House and Bill Carmichael made Frank Graham possible. They ran the place. They tended to the place while he (Graham) was in Indonesia or wherever he was.”

Well, that was Chancellor House, the professor I never really got to know – yet feel that I do. He had that way about him, touching the lives of those by his side, in his classes and, yes, even some who just missed the opportunity to be a closer part of his world. He died in 1987 and left a void that remains unfilled to this day. One of a kind, indeed. Rest easy, my almost mentor and vicarious friend.

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by Charly Mann

Bland Simpson is a Chapel Hillian with an absurd diversity of talents. He is a composer of highly regarded musicals, an author, teacher, sometime member of the renowned eclectic string band The Red Clay Ramblers, and a skilled house painter. In the late 1960s and early 70s it seemed like Bland was destined to become a singer-songwriter superstar like his friend James Taylor and mentor Bob Dylan.

Simpson album cover: left to right Rob Stoner (Rothstein) - bass and organ, Bland Simpson - piano, David Olney - guitar and harmonica, Steve Merola - drums

Simpson graduated from Chapel Hill High School in 1966 (the same class James Taylor would have been in if he had stayed in town), and entered UNC with the intent of eventually becoming a lawyer. As a student he had a room in the University Methodist Church on Franklin Street where he spent a lot of his free time perfecting his musical skills on several of the pianos housed in the church. He had always loved music and especially admired the work of Bob Dylan. In 1968 Dylan released John Wesley Harding, an acoustic album that was in sharp contract to his two previous groundbreaking rock n roll albums Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. That album and its country sound had a profound influence on Simpson.

By the end of 1968 Simpson had become so obsessed with Dylan and his music that he got a ride from Chapel Hill to Woodstock, New York, the then home of Bob Dylan, with the hope of meeting his idol. Through both luck and determination Bland found his idol's secluded home. He knocked at the door, which was answered by Dylan's wife Sara. Bland asked her if he could speak to Bob. A few minutes later a friendly Bob Dylan came out to the front porch and spoke to Bland for almost an hour. They talked about songwriting, Simpson's unusual first name, Dylan’s just completed new album, Nashville Skyline (which would be released three months later), and Bland’s friend James Taylor’s recently released first album, which Dylan told Bland that George Harrison had brought over and played for him.

Bob Dylan in front yard of his Woodstock home in December 1969, about the time Bland Simpson came to visit him there

Soon after meeting with Dylan Simpson left Chapel Hill for New York City intent on becoming a professional singer-songwriter. He signed a publishing deal with Dylan's manager Albert Grosssman, and secured a record deal with Dylan's record company, Columbia Records, which was then the most prestigious and coveted label to be on in the world. Destiny seemed to be on his side when he assembled a group that included Rob Stoner who would go on to record several albums with Dylan as well lead Dylan's touring band, on bass, and fellow Chapel Hillian and UNC student David Olney who has for more than three decades been one of America's best singer-songwriters, on lead guitar. The band was called Simpson and they released an album with that title in May of 1971.

Bland Simpson (right) and his wife Catherine in Chapel Hill in July 1970 shortly aftering recording his debut album in New York

When the Simpson album came out I was the manager of two Chapel Hill record stores and was determined to sell as many copies as possible. In those days neither local station WCHL, nor any stations in Durham or Raleigh were formatted to play the type of music on Bland’s album, so I made an extra effort to advertise it and play it often in our stores. Within two weeks after the album was released we sold more than 150 copies of the album, yet without a radio hit it was hard to keep this momentum going. The album today is largely forgotten.

Cartoon caricature of me - Charly Mann - in 1971 holding the Bland Simpson album which I was enthusiastically promoting to all my customers

After the Simpson album debacle Bland Simpson returned to Chapel Hill and co-wrote and performed in the musicals Hot Grog and Diamond Studs, which both premiered at The Ranch House. Diamond Studs eventually became a hit both on Broadway and in London. Over the last 40 years Simpson has authored several books, been a contributing columnist to local alternative newspapers, was a member of The Red Clay Ramblers, and has written several more musicals including the wonderful King Mackerel and the Blues are Running. For the past 30 years he has also taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina.

October 1974 flyer for DIAMOND STUDS musical which Bland Simpson co-wrote

Note: The first three tracks on the playlist at top of this article are from the SIMPSON album. The second and third songs feature David Olney, marking the start of his brilliant career.

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