Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Aycock Brown earned a chapter in Carteret County history

While Aycock Brown was serving as editor of The Beaufort (N.C.) News from 1935-41, he was constantly on the prowl to find new ways to expand business and commerce in Carteret County and the coastal region.



Somehow, Aycock Brown managed to get himself hired by the U.S. Army as a civilian consultant to promote activities associated with the construction and opening of Camp Davis Army Air Field at Holly Ridge in Onslow County in 1940-41. It was designed as a state-of-the-art anti-aircraft artillery training facility. 

The new camp was named for Army Maj. Gen. Richmond Pearson Davis of Statesville, N.C., who served in World War I as a troop commander in France. 

Representing a $16.8 million investment, Camp Davis was a massive construction project, consisting of more than 3,000 buildings on 45,538 acres as well as two paved 5,000-foot runways and two railroad spurs. Workers came by the hundreds, if not thousands.



 

Camp Davis was built in just five months. Troops started arriving in April 1941, and the facility was fully operational by June. At its peak, more than 20,000 officers and soldiers were stationed at Camp Davis. 

Aycock Brown made sure that the news media got the story…and that the politicians got the credit…as he was paid to do. 

A few months later, Japanese aircraft bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. 

Aycock Brown immediately volunteered to serve his country, but he was too old, too skinny and too near-sighted to qualify for soldiering. 

The Naval Intelligence Office took him on, however, as a special civilian agent to cover the North Carolina coast. 

“Driving his old jeep along the shore, it was his job to photograph sinking ships, interview survivors and arrange proper burials for the dead,” wrote Lorraine Eaton of The Virginian-Pilot newspaper. 

One eerie aspect of Aycock Brown’s work was fingerprinting the bodies of any U.S., British and Canadian sailors and merchant marine seamen that washed ashore during World War II in order to identify them.

Eaton said: “This information was vital to national security, as the Germans could and did strip the identifications from bodies recovered off torpedoed ships to provide enemy spies with Allied identities.”

In the spring of 1942, Aycock Brown had his hands full, as two British ships were torpedoed by German U-boats and sank off the North Carolina coast only about a month apart.

On April 9, 1942, the San Delfino, a merchant marine oil tanker, was attacked by U-203 off Cape Hatteras, due east of Rodanthe. Twenty-eight men died, but 22 were rescued from the sinking ship and delivered to the port at Morehead City.

On May 11, 1942, the Bedfordshire, an armed trawler, while on patrol off Cape Lookout, was destroyed by U-558, killing all 37 hands aboard. The Bedfordshire had departed that very morning from Morehead City.

Over a period of several weeks after these two vessels sank, 10 bodies of British seamen were found. They washed ashore at various locations in Carteret, Dare and Hyde counties. Six were positively identified by Aycock Brown and authorities.

 



Carteret County historian Rodney Kemp said Aycock Brown was an unsung war hero, in a sense, and many of his “war stories” are preserved in collections at the History Museum of Carteret County in downtown Morehead City.

 


After World War II, Aycock Brown came back home to Carteret County to perform some of his “press agentry magic” for clients such as the Sanitary Fish Market & Restaurant, which was established in 1938 on the Morehead City waterfront. Aycock Brown and Tony Seamon, co-founder of the Sanitary, had become fast friends.


In 1949, Jack Riley of The (Raleigh) News & Observer wrote: “Aycock Brown was the first writer to extoll the virtues of Tony Seamon’s seafoods at the Sanitary, and his squibs led to a growing clip file of free publicity the like of which has never been shared by another Tar Heel restaurateur.”

Riley said: “The grateful Seamon dropped a $350 press camera into his lap and launched Aycock Brown on his own….”

John Tunnell of Morehead (shown below), who started working at the Sanitary as a 15-year-old cook in 1945, said Capt. Tony and Aycock were like peas in a pod. The two of them could talk, laugh and connive for hours. They were born promoters.




“Aycock Brown got the first free piece of publicity for the Sanitary, an article that ran in the Greensboro Daily News,” Tunnell recalled.

A photograph of Aycock Brown in his Navy uniform also hangs on the “wall of fame” at the Sanitary, Tunnell said. “Next time, you’re there, ask someone to show it to you.”

One of the early advertising specialty items (perhaps developed by Seamon/Brown) promoted “Meet and Eat” at the Sanitary. It was a pocket-sized combination bottle opener/screwdriver in the shape of a fish. Each was stamped on the back with a four-leaf clover and the words “Good Luck.” These items were very popular with fishermen. Proceeds benefited the VFW Welfare Fund.



Tunnell concluded: “Aycock was a great person and a good publicity man. He did a lot for tourism in eastern North Carolina.”

Monday, March 25, 2024

Aycock Brown introduced tourism to the Outer Banks

North Carolina’s Outer Banks is a national treasure…because a 20th century press agent named Aycock Brown said so.

News and photo editors across the state and nation trusted him. Aycock Brown had an uncanny knack for getting his material published.

Thus, as “the father of coastal tourism,” he was “king of the dunes” in the Outer Banks for several decades, both before and after World War II. North Carolinians are forever grateful. Aycock Brown was still cranking out publicity when he died in 1984, at age 79.

April 13, 2024, marks the 40-year anniversary of his death, so it’s appropriate to pay tribute to the man and reflect on his good deeds.

 


Aycock Brown was gifted in several ways. One editor commented: “Give Aycock Brown sand and sea water, and he will make something newsworthy about it.”

He loved taking photos of vacationers. “Mind if I take your picture?” he would ask beachgoers. 

He was a charmer. They’d agree and Aycock would send the photos to the visitors’ hometown newspaper editors. Sure enough, the pictures would get published, gaining another bit of free publicity for the Outer Banks.

 


Stormy Gale Brown Ballance said her father developed his fine art of conversation on the porches of the villages of the Outer Banks. “That skill, honed with endless hours of leisurely jawing, made him successful in building relationships,” she said.

 Aycock Brown was nice to people. He gave holiday gifts to bank tellers and widows, and the trunk of his car was full of trinkets for journalists, children, tourists and politicians. His generosity was genuine, but it also won him friends,” a co-worker said.

 



When they saw or heard about “a story,” they would call him…and he would fly off to get the scoop.



 

Aycock Brown was born in 1904 in Happy Valley, N.C., a small community in Caldwell County about halfway up the mountain to Blowing Rock in Watauga County. His parents named him Charles Brantley Aycock Brown, after North Carolina’s sitting governor, Charles Brantley Aycock of Wayne County.

The Brown family moved to a farm at Occoneechee near Hillsborough in Orange County. Aycock Brown was introduced to journalism as a teenager, working as a printing apprentice at the Orange County Observer. 

In 1923, Aycock Brown was hired as a reporter at the Elizabeth City Independent. About six months later, he decided to enroll at Columbia University in New York City to take some journalism courses. Shortly thereafter, he took a job as a copy editor at the Durham Herald.

 “That lasted two days,” Brown said. “That’s how long it took them to find out I couldn’t spell and didn’t know where to put commas.”

Aycock Brown resurfaced in 1928 in Carteret County to work as a reporter at The Beaufort News. He also did some consulting work with local investors who built a toll bridge from Morehead City to Atlantic Beach and put up a dance pavilion near the surf. Aycock Brown named the resort “The Pagoda by the Sea.”


 

Aycock Brown moved on later in 1928 to join the political campaign of Alfred E. Smith, the Democrat who opposed Herbert Hoover in the U.S. presidential election. Smith lost, and so did Aycock Brown, because he wagered his pay on the wrong man. 

Broke, he took up bootlegging, and went to Ocracoke. Arriving in a small skiff loaded with bootleg liquor, he came face to face with a young woman who was standing on the dock. 

“I’ll tell you how pretty she was,” he said. “For several minutes, I completely forgot about all of those gallons of liquor in the boat. And it was good stuff.”

Capt. Bill Gaskill (shown below), owner of the Pamlico Inn at Ocracoke, offered Aycock Brown free lodging for two weeks in exchange for some public relations work to promote Ocracoke as a tourism destination.

 



Aycock Brown readily agreed…allowing him some time to get better acquainted with Miss Esther Styron. One thing led to another, causing Aycock Brown to nix his grand plan to sail on to Cuba to take a job as press agent for a carnival.

Instead, he opted to stay in Ocracoke and court Esther. They were married in 1929 and planned to make Ocracoke their home. 

Genealogist Ron Ragland wrote: “For the next few years, Aycock dreamed up odd Ocracoke promotions. He sold stories about Blackbeard and the beaches to big-city newspapers…he painted the Ocracoke Lighthouse on conch shells in India ink and sold them to tourists. He eventually sold an essay about Ocracoke Island, titled ‘Cape Stormy,’ to the Saturday Evening Post.” 

“Yet,” Ragland said, “the Great Depression made it harder to make a living pushing tourism.” 

Aycock Brown had a typewriter, and he could type, so he pitched his services in that regard as well. “If anyone had any legal work that needed to be typed up, I did it,” Brown told author David Stick. 


Aycock Brown and David Stick (right).

 

Life on Ocracoke was hard, but an opportunity knocked, causing the family to relocate to Beaufort in 1935. 

Aycock Brown was hired “as a temporary press agent for an organization attempting to save the town’s railroad, which was in danger of being decommissioned,” according to his biographer. 

“When the railroad was saved, largely due to Brown’s promotional efforts, Brown was soon asked to run The Beaufort News temporarily, while its publisher, William Giles Mebane, was ill. He retained the position when Mebane eventually died of his illness in 1935.” 

Aycock Brown connected with his readers and introduced new regular features, including “Covering the Waterfront” and “Fishing and All Outdoors.” It was all rather humorous, because he neither fished nor swam in the ocean. But he didn’t let that stop him from hooking new readers.

He preceded the fish house liars group of storytellers, but they may have taken their cue from Aycock Brown. 

Always the opportunist, Aycock Brown was keen on promoting new events such as a bow and arrow “goggle fishing tournament” that suggested spearfishing was the next great sport. It brought in a slew of news media coverage for Carteret County…and two entrants. 

As a community service, Aycock Brown would read capsules of the national news from behind the curtain during the motion picture shows at Beaufort’s downtown cinema, known as the Sea Breeze. 

Aycock Brown also served as a visionary leader of the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce in its pursuit of tourism as a key to foster regional economic development.

Friday, March 22, 2024

There’s no shortage of ‘upstream thinking’ nurse practitioners

Within the field of nursing, an important “upstream thinker” was Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Nurses’ Settlement in New York City in 1893. Wald coined the term “public health nurse.”

 


Writing about Wald’s contributions to nursing, Dr. Elizabeth Fee, chief medical historian at the U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., and Dr. Liping Bu, a history professor at Alma (Mich.) College, said: 

“Wald believed that public health nurses must treat social and economic problems, not simply take care of sick people. The public health nurse should be involved with the health of an entire neighborhood and cooperate with social agencies to help improve living conditions.” 

In 1893, nurses Wald and Mary Brewster moved to New York’s Lower East Side to begin caring for poor people in the tenement. Within the Henry Street Nurses’ Settlement, they gathered six more nurses and social reformers.



 

In addition to providing nursing care, they took neighborhood members on picnics, on excursions to the country and to music concerts. They formed girls’ clubs and offered cooking classes. The yard behind the house was converted into a large playground.



 

Next came the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service, with nurses visiting homes of all nationalities across the city. In 1917, the Nursing Service gave 32,753 patients bedside care and attended 21,000 sick children in their homes. Wald and her team kept moving farther and farther upstream.

 


The visiting nurses unit eventually had a staff of about 100 blue-uniformed nurses who went from tenement to tenement, offering free or low-cost check-ups and treatment, mostly for immigrant mothers and their children. Rather than climbing all those tenement stairs on their rounds, the nurses simply hopped from rooftop to rooftop, like this nurse is doing here.


In a sense, Dr. Deborah Lindell, a nursing professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio (shown below), believes that Wald took that baton from Florence Nightingale, a nurse of British heritage, who lived from 1820-1910, and is remembered as a social reformer and the “founder of modern nursing.”



 

“Wald, as Nightingale before her, understood from providing care to those members of society who were impoverished, disenfranchised and otherwise vulnerable, that many of the health issues they faced could be prevented by upstream actions focused on changing/enacting public policies,” Dr. Lindell wrote.



 

Historians acknowledge that Nightingale’s most famous contribution to nursing came during the Crimean War (1853-56), when she sounded the alarm about the “horrific conditions for the wounded at the military hospital on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus Strait, opposite Constantinople, at Scutari” (now within Istanbul, Turkey).

As background, after Britain and France entered the war against Russia on the side of the Ottoman Empire, Nightingale’s staff of 38 female volunteer nurses and 15 Catholic nuns were mobilized and sent into the war zone in October 1854.

When they arrived, they found the living conditions at the field hospital to be deplorable…and killing the patients. In fact, 10 times more soldiers died from poor nutrition and illnesses such as typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery than from battle wounds.



 

Overcrowding, defective sewers and lack of ventilation at Scutari were corrected by the British government’s Sanitary Commission in March 1855, almost six months after Nightingale had arrived.

During the Crimean War, Nightingale gained the nickname of “The Lady with the Lamp.” The Times of London reported on Nightingale’s presence:

“She is a ‘ministering angel’ without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as (she) glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow’s face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night…she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.”


 

The phrase was further popularized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a poem written in 1857:

 Lo! in that house of misery

A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering gloom,

And flit from room to room.




Wednesday, March 20, 2024

‘Upstream thinking’ emerges as problem-solving method

Here’s a novel idea: What if we could solve problems by preventing them from happening in the first place? It’s possible, through an approach known as “upstream thinking” or “upstream problem solving.” The notion has gained traction, particularly within the health care arena.

Katya Andresen, a digital and analytics executive with The Cigna Group in Washington, D.C., recommends the book “Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen,” which was released in 2020.

 



The author is Dan Heath, Senior Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in Durham, N.C.

Heath told Andresen that society is “stuck in a cycle of reaction. We spend the vast majority of our time and resources reacting to problems that we might well have prevented outright.”

 


Heath said the pioneer in the field of upstream thinking that he admires most was the late Dr. Bob Sanders, a pediatrician in Murfreesboro, Tenn. “He deserves as much credit as anyone for the fact that car seats are now mandatory for kids.” 

While serving as Director of the Rutherford County (Tenn.) Health Department, “Dr. Sanders read an article in the 1970s that convinced him that kids dying in auto accidents was exactly the kind of thing that pediatricians should be worried about,” Heath said.

 


“It sparked him to action. He led an effort to get a new state law passed in 1977. Tennessee became the first state in the country to a pass mandatory car-seat law” (the Child Passenger Protection Act), requiring parents to properly restrain children under age 4 in approved car seats.

By 1985, all 50 states in the nation had passed related laws. Dr. Sanders then set out to champion mandatory seat belt requirements for older children and adults, which became Tennessee law in 1986.

These accomplishments led to Dr. Sanders earning the nickname “Dr. Seat Belt,” one which he wore proudly until the day he died in 2006, at age 78.

Heath said Dr. Sanders’ work helped assure that more than “11,000 kids are alive today who otherwise would have died.”

 


Patricia Sanders helped unveil the historic highway marker that pays tribute to her late husband.


In a medical sense, “upstream thinking examines and addresses root causes rather than symptoms and can improve long-term outcomes while decreasing health care costs,” wrote Dr. Thea James, Associate Chief Medical Officer at Boston Medical Center.



 

“Imagine walking along a river and seeing people floating down, nearly drowning,” she said. “Of course, your first thought is to run to shore and pull them out. You feel good about it – you’ve saved them from drowning, after all – but people keep coming down the river.”

Dr. James said it dawns on you to go upstream to see “what’s the cause of so many people in the water. You discover that a safety fence meant to keep people from falling into the water is missing.”

 


While it’s important to continue to haul half-drowned people out of the water downstream, she said, “Upstream health care is about rebuilding the safety fence so that people don’t fall into the water to begin with.” 

Lillian Wald and a cadre of nursing activists who began work in New York City in 1893 continue to stand out as distinguished nursing forerunners. A hallmark of Wald’s upstream approach – more than 130 years ago – was to promote wellness as a means to prevent illness and disease. 

Dr. Patricia Pittman, a public health professor at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., wrote: “Wald’s model of care (involved) nurses working side by side with social workers at the intersection of medicine and society.”

 



Wald’s story is coming up next.



Monday, March 18, 2024

True inventor of eggs Benedict remains a mystery

Eggs Benedict is a unique American dish often served for breakfast or brunch. It is anchored by a split English muffin that has been lightly toasted. In its most basic form, each English muffin half is topped with Canadian bacon, a poached egg and Hollandaise sauce.


 

Just as the English muffin itself was invented in New York City, the eggs Benedict dish was created in The Big Apple, too. But there’s a ton of mystery still associated with the origin of eggs Benedict.

Perhaps the dish was first served at the original Delmonico’s restaurant in New York City that was opened in 1837 by brothers Giovanni and Pietro Delmonico, who were Italian-Swiss immigrants. Located in the heart of the financial center of the world, this was America’s first fine dining restaurant. 

Author Rachel Wharton believes that Emma Frances “Fannie” Gardner Benedict was the “reason” for the creation of eggs Benedict. She married LeGrand Lockwood Benedict in 1863, while he was serving as an officer in the Union army during the Civil War. The couple “enjoyed the unusual experience of a two months’ honeymoon in camp.”

 


Back in New York City for the duration of the war, Fannie Benedict, a writer, was among a group of educated women who dined frequently at Delmonico’s (the first restaurant to allow women to dine by themselves), Wharton wrote. The story goes: Fannie Benedict had grown weary of the regular menu, so she asked the kitchen to try something new for lunch. 

Frenchman Charles Ranhofer, the head chef at Delmonico’s, claimed to create “Eggs à la Benedick” just for her. Many years later (in 1912), the second edition of Ranhofer’s cookbook described how to make the dish:

 

“Cut some muffins in halves crosswise, toast them without allowing to brown, then place a round of cooked ham an eighth of an inch thick and of the same diameter as the muffins on each half. Heat in a moderate oven and put a poached egg on each toast. Cover the whole with Hollandaise sauce.”


 

(Ranhofer didn’t specifically refer to English muffins. They were invented by baker Samuel Bath Thomas in the early 1880s.)

Perhaps a more logical English muffin story involves retired Wall Street stockbroker Lemuel Benedict in 1894. Hoping to cure a morning hangover, Lemuel Benedict entered the restaurant inside New York City’s Waldorf Hotel and ordered “buttered toast, two poached eggs, crisp bacon and a hooker of Hollandaise.” (Food writer Rupert Taylor defines a hooker as being “somewhere between a splash and a slosh.”)

 


The hotel’s maître d’ was Oscar Tschirky (shown below). He tweaked Lemuel Benedict’s breakfast – the toast was replaced by an English muffin and Canadian bacon was substituted for crisp bacon.


 

Billy Oliva, the current executive chef at Delmonico’s, confirmed that eggs Benedict is a “good hangover food combination,” because “it’s very rich. It’s also tricky to make, so it’s an item that people don’t want to try at home.”

 


Then there is Elias Cornelius Benedict, a New York financier and yachtsman, who was nicknamed “Commodore.” He claimed the recipe for eggs Benedict came from his mother who died in 1885.


 

Wharton said: “The first written recipe appeared in the February 1897 issue of Table Talk magazine, written by Cornelia C. Bedford, the former principal of the New York Cooking School.

The creators of “The Food We Know” website offered: “In the end, does it matter who ‘concocted’ the first eggs Benedict? Certain pairings are fated to be together. Perhaps eggs Benedict is not a ‘100% invented dish’ but an evolution.”

Friday, March 15, 2024

English muffin emerged as ‘an elegant alternative’ to toast

One of the items found on the breakfast tables of America is the “soft and crunchy” toasted English muffin. Despite its “across-the-pond” name, the first English muffin was created in New York City in the early1880s.

 


The recipe was formulated by an Englishman, however. He was Samuel Bath Thomas, a native of Plymouth in Devon County in southwestern England. Thomas came to the United States in 1874 and found work in a Gotham bread bakery.



He was able to save up and open his own bakery in 1880 in the affluent Chelsea neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side. Originally, Thomas’ English muffins were known as “toaster crumpets,” a variation of the popular British staple served during breakfast and afternoon tea with fruit jam, clotted cream or butter placed atop the crumpet.


 

“Though crumpets and English muffins are both griddle cakes cooked on the stove, there are some key differences,” commented Gordon Ramsay, a British celebrity chef.

 


He says a crumpet contains flour, yeast, salt, baking soda, warm water and milk. An English muffin uses flour, yeast, salt and milk, along with butter. But no baking soda or warm water.

“Crumpets have more moisture. Make crumpets by pouring the batter into a crumpet ring mold and cooking the batter on one side,” Ramsay said. They are eaten whole, and the nooks and crannies appear on the top of the crumpet.

“English muffins have a firmer dough, and the muffins are usually rolled out into little balls and flattened. Cook both sides,” he said. English muffins are then halved, to expose the nooks and crannies on the inside, and toasted before being served with fruit jam, cream cheese or butter. Add egg and cheese to make a breakfast sandwich.





One piece of advice from SiriusChef.com is: “True aficionados know you never want to slice an English muffin with a knife; doing so ruins all those wonderful air pockets (nooks and crannies). Instead, use an English muffin splitting tool, which leaves two equal halves with perfectly preserved peaks and valleys.”

 




Or, follow the instructions on the bottom of the Thomas English muffins box and split the English muffin using the tines of a fork. 

Shortly after Thomas’ English muffins hit the market in the 1880s, New York City’s fine hotels began serving English muffins as “a more elegant alternative to toast.” It wasn’t long before Americans in general embraced the English muffin.

With the introduction of electric pop-up toasters in 1926, English muffins became a mainstay of American breakfast cuisine.

The Thomas brand continues today as the English muffin industry leader. Two early competitors have survived as well. They are Wolferman’s and BAYS English muffins.

Louis Wolferman opened a corner grocery store in Kansas City, Mo., in 1888. In 1910, Fred Wolferman (son of the founder) began making his own English muffins, using tuna cans (with the tops and bottoms removed) as molds. This is what gave Wolferman’s English muffins their distinctive shape and height of at least 2 inches thick.

 


George W. Bay opened a bakery in downtown Chicago in 1933. Bays Bakery was one of the first companies to package its English muffins in a box with a cellophane window. McDonald’s introduced its Egg McMuffin Canadian bacon, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich on a toasted BAYS English muffin in the early 1970s.




Today, the Thomas and BAYS brands of English muffins are part of Bimbo Bakeries USA, a subsidiary of Grupo Bimbo, a huge conglomerate based in Mexico. Wolferman’s is owned by 1-800-FLOWERS.com, Inc., which is headquartered in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

Aycock Brown earned a chapter in Carteret County history

While Aycock Brown was serving as editor of The Beaufort (N.C.) News from 1935-41, he was constantly on the prowl to find new ways to exp...