Blimps help save the day in World War II

One of the remnants of World War II in eastern North Carolina is the Navy’s Weeksville dirigible hangar (a big blimp garage) in Pasquotank County, about 9 miles outside of Elizabeth City.

The site is now owned and operated by TCOM, L.P., an airship manufacturing company based in Columbia, Md., and used as a manufacturing and testing location. The massive corrugated soft steel structure is 1,040 feet long, 150 feet high and 296 feet wide.

Writing for Our State magazine in January 2012, freelancer Earl Swift described it this way:

“One moment the view from the two-lane road south of Elizabeth City is a predictable album of soybeans, farmhouses and thickets of loblolly.” And then, all of a sudden, dagnabbit, “an enormous, silver spacecraft – or something – looms.

“It’s big beyond sense: 20 stories high, humpbacked and futuristic. Or rather, an old-fashioned notion of what the future might look like. Its size defies superlatives,” Swift said. “An arching roof relies on arching steel trusses, rather than columns, for its support. A tractor-trailer becomes a toy on a floor the size of six football fields.

“Designed to shelter six of the Navy’s patrol blimps, it actually accommodated nine, with room to spare. Three battleships would fit side by side, as would a platoon of Statues of Liberty,” Swift said.”

“…The structure is a monolithic monument to a mostly forgotten chapter of World War II – a hangar for U.S. Navy blimps that helped defeat Nazi Germany’s infamous U-boats,” Swift said.

The hangar was commissioned as an LTA (lighter than air) Naval Air Station more than 76 years ago on April 1, 1942, and the Navy’s first blimp mission out of Weeksville in the Battle of the Atlantic occurred June 8, 1942.

Weeksville was as “an ideal southern location” for a naval air station for LTA craft, the second in the country, to complement New Jersey’s Lakehurst blimp base. Weeksville beat out 42 other sites that were considered by the Navy, Swift said.

He said the U.S. government paid a little more than $100 an acre for the 822-acre site.

In the years before helicopters, Swift said, “the best vehicle to detect German U-boats was the dirigible, commonly referred to as the blimp. Blimps could fly slowly for extended periods, hover and carry the sensors and armament to protect the shipping lanes off the East Coast.”

“From the deck of a surface ship, a submerged sub was invisible. From the gondola of a blimp, however, a U-boat at shallow depth was plain to see. A blimp could stay in the air for two full days without refueling. If a sub dived deep, blimp crews could sniff it out with an array of tools the Navy perfected – sensors that detected the vibrations of turning screws and the magnetism of a hidden boat’s steel hull,” Swift said.

“Once found, a U-boat was in trouble. Blimp crews could summon warships to the scene or tangle with the marauder themselves. Harmless and soft and quiet though they seemed, Navy blimps were armed with depth charges and machine guns.

“To see one blimp in flight was an occasion,” Swift said. “To see three or four rise over the treetops and nose eastward into battle, their size belying their speed, was jaw-dropping. They made an even bigger impression on U-boat crews.

“Once deployed on patrol runs and as convoy escorts, the blimps all but halted German sub attacks on Allied merchantmen,” Swift reported.

“The blimps rarely mounted an attack, but their presence helped turn the Battle of the Atlantic. Allied shipping losses off the coast fall to three in 1943, to zero in 1944, to two the following year.”

With the end of World War II in 1945, the blimps left. Weeksville was reduced to a Naval Auxiliary Air Station, and the Navy used the facility for storage of surplus fixed-wing aircraft, eventually housing a maximum of 576 aircraft.

On the wall of the Ocracoke post office was a government-issued poster. It depicted Uncle Sam pointing his finger, with the words: “Loose Lips Could Sink Ships.”

Coastal North Carolinians heeded that advice to “hush”…and bring World War II to an end. Hallelujah.

‘Curious George’ helps his creators avoid Nazi persecution

America’s favorite storybook monkey, Curious George, had a most adventuresome early life.

He became a hero in 1940, saving the lives of his creators. A new documentary film, “Monkey Business: The Adventures of Curious George’s Creators,” has received favorable reviews.

Writer and illustrator Hans Reyersbach and Margret Waldstein were neighbors and grew up in Jewish homes in Hamburg, Germany.

He moved to Brazil after World War I and took a job selling bathtubs. Sometime later, she followed him to Brazil. Together, they started the first advertising agency in Rio de Janeiro, and they were married in 1935.

Hans and Margret took a vacation to Paris the following year. “What was supposed to be a four-week trip turned into four years,” said film director Ema Ryan Yamazaki. At some point, their surname was shortened to Rey, believed to be an attempt to mask their Jewish heritage.

While in Paris, Hans and Margret completed the first manuscript for what would become Curious George.

Michael Miller of People magazine wrote: “Like so many other Parisians at the time, the Nazi invasion in 1940 caught the Reys off-guard. As Jews, their lives were at stake and they resolved to escape. But by the time Hans went looking for a pair of bicycles to flee Paris, everything was sold out.”

“The only bike available was a tandem, a two-seater,” Yamazaki explained in an interview with Miller. “But Hans was able to build two separate bikes by incorporating spare parts.”

They left Paris just a few hours before the Nazi occupation. Margret told the story that they shoved off and pedaled south “in June 1940, on a rainy morning before dawn, with nothing but warm coats and our manuscripts – Curious George among them – tied to the baggage racks.”

The Reys were abruptly stopped at a checkpoint by two German guards.

Sarah Pearson of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor interviewed David Foster, a friend of Hans and Margret, who said: “They were accused of being spies. As they were being searched, one of the guards saw the Curious George illustrations and said, ‘they aren’t spies, they’re artists,’ and they were released.”

Dagnabbit. What a relief. The Reys rode their bikes for four days. Their 415-mile journey took them to Bayonne, France, where they were issued life-saving visas signed by the Portuguese consul-general. They crossed the Spanish border where they bought train tickets to Lisbon, Portugal.

From there they returned to Brazil where they attained American visas to allow them to continue their odyssey and move to New York City.

In 1941, Margret said: “We took a small apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, rolled up our sleeves, and were ready to start from scratch. We did not know a single publisher, but before the week was over we had found a home for Curious George at Houghton Mifflin.”

Curious George was an instant success, and the Reys were commissioned to write more adventures of the mischievous monkey. They wrote seven stories in all. Eventually, they bought a home near Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass.

From the mid-1950s forward, the Reys would spend their summers in Waterville, N.H. Hans would work on his books around the hotel swimming pool.

“The children just flocked to him – I was one of them,” David Foster told Pearson. He was about 5 years old when he met the couple.

Virginia J. Johnson, a librarian at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library in Fredericksburg, Va., wrote that Hans and Margret Rey “had no children themselves, but kids across the world have made friends with their little monkey, Curious George.”

Margret Rey told Johnson: “Among children, we seem to be known as the parents of Curious George. ‘I thought you were monkeys, too,’ said a little boy who had been eager to meet us, disappointment written all over his face.’”

A review of the “Monkey Business” documentary by film critic Renee Schonfeld of Common Sense Media noted: “Charming animation by artist Jacob Kafka is superimposed on the newsreel film, so that young audiences see Hans and Margret as cartoon heroes amid the crowds. In spite of the horrors of European wartime and occupation…there are no frightening or graphic scenes, no atrocities shown or referenced.”

Schonfeld said. “For middle grades and up, the film is recommended for family viewing and should provide ample opportunity for discussion of a critical historical era, as well as a celebration of two unique people whose life journey left an indelible mark on children’s literature.”

A father who commented on the documentary offered praise to the Reys for “their gift to the free world…about the adventures of a small, curious monkey. These stories have settled in the minds of millions of children and their children’s children.”

Hans died in 1977, leaving Margret to handle the Curious George franchise until her death in 1996. One of her greatest individual accomplishments was the establishment in 1989 of The Curious George Foundation to “fund programs for children that share Curious George’s irresistible qualities: curiosity in learning, exploring, ingenuity, opportunity and determination.”

Deviled eggs are a Southern delicacy

 Writing for Our State magazine, based in Greensboro, N.C., Andrea Weigl asserts that in the South: “The deviled egg is revered. It’s both the symbol and the centerpiece for every covered-dish dinner or picnic you’ve ever attended.”

She has credentialed subject matter experts to back her up. One is Liz Williams, the director of the New Orleans-based Southern Food and Beverage Museum. When Williams turned 21, her mother marked her daughter’s adulthood by giving her a deviled egg plate and saying: “You can’t entertain without one of these.”

Debbie Moose, a food writer and author in Raleigh, shared her mother’s advice: “There are two things that a Southern woman always got for wedding presents: a hand-crank ice cream maker and a deviled egg plate.”

Susan Perry of Durham, an egg plate collector, told Weigl she gives egg plates as gifts to newborn girls because she believes all Southern women should have one. “Deviled eggs are the first thing to go at a party,” Perry says. “So, you better have an attractive empty plate.”

On assignment for History.com, Laura Schumm determined the origin of “modern-day deviled eggs – those classic creamy concoctions – dates back to ancient Rome.”

“Around 61 A.D., eggs were boiled, seasoned with spicy sauces and then typically served at the beginning of a meal as a first course,” Schumm reported.

“The first known printed mention of ‘devil’ as a culinary term appeared in Great Britain in 1786, in reference to dishes including hot ingredients or those that were highly seasoned. By 1800, ‘deviling’ described the process of making food spicy.

“But in some parts of the world,” Schumm said, “the popular egg hors d’oeuvres are referred to as mimosa eggs, stuffed eggs or dressed eggs.”

She noted that salad eggs is the term frequently used at church functions in the United States to avoid any association with Satan.

According to Schumm, the classic version of deviled eggs is now widely considered to include a mixture of mashed up egg yolks and whites, mayonnaise and mustard, “but professional chefs and home cooks around the world have experimented with numerous variations on the filling, including the use of pickle relish (either dill and sweet), bacon, crab meat”…you name it. Add pepper and hot sauce, if you care and dare.

A sprinkle of paprika on the top adds a splash of color.

Presentation is critical as well as practical.

It requires an official deviled egg plate, platter or tray…especially when traveling, so the eggs sit tight in their “depressions” and don’t go sliding off onto the seat, floor or trunk of the vehicle.

Diana Bulls, writing for Kings River Life Magazine in Reedley, Calif., said America’s first true egg plates were produced in the 1930s in popular Depression Glass Sandwich Patterns.

She said Duncan & Miller Glass Company in Washington, Pa., most likely made the earliest egg plates.

Angela Huston, a columnist with Medina County (Ohio) Life, an online newsletter, offers her own personal observation:

“Every time I make deviled eggs, I wonder ‘what were they thinking’? The ubiquitous ‘they’ is whoever designed the plate specifically for serving deviled eggs with 15 neat, little, oval-shaped slots.

“Anyone who has ever fixed deviled eggs knows the eggs are cut in half; no matter how many eggs you cook, the final count will come out to an even number, and 15 is not an even number.” Dagnabbit.

Huston continued: “Would it really have been all that difficult for someone with engineering sense to redesign the plate so it would have an even number of slots?

Huston concluded: “I have finally learned to stop fussing. Now, I just eat the darned extra egg, a necessary sacrifice to have peace of mind — and a properly balanced plate.”

Marie Lawrence of Morehead City, N.C., may have the largest egg plate collection in the United States: 986 as of Palm Sunday 2018. One of the fun things about egg plates, she said is that there is no uniformity in the number of depressions.

Lawrence said she has been collecting egg plates for nearly 20 years. They are colorful and come in a variety of shapes and sizes and many are hand-painted. “Like flowers, they make you happy,” Lawrence said.