‘Indefatigable tourism promoter’ Aycock Brown was a treasure

Aycock Brown’s introduction to Dare County, N.C., occurred in 1948, when the Roanoke Island Historical Association asked him to be in charge of publicity for “The Lost Colony,” the outdoor symphonic drama about the lives of the first settlers who came from Europe in 1587.

 

Asked to help revive slumping attendance figures, Aycock Brown “tapped into the spirit of the community.” One of his publicity photos featured the Elizabeth City High School band performing a concert on stage at the theater.

 

Another idea was to create a cameo role in the production for J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee who worked regularly with Dave Garroway on television’s “Today Show.” Monkeys might have been aboard the Elizabeth II with the colonists, Aycock reasoned. “The Lost Colony” director vetoed that suggestion.

 

“OK, then how about chorus girls from Las Vegas? That would make a heck of a promotion,” Aycock Brown reportedly countered. The answer was a louder “no.”

Aycock Brown settled on having a “celebrity” make a guest appearance in each production. Indeed, that sparked new interest and boosted attendance.

Aycock Brown had the connections to make it happen. He befriended the local Western Union telegraph office operator. When a prominent visitor sent a telegram, the Western Union man notified Aycock that “someone important” was in town. Aycock would hunt down the person…and get him or her into costume.

Eventually, Aycock Brown opted to hitch his publicity wagon to a cast member from “The Lost Colony” who showed great acting potential. He was Andy Griffith, who performed in the production from 1947-53 and advanced to play the lead role of Sir Walter Raleigh with gusto.

 

Aycock Brown would later portray the whole village of Manteo as “Mayberry on the Coast,” depicting the community as a “sister city” to Griffith’s hometown of Mount Airy in Surry County.

Aycock Brown was hired in 1952 as Dare County’s first tourism bureau chief. He was paid a handsome annual salary of $10,000 to get free publicity for Dare County.

 

Back then, community leaders reckoned that they would have to shell out about the same amount of cash for a full-page advertisement in a national magazine.

It proved to be a prudent investment to go with Aycock Brown. He was described as “an indefatigable promoter” by Wynne C. Dough, former curator of the Outer Banks History Center.

In 1995, Lorraine Eaton of The Virginian-Pilot newspaper wrote: “For nearly three decades, Aycock Brown cruised Dare County wide-eyed as a lemur, a straw hat on his head, an outrageous shirt on his back and at least three cameras slung around his neck. He knew everyone, and he was everywhere all the time. His impact was incredible.”

 

“When someone reeled in a record blue marlin, Aycock Brown was on the dock to greet the proud angler,” Eaton wrote.

Brown photographed members of the Cape Hatteras Anglers Club so often that they awarded him an honorary embroidered patch, noted Rebecca Bengal, a correspondent for Our State magazine.

 

Hugh Morton of Grandfather Mountain near Linville, N.C., an acclaimed photographer and promoter in his own right, labeled Aycock Brown as the “Barker of the Banks,” because no one worked harder, turning out so many stories and photos. More importantly, no one had more success in getting “stuff published.”

Morton said Aycock made each editor feel that “Aycock was an extra staff member on the Outer Banks, looking after the editor’s interests.” They valued “the incessant flow of words and pictures that would otherwise not be coming from any other source on the coast,” Morton added.

Aycock often made three trips a day to the post office. He would often hand stamp envelopes: “News Rush!”

Inside could be articles and photos of Outer Banks shipwrecks, storms, tree skeletons, driftwood, shells, visitors frolicking on the beach, nature scenes, dune buggy races, giant fish fries, pirate jamborees, swimsuit fashion shows, dolphins, waterfowl, sea turtles, majorettes on Jockey’s Ridge, hang gliders, spectacular sunrises…and more big fish.

 

Perhaps Aycock Brown’s most famous news photograph was inspired by the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Brown’s tourism office was hosting an event that evening at the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills.

 

There was a huge crowd, so no one noticed Aycock slip away. With a transistor radio in hand, he walked out to a spot where he could see a rising crescent moon appear over the lighted monument. When astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Aycock snapped the classic photograph…for his editors.

 

Morton commented in 1976: “No person will ever know how much in actual dollar value Aycock Brown has added to the tax books of Dare and other coastal counties, but it is up in the millions.”

By 2022, travel and tourism expenditures in Dare County reached $1.974 billion, ranked fourth among the state’s 100 counties, trailing only Mecklenburg, Wake and Buncombe. Nice job, Aycock.

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.”

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.

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.

‘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.