Portsmouth connects the dots between ‘fishing and swishing’

Inhabitants of fishing communities perfected the art of netmaking in order to survive. This was the case in the island village of Portsmouth, located on the northern tip of Core Banks in Carteret County, N.C.

Living on an island, the basic premise for residents in the olden days was “if we couldn’t make, grow or catch it, we didn’t much need it.”

Sisters Nora and Elma Dixon were excellent Portsmouth netmakers of the 1940s and ’50s, and they developed a bit of a curious “cottage industry” on the side by making netting for other purposes.

Richard Meissner shared their story during an interview in 2009 with Stephen Jesse Taylor, who was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Taylor wrote a master’s thesis about Portsmouth and included some of Meissner’s material.

 

A retired English teacher from Asheboro, N.C., Meissner served many years as a key volunteer leader at Cape Lookout National Seashore. He enjoyed a friendship with Jessie Lee Babb Dominique, a niece of the Dixon sisters.

Jessie Lee had given Meissner a keepsake, one of the basketball nets that was netted by the Dixon sisters.

Meissner said: “I understand there was a netmaking place in Beaufort, and the Dixon sisters would be what we call subcontractors. They weren’t the only ones. Ladies all around the county made these things, and other things that the net company had them make, to bring in a little extra money.”

When the basketball net was finished, “you have to do one more thing to it for it to be useful. And that’s to cut it open at the bottom,” Meissner said.

“Can you imagine some young Michael Jordan in Iowa throwing a basketball through a net that two little old ladies on Portsmouth made?”

 

Nora Dixon died in 1956, at age 64, but Elma Dixon has another claim to fame.

She and niece Marian Gray Babb (an older sister of Jessie Lee Babb Dominique) were the last two permanent residents to pull up stakes and leave Portsmouth in 1971 – more than 50 years ago.

Elma Dixon and Marian Babb

There’s no telling how many basketball nets were laced on the front porch of the Dixon family house in Portsmouth, but the one in Meissner’s possession is priceless.

Dr. James Naismith invented the game of basketball in 1891 in Springfield, Mass. The original goals were peach baskets. Metal rims debuted several years later, but nets weren’t added until 1912, according to research by Phil Edwards, a freelance journalist.

 

The reason rims have nets is so shooters can hear the “swish” sound of “nothing but nylon.”

Nobody seems to know who “invented” the use of the net, but Edwards said the first person to write about “swish shots” in 1913 was Trebor Yarrum, a student at Trinity College in Durham, N.C.

Yarrum was a regular contributor to the college’s literary magazine. In one story, he described a fictional basketball game: “A swish of netting resounded as the ball dropped through the goal without touching the iron rim.”

Trinity College was renamed Duke University in 1924. How fitting that “swishing” has its roots there.

 

One of Duke’s best swishers of all time was Dick Groat. His basketball jersey (#10) was retired in 1952 – the first Blue Devil jersey to be hoisted to the rafters of Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium. Groat also excelled in baseball and went on to play Major League Baseball, spending most of his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

 A true outdoorsman, Groat’s favorite happy hunting ground was said to be in Carteret County – at Cedar Island and Portsmouth.

Groat was 92 when he died in 2023. He was the great uncle of professional golfer Brooks Koepka, who has won five major championships.