BIG DADDY’S Wrightsville Beach It is like a benediction to see him transported to childhood, to the romance of riding the surf, watch-ing movies over the ocean under a full moon and hearing swing music drift across Banks Channel. My grandfather’s parents, Oliver and Mary Penelope Wallace, moved the family from a rented house on Dock Street in downtown Wilmington to a newly built cottage on Columbia Street in Wrightsville Beach during late summer 1928. It was a two story house suitable for year-round living with servants’ quarters under-neath the home and one of the few grassy lawns on the beach. “At that point, looking south, there was nothing between our house and the next street down, just vacant land,” remembers my grandfather. “We were about a block and a half away from Station One, where the beautiful Oceanic Hotel used to be. It was an idyllic situation in the wintertime because there were only ten or Memories My grandfather, age 98 September 3, affectionately known as Big Daddy, has a gift for storytelling. His blue eyes widen and dart when there is danger, twinkle mischievously when telling something naughty and grow wistful and dreamy at the lovely parts. He clasps his hands loosely in his lap or holds them fingertip to-fingertip, prayer-like. His voice is deep and melodious and he has an infectious, booming laugh. BY CARRIE DAVIS CONWAY twelve families that lived down there all year long. There were the Willinghams, the Colucci family, the Ford family that lived on the comer of Atlanta Street, the Whipley family that lived up on the northern end of the beach; on the southern end there was the Frownfelter family, the Robinsons, the Werkhausers, and Mr. Callaway, who lived on Lumina Avenue.” At that time, my grandfather was 12 years old and had just started the seventh grade at Hemingway Grammar School in Wilmington. He was the second of four children - Arrington, 14, Mary Penelope, 9 and Bill, 3. Their live-in maid, Gertrude, who was about 16 years old, earned $5 per week plus room and board and Sundays off. She cooked, cleaned, ironed and kept a fire going during the winter months. My grandfather and his older brother chopped large pieces of driftwood and the remains of pilings over a sawhorse in the backyard for fuel. The working men on the island went into town each day on the Silent movies were shown on an outdoor movie screen in the surf at Lumina, with spectators sitting on benches on the ocean side of the pavilion. The movies appealed especially to children, for they were most often comedies or westerns. Bathers in the surf at right. Top left: Big Daddy Jim and Lois Wallace, Wrightsville Beach, circa 1950s. 36 WBM september 2014 IMAGE COURTESY OF NEW HANOVER COUNTY LIBRARY IMAGE COURTESY OF JIM WALLACE SR.
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