“Back in those days, not everybody had a car like they do today,” explains my granddad. “People rode the streetcars. You’d pick up your date in Wilmington, get on the streetcar, come down, you’d have about a 35-40 minute chat, you know, a cool breeze blowing, get out and dance until midnight, get back on the car and go back to town. Ah yes, how sweet it is!” In addition to Lumina, there was the Harbor Island Casino, which was almost directly west of Columbia Street. It always attracted a crowd but never had the same following as Lumina. Al Katz and His Kittens was a favorite band. Their vocalist was Teddy Grace. “Now she was one good singer, terrific. I have one of her records now,” my grandfather says, grinning like a kid. “When she was singing, we could sit on our front porch on Columbia Street and hear her. See, water causes sound to amplify and carry. That woman could be singing over in that casino across the channel, and we could sit on the front porch and hear her sing in the sum-mertime. And one of the songs that she used to sing was, ‘Stick Out Your Can, Here Comes the Garbage Man.’ That was sugges-tive, you know!” There was also the Seashore Hotel, which stood halfway between Lumina and the Oceanic at about Station Four. “One band I remember that came there one summer was Don Redman. He had a great song called ‘The Chant of the Weed.’ Old Don Redman was a piano player, and I’m telling you, he could really play,” remembers my grandfather. “Sometimes they charged for the dances, but the concerts they held at the Oceanic on Sunday afternoons were free, and you could go and sit on the outside porch and dangle your feet and listen to the band play-ing inside, which was very nice. You had to get dressed up to go, though. You didn’t go up there in your bathing suit like they would today. You’d put on a clean, white shirt, clean trousers, and a pair of shoes, and go sit out there and listen to it, you know. A lot of fun. This was really before the big band era. This was swing music. Jazz and swing. Benny Goodman, you know, the King of Swing, and Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Sammy Kaye and His Orchestra.” & nacks could be had for less than a nickel at Werkhauser’s open-air soda shop stand, where my great-uncle Arrington jerked soda one summer. Werkhauser’s place opened and closed on a hinge, and there was no place to sit down so folks stood at the counter. My grandfather and his friends spent hours hunting for pocket change through the cracks in the boardwalk in front of Werkhauser’s place using sea oats with chewing gum stuck to their tips. On Friday and Saturday nights, black musicians played on the corner. One strummed a washboard with thimbles on his fingers, another played a homemade base fiddle — a string tied to a block of wood. Another played a makeshift bazooka. And a fourth blew into a gallon jug. “Man, they could turn out the music!” remembers my grand-father. Above: The depot in downtown WIlmington shows where riders could board the historic Beach Car line to ride to Lumina Pavilion. Right: West side of Lumina. “They could play anything you asked them to play. They had a hat there, and you could throw them a penny or two. Oh man, they were something.” Just across from Werkhauser’s stood “Pop” Gray’s place, which was a little more refined. Pop Gray had Coca-Cola tables and chairs, a jukebox and beer. During my grandfather’s second summer at the beach, a man came and opened a small movie theater next to Pop Gray’s Soda Shop at Station One. The theater seated 20 people on crude wooden benches. “He’d show these old silent films. It wasn’t very successful. Billy and I used to wait ’til low tide and slip in under the barbed wire so we could get in for nothing, and I’m sure that some time or another he must have sat there running the projector and count-ing heads and there were more people in there than he had sold tickets to!” he recalls gleefully. Provisions were purchased in town and carried by trolley to the beach. “Mother would go to town on the streetcar every week, shop, purchase the groceries for a week, and it was always a great thrill when she came back. Late in the afternoon, they ran an enclosed baggage car down to the beach on the trolley with each woman’s groceries labeled. Ours was delivered to the end of Columbia Street, and of course we kids would go down and get it in the wagon and take it back up to the cottage. It was always wonder-ful to get in that box and see what she’d bought for that week. Gertrude would put the stuff away and we’d jump into the cook-ies and the cakes. That was real good livin’.” Several local peddlers sold their wares up and down Lumina Avenue during the summer months. My great-uncle John Fox IMAGE COURTESY OF CITY OF WILMINGTON 42 WBM september 2014 IMAGE COURTESY OF NEW HANOVER COUNTY LIBRARY
2014-9
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