In Memory
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NELL T RASK HOOPER
Longtime Wrightsville Beach resident Nell Hooper passed away on March 11, four months before her 90th birthday. Wrightsville
Beach Magazine told her story in our June 2008 issue. As a tribute, we present excerpts from that story, written by Jenna Jones.
HERE ONCE WAS A TIME when Wrightsville Beach was a more peaceful
place even in the summer months. That’s the town Nell Hooper remembers
every time she crosses the drawbridge — fishing for hours in the empty surf,
playing in Sunday afternoon baseball games on the south end, where the sand
stretched for miles and no one was around.
Nell can’t help but remember the beach that way. The drawbridge is named for her
father, Heide Trask, who was North Carolina Highway Commissioner when it was
completed.
“We moved to the beach when I was 8 years old — to the southern end,” she says. “They
called it Traskville because Daddy’s brothers bought land and built there, too. There were
about four or five of us and we were the last house.”
A typical day at the beach back then was filled with fishing, hot sand and unbridled
joy as each new adventure unfolded.
“We’d go out fishing at 5 o’clock in the morning and come back at 11 and the sand
would be so hot,” she says. “Then we played on the beach all day.”
Nell’s days on Wrightsville Beach did not end at childhood. After marrying
Wilmington urologist Joe Hooper, she shared the Wrightsville Beach life she loved with
her husband, her five daughters, and her 12 grandchildren. She is grateful for those
nights on the porch of their Charlotte Street cottage.
“It was just family life down there,” Nell recalls. “You didn’t
have to keep your doors locked all the time, and you
could walk around at night. Where the Crest
is (now Jerry Allen’s), that was a movie
theater, and the children would
walk. They’d come back
at 9 o’clock and we’d sit
on the porch and wait for
them. It was just a great
way to live.”
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Nell Hooper on the porch
of the Hooper Cottage in
2008. Below: The Hooper
Cottage on Charlotte
Street, where it remains
today.
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WBM FILE PHOTO