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Monthly Archives: September 2020

Charlotte’s Creators of Comic Strips

September 28, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

My love of comic strips goes back to my early childhood.  When I was a boy, my father read aloud to my siblings and me.  In addition to reading books aloud, he regularly read the Sunday comics to us.  We always called them the “funnies.”  Every Sunday morning, before our mother got up, one of us would hand Dad the comics sections from our local newspaper, and he would start reading.  One Sunday, when I was around seven or eight, I decided to play a trick on him.  I dug through the stack of old newspapers next to the fireplace, found the comics from the previous Sunday, and slipped them inside the current week’s comics.  Then, after Dad woke up, I handed him a double dose of comics to read aloud.  He began by reading Dennis the Menace, and then he turned the page and found another Dennis the Menace.  To my glee, he also read the second one.  He went on to read both weeks’ worth of every comic strip, never letting on that something was not quite right.  Needless to say, I reveled in my own Dennis-the-Menace moment. 

I still regularly read Dennis the Menace although nowadays I tend to identify more with the character of Mr. Wilson.  Given my long history with Dennis the Menace, I was pleased to learn that one of the current creators of this comic strip is from the Charlotte area.  His name is Marcus Hamilton, and he has been creating the daily Dennis the Menace comic strip since 1995.  Hamilton, however, is not the only creator of comic strips with Charlotte connections.  Charlotte can also claim Jim Scancarelli, the current writer and illustrator of Gasoline Alley, and the late Doug Marlette, the writer and illustrator of Kudzu.

photo by Chris Edwards

Marcus Hamilton did not create the character of Dennis the Menace.  That honor goes to Hank Ketcham, who started the Dennis the Menace comic strip in 1951 and continued to write and illustrate it until the mid-1990s.  When Ketcham began making plans to retire in 1993, he set out to find someone who could keep his comic strip going.  Hamilton, a Charlotte-based illustrator, heard that Ketcham was looking for a successor, and the opportunity appealed to him.  He contacted Ketcham, who was living in California at the time, and applied for the position.  Ketcham liked Hamilton’s style of illustration, so he flew Hamilton to California, and they spent three days working together on the comic strip.  Hamilton later said, “I learned more in those three days than I did in four years at college.”  Hamilton has been illustrating the daily panels of Dennis the Menace ever since.

Jim Scancarelli, like Hamilton, worked as a freelance illustrator in Charlotte for years before entering the world of comic strips.  In fact, both of them worked as artists for WBTV (Charlotte’s CBS-affiliated television station) in the 1960s.  Also like Hamilton, Scancarelli ended up taking over an existing comic strip. Gasoline Alley, the comic strip that Scancarelli now writes and illustrates, debuted in 1918, making it the longest-running current comic strip in the United States.  Frank King originated the strip and continued to produce it until the mid-1950s.  King created a large cast of colorful characters who live in the fictional town of Gasoline Alley.  In 1956, Dick Moores stepped in as the writer/illustrator of the strip, and in 1979 Moores hired Scancarelli as his assistant.  When Moores died in 1986, Scancarelli took over Gasoline Alley.  In commenting on this transition, Scancarelli recently said, “When I came along, I put my own personality into it.  The art is a little different.  Dick had a certain way of doing the expressions, and I’ve kept the characters in character but put my own swing to them.  Now it’s more fun because I don’t have to sit there and emulate him as much as I did in the beginning.”

For Doug Marlette, the creation of his comic strip Kudzu was tied to his career as an editorial cartoonist.  Marlette worked as the cartoonist for The Charlotte Observer from 1972 to 1987, and he launched Kudzu during this time in his career.  Kudzu ran from 1981 until 2007 when Marlette died in a car accident.  At its peak in popularity, the strip was syndicated in 300 newspapers nationwide.  Kudzu is set in the fictional town of Bypass, North Carolina, and much of the humor relates to the tensions between the traditional South and the New South.  Although Kudzu is no longer published in newspapers, there are several collections of the strips that are still available, including Gone with the Kudzu.

Marcus Hamilton, Jim Scancarelli, and Doug Marlette are all major players in the world of comic strips.  It takes a special talent to be able to tell a story in just a few panels, and these three cartoonists excel at telling stories in this compressed format.  Their artistry, wit, and insights into human nature are reflected in their comic strips.  As I see it, their comic strips are delightful contributions to Storied Charlotte.

Tags: comic stripsSunday comics

UNC Charlotte Graduates Find Success Writing for Children and Young Adults

September 21, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

In the fall of 1984, I joined UNC Charlotte’s English Department with the understanding that I would focus my teaching and scholarship on children’s literature.  During the early years of my career as an English professor, I took a lot of pride and satisfaction in my successes in publishing articles and books.  I remember, for example, when I sold a piece to the New York Times Book Review, I used the honorarium to throw a party for the entire English Department. I started the invitation by saying, “This party is being brought to you by the New York Times.”  Nowadays, however, much of my sense of satisfaction comes from the successes of our students and former students.  

Given my interest in children’s literature, I am particularly pleased that two recent graduates of our M.A. program—Lora Beth Johnson and Susan Diamond Riley—have found success writing books for children and young adults.  This summer, Razorbill, a Penguin imprint, published Lora Beth’s Goddess in the Machine, a YA fantasy novel.  Also taking place this summer, Koehler Books published Susan’s The Sea Turtle’s Curse, the second book in her Delta & Jax Mystery Series for middle-school readers.  Both Lora Beth and Susan honed their writing skills while pursuing their M.A. degrees.  I contacted these authors and asked them to provide me with information about their books and to comment on how their experiences as graduate students in UNC Charlotte’s English Department contributed to their successes as published authors. 

Here is what Lora Beth sent to me:

Goddess in the Machine is my debut novel and the first in a duology from Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House. In it, a girl wakes from cryonic sleep on a planet she doesn’t recognize and must team up with the mysterious soldier who woke her to navigate a future world where technology is considered magic and its practitioners revered as Deities. Goddess received a starred review from the School Library Journal and was selected for the American Bookseller Association’s Indies Introduce list. The Nerd Daily calls it “exhilarating and gripping,” and that it “reinvents one of the most beloved genres of fiction and leaves you wanting more.” I describe it as The 100 meets Jupiter Ascending, with a little bit of a linguistic twist.

When people ask me where I got the idea for Goddess, I always start by telling them about my experience at UNC Charlotte. I wrote the first draft of the manuscript that would become Goddess in Dr. Beth Gargano’s YA Fantasy course. It was a very different book then, with a different title, characters, and plot. But I had the opportunity to explore the themes and worldbuilding elements that I wanted to weave into the narrative. I did the next few revisions during the following semester, learning to work on deadlines and turning in multiple drafts to Dr. Gargano, who was my creative thesis committee chair. At the end of that semester, I put a 400-page, unbound manuscript into the boxes of Dr. Gargano, Dr. Balaka Basu, and Dr. Paula Connolly. They passed me anyway.

Since the first few drafts of Goddess were written while I was at UNCC, it was inevitably shaped by the courses I took, most notably by a linguistics course I had with Dr. Pilar Blitvich. Goddess is told from the perspective of two different characters who speak in different dialects. Depending on which character’s point of view you’re reading from, you’ll either be reading a science-fiction story or a fantasy. What one character calls technology, the other calls magic, and that difference in language is all it takes to put these two characters sharing a narrative into alternate realties. This is an idea that germinated from our studies in Dr. Blitvich’s course and grew into the entire crux of the novel.

Graduating wasn’t the end of my journey with Goddess—there were still revisions to be done, and queries to be sent, and editors to submit to—but my time at UNC Charlotte inspired and directed what would become my debut novel and continues to shape my writing. I’m currently revising the second and final book in the Goddess duology and plotting my next series. You’ll be able to find information about future work on my website: https://www.lorabethjohnson.com/.

Here is what Susan sent to me:

My novels The Sea Island’s Secret (University of South Carolina Press, 2019) and The Sea Turtle’s Curse (Koehler Books, 2020) are the first two books in the Delta & Jax Mystery series, with a third book currently in the works. While set in the present day, each book takes place in the Carolina Lowcountry and has the sibling duo solving a mystery from a particular era in our country’s past. In The Sea Island’s Secret, for instance, Delta and Jax find a skeleton and a mysterious message in a bottle in the salt marsh, sending them on a quest for a forgotten Civil War treasure. In their second adventure, the kids discover an ancient carving of a sea turtle on the beach, but soon find that the relic has magical powers that send them back nearly 500 years to the time of Spanish explorers and Native Americans. And did I mention that the turtle carving has apparently put their sea island home under a curse, with a hurricane hurtling their way?  You can find more information about my novels on my website:  https://www.susandiamondriley.com/

I am not exaggerating when I say that neither of these books would have existed if I hadn’t decided—at age 50—to enroll in UNC Charlotte for my M.A. degree in English. Up to that point, I had spent my professional career primarily writing nonfiction pieces for newspapers and marketing departments, as well as editing other writers’ works. If I was ever to achieve my dream of writing a fictional novel for children, though, I needed the structure and accountability that I believed a graduate program would provide. What I received was so much more. I found mentors in the field of Children’s Literature, instructors and published authors who graciously shared their insights and experiences in both the writing process and the world of publishing itself. My M.A. thesis consisted of an early draft of my first novel, and I admit that I would have been satisfied with that manuscript alone. After all, my bucket list item had been to write a novel, and I had done that. But my mentors would not let me leave it at that. Even after I graduated and moved out of state, the members of my thesis committee continued to check on me regularly to ensure that I was pursuing publication of my book. Without their encouragement, I don’t know that I would have ever seen my books on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, let alone in the hands of eager young readers asking, “When will the next Delta and Jax book be out?”

My life has completely changed since my days at UNC Charlotte. I now live on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and have become part of a dynamic network of authors and artists who include me as one of their own. I regularly attend book launches (sometimes my own!), lead writing workshops for adults and children, and speak to groups of all ages—all via Zoom these days, of course. You might say I’ve started a whole new chapter of my life, and I can’t wait to see what happens next!

The successes that Lora Beth Johnson and Susan Diamond Riley have achieved as published authors are of their own doing.  Their novels are the products of their fertile imaginations and their hard work.  Still, I like to think that the time they spent as graduate students in UNC Charlotte’s English Department helped in the launching of their writing careers.  As graduates of our M.A program, Lora Beth and Susan are alumni of UNC Charlotte and are part of the community of readers and writers that make up Storied Charlotte.   

Tags: mystery seriesYA fantasy novel

Charlotte’s True Crime Writers

September 13, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

My introduction to the genre of true crime took place while I was still in high school.  I decided to read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood after I saw the 1967 film adaptation of Capote’s book.  Since I had already seen the film. I had a pretty good sense of what to expect from the book, but it still disturbed me. It wasn’t just Capote’s account of the murders of the four members of the Clutter family that got to me; what troubled me the most was Capote’s ability to bring his readers inside the minds of the two killers.  Capote helped me understand these men’s thinking process, and I found it unsettling to see the world through their eyes.  Works of true crime can do that.  As a genre, true crime is about more than the crimes depicted.  Works of true crime can shed light into the dark corners of human nature and reveal sides of our society that we generally like to keep out of view.

Charlotte is home to several excellent true crime writers, including Karen Cox, Pam Kelley, and Cathy Pickens.   These three writers have recently published works of true crime that provide readers with insights into the seamier side of life in the American South.  Karen Cox, a history professor at UNC Charlotte, published Goat Castle:  A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South in 2017. UNC Press brought out a paperback version of this book last month.  Pam Kelley, a former reporter for The Charlotte Observer, wrote Money Rock:  A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South, which the New Press published in 2018.  Cathy Pickens, the author of the Southern Fried Mystery Series, wrote Charlotte True Crime Stories:  Notorious Cases from Fraud to Serial Killing, which came out with the History Press in 2019.  I contacted all three of these authors and asked them to provide me with information about their books and their interest in the genre of true crime.

Here is what Karen sent to me:

I wasn’t searching for a true crime story to tell, the true crime story found me. I was in the Mississippi state archives wrapping up research for a different book, when a story caught my eye. In 1932, an elderly white couple from Natchez, known for their eccentricities and who lived with their goats in a crumbling down antebellum mansion, were charged with murdering their neighbor in Depression-era Mississippi. It was southern gothic come to life. I mean, who could resist such a story? I couldn’t.  That is where things began, but it is not where they ended.

Certainly, the notoriety that the case received in the national media at the time made this a fascinating story. Known locally as the “Goat Castle murder,” the focus had remained on the white protagonists for decades. But as I learned, at the heart of the story was a tale of racial injustice. It’s more likely that a journalist or nonfiction writer might have written about this story, but I saw in it an opportunity for me, a historian, to write creatively about various topics that are central to understanding southern history–race relations, Jim Crow segregation, the double-standard of southern justice, the decline of the southern aristocracy, the southern gothic, and mass incarceration. These are tough issues for readers to grasp, but woven into a story of true crime they become easier to digest and understand.

At some point, my interest in writing about this case became an obsession to set the story right, to give some historical justice to the poor black domestic–Emily Burns–who was convicted of the crime and sent to one of the South’s most notorious prisons, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman.  She was innocent, but white southern society demanded that someone, especially a black someone, pay the price for taking a white life–even if the eccentric white neighbors were complicit in the crime. I think that writing Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South freed me as a historian to write for broader audiences. Academia can beat the creativity out of a person, but through true crime, I found my way back.

Here is what Pam sent to me:

My book focuses on true crime – cocaine dealing – but when I decided to write Money Rock, I also wanted to explore Charlotte’s legacy of racism. In a way, this book was a do-over. I’d first written about Belton Lamont Platt, a flashy coke dealer nicknamed Money Rock, when I covered his trial for the Charlotte Observer in 1986. When I reconnected with him in 2011, he’d spent more than 20 years in federal prison and become an evangelical minister. That’s when I started asking deeper questions that I hadn’t considered the first time. 

I find the genre of true crime a double-edged sword. Done badly, it can be exploitive, reinforcing stereotypes about criminals without exploring why they commit crimes. I’d put my original 1986 story about Money Rock in this category. I focused on the man’s jewelry and money and cars but didn’t dig deeper. On the other hand, the best true-crime reporting can spotlight and even correct injustice. One terrific example – not a book, but a podcast – is In the Dark’s series on Curtis Flowers, a man who was tried six times in Mississippi for the same murder. Its meticulous reporting uncovers a botched investigation and stunning prosecutorial misconduct. The podcast drew national attention to the case, and last week, Mississippi’s attorney general finally dropped it. Flowers is free after 23 years in prison.

When I first began researching my book, I was trying to understand what drove Belton in his Money Rock days. I wanted to hear what it was like to be a major cocaine dealer, why he bought so much jewelry. Eventually, I began to look at larger issues, such as the role structural racism – segregation, urban renewal, mass incarceration – played in his family over several generations. It’s been gratifying to hear readers say the book opened their eyes to Charlotte’s racial history.  What I love about the true crime genre is that it can illuminate so many things besides crime. 

Here is what Cathy sent to me:

When I decided to become a mystery writer, I journeyed through courtrooms, high-profile trials, morgues and autopsy suites, jails, all the places where we wrestle with often insurmountable questions of good and evil.  I was first intrigued with the crime solvers and the crime scientists, rather than the crimes and criminals. Then I stumbled on the crime reporters, those who made reportage its own art form: William Roughead, Edmund Pearson, F. Tennyson Jesse, Rebecca West, Zora Neale Hurston, Edna Buchanan.

Along the way, I’ve learned only the edges are black and white. The stories behind the headlines are the most fascinating, but we seldom get to peek back there.

In trying to understand my fascination with true crime, I’ve pored over academic studies and random apologist essays. None offer satisfying answers.  I started reading true crime because I needed to understand. How could I write good crime fiction if I didn’t understand why crimes were committed, how they were solved, what it felt like to be a victim?  The real fascination? I love a good story. Nowhere have I found better storytellers than lawyers, police officers … and crooks.

Our fascination with crime stories isn’t new, we just have more ways of engaging with the stories than ever before, the latest being podcasts, cable TV networks, and do-it-yourself social media sleuths.  The demographic for the true crime “consumer” skews female. Is the puzzle-solving attraction a simple hearkening to Nancy Drew or Miss Marple?  As for readers of mystery fiction, readers of true crime are often attracted by the puzzle, by wanting to mentally (and safely) engage in unraveling the mystery of who-dunnit or why.  The stories are complex—and subtle. And endlessly fascinating.

Crime is a mirror that reflects its society, the people, the place, the time when it occurs. To understand any city, it helps to know its extremes, and crime is certainly an extreme, one that alters the lives of those who commit crimes, those who suffer, those who solve, and those who try to understand.   In its broad outline, Charlotte crime varies little from that in other cities. But like any city, Charlotte lends its own unique flavor to the ways people can go wrong.  Though regularly reported, “annual statistics” or “average” stories seldom grab headlines—and imaginations—for long. So what makes a story become part of the warp and weft, woven into the essence of a city and the people who call it home? With over one million residents, the Charlotte area is full of stories. In Charlotte True Crime Stories:  Notorious Cases from Fraud to Serial Killing are stories that started in dark places but that show the heart of a city still southern and, in good ways, a bit small-townish.

Like Truman’s Capote’s In Cold Blood, the true crime books written by Karen Cox, Pam Kelley, and Cathy Pickens can leave readers feeling a bit unsettled, but they can also help readers better understand why some of our fellow humans turn to lives of crime.  Karen, Pam, and Cathy have all written books that belong on the shelves of the ever-expanding library that is Storied Charlotte.  

Tags: Charlotte true crime writerssouthern gothictrue crime genre

Allegra Westbrooks, Charlotte’s Pioneering African American Librarian

September 07, 2020 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte
courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler
Carolina Room

I never met Allegra Westbrooks.  She retired from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library (then called the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County) in 1984, the same year that I arrived in Charlotte.  She did, however, have an impact on my early years in Charlotte.  Soon after my arrival, I met Pat Siegfried, the library’s Director of Youth Services.  When she found out that I once made my living as a professional puppeteer, she obtained funding for me to do puppet shows at every branch of the public library.  I remember being impressed with the library’s extensive network of branches.  These branches had their own community outreach which they used to promote my puppet shows.  I was especially impressed with how these outreach programs connected with Charlotte’s African American communities.  I shared with Siegfried my positive experiences performing at the various branches, and she mentioned that the strengths of the branch system had a lot to do with the woman who had long served as the Supervisor of Branches.  That woman was Allegra Westbrooks.  

courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room

When Westbrooks moved to Charlotte in 1947 to manage the Brevard Street Library branch of the public library, the library system was still segregated.  The Brevard Street Library was one of only two branches that served African Americans at the time.  After the library system desegregated in 1956, Westbrooks moved to the Main Library where she ran the acquisitions operation before being promoted to Supervisor of Branches in 1957, making her the first African American to hold the position of supervisor in the Charlotte public library.  Over the years, her title changed, but she continued to serve as a leader of the branch system throughout the rest of her career.

During her thirty-six years with the public library, Westbrooks played a major role in developing library outreach programs and expanding the library’s branch system.  Early in her career, she collaborated with community groups and organizations to make books available to children who did not live near branches, and then she started a bookmobile program to bring books to residents throughout Mecklenburg County.  Later in her career, she helped expand the number of library branches operating in the county, and she encouraged the branches to sponsor book-related events that would draw local residents to the branches. 

Toward the end of her career with the library, Westbrooks worked closely with Judith Sutton, who became the Deputy Director of Libraries in 1977.  As Sutton recently recalled, Westbrooks “did everything in her power to orient me to the system I joined, the community we served and to the nature, history and resources of the variety of branches of the library.  Allegra was a calm, quiet-spoken but strong advocate for the best in public library services.”

Westbrooks talked about the highlights of her career during an oral history interview conducted in 2007.   To listen to this interview, please click on the following link:  https://repository.uncc.edu/islandora/object/uncc%3A2152

Westbrooks retired in 1984, but she remained involved in the Charlotte community until her death in 2017.  In recognition of Westbrooks’ many contributions to the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library Board of Trustees recently decided to rename the Beatties Ford Regional Library in her honor.   In April 2020, this library branch officially became known as the Allegra Westbrooks Regional Library.  It’s a testament to Westbrooks’ lasting legacy that her contributions to Charlotte Mecklenburg Library are still remembered and honored some thirty-six years after she officially retired.  As a librarian, Allegra Westbrooks devoted her career to making books and stories available to the residents of Charlotte.  In the process, however, she made a place for herself in the pages of Storied Charlotte.

Tags: bookmobile
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