‘Liza Peoples, colored, now around 70 years old, who was our servant long years ago when she was ‘Liza Jenkins, refused absolutely to enter my Ford Sedan and be driven home after a visit to me the other day. All persuasion was in vain. She said she had never been in one of them things and never would be. They skeered her. So off I went in the car, and she started plodding her mile on foot. To me this seemed conservation carried to an extreme.
I have many recollections of ‘Liza, and all of them pleasant ones. She used to berate me for hanging around the kitchen and begging her for things to eat. Pest was the word she always used to describe me. Yet she never let me leave without the cookie or whatever it was I wanted. I remember gratefully how, when my older brother Ernest was just on the point of giving me a thrashing in the back-yard, she appeared at the kitchen door with a rolling pin and descended on him like a Fury. He departed in haste and did not return until she had had time to cool off. He always said, and sticks to it to this day, that, because I knew ‘Liza was near and would come to the rescue, I would stop at no devilment at his expense.
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Several weeks ago Clyde Andrews, when I commented on the fact that he was not scheduled to take part in his sister’s wedding, said that inasmuch as he was a member of the fire company his function would be to put the fire out if one occurred. He didn’t have this to do when the event came off, but I noticed that he was walking quietly about in the back of the church, giving directions and signaling for somebody to go this way or that. He was determined to see that there was to be no slip-up in the proceedings.
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Here comes a letter from a man well known in Chapel Hill, Percy V. Hogan. He is in Kingsport, Tenn. Subscribing to the Weekly for himself and his sister, Mrs. D.J. Currie in Florida, he says: “I have planned two or three times to get back to Chapel hill for a visit, but something has always interfered. I am still hoping to find my way back some of these days; when I do I suppose I’ll need a guide to show me about.”
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It is announced that the installation of the local chapter of the Pi Beta Phi Sorority is to take place in the Wallace E. Caldwell home Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of week after next. As a Mere Male, I rise to inquire what’s to become of Mr. Caldwell during this period? If he should wear the costume he wore in the Tut-ankh-Amen burlesque last spring—a costume that was quite sexless, as far as I could see—mightn’t he get by as a member of the Pi Betas?
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H.H. Williams and his eldest pupil, Robert W. Winston—better known as Judge Winston—got back to town at about the same time last week in the midst of a hot spell. Both of them said they had been cold all summer and this heat was a novel experience. Mr. Williams is bronzed and vigorous after two months in New Hampshire and Main. While he was in Maine he happened to meet Charles W. Eliot, the former president of Harvard, and they had a long conversation together. “He is now in his ?? year,” Mr. Williams said, but he is thoroughly alert. When you hear him talk you simply cannot think of him as being old.
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Judge Winston attended the Institute of Politics at Williamstown, Massachusetts. He dined and golfed and discussed the affairs of nations with the statesmen of Europe and America. He was present when Lord Birkenhead made the speech, so widely published and so soundly condemned, in which he said a policy dictated by self-interest was the only workable national policy. Judge Winston found time to work on several articles for the magazines. As a result of his piece in the Nation about North Carolina, and his review of the race situation in the South, published in the Current History Magazine, he has received from editors several requests for manuscripts.
Back in the spring I told of the satisfaction judge Winston said he got from taking R.D.W. Connor’s advice—picked up, the Judge testified, on the golf course in Raleigh—that he go and join the Cosmos club in Washington. When you add a session at the Institute of Politics to several months at the Cosmos club, there aren’t many more celebrities left to bother about. I believe Judge Winston has already got Isaac Marcosson back off the map.
From the front page of the Chapel Hill Weekly, Sept. 13, 1923
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