One of the agreeable features of a journey such as the one that Mr. Odum and I made to Dayton, Tennessee, is running across old friends. And the dweller in Chapel Hill is apt to be more than usually fortunate in this when he goes a-traveling, because almost every town of any size, within a thousand miles’ radius, has its University alumni.
Stopping at Knoxville on the way home, I saw Dr. Eben Alexander, the brother of Mrs. A.H. Patterson. He is a prominent surgeon there. We grew up together here in Chapel Hill, where his father was professor of Greek and mine was professor of mathematics in the University. In the old days Eban was exceedingly fond of cockfighting, and the other day I asked him if he was still interested in it.
He is now an elder in the church and it would not be seemly for him to indulge in this sport. But, as proof that the pastime of his youth is still held in affectionate memory, the large flock of chickens at his home on the outskirts of the city includes a few high-blooded gamecocks. He likes to look at them and admire their points even though his position of dignity and his matured conscience prohibit him from letting them have it out in the arena. When he showed them to me, he was sighing for the dear, dead days. But maybe that was a bluff for the benefit of me who might betray him in print—maybe he slips out sometimes at night with his cronies and has his fun? I don’t know. I didn’t question him too closely.
Of all bundles of nervous energy I ever saw, Eben is the beatin’est. I remember him as such, and he has not changed. Doesn’t he ever quit working? I asked his wife. No. From performing an operation he rushes home to dig in the garden. Off again to make calls on patients, and then back again to tinker with the automobiles or patch the roof or repair the broken drain pipe. Poring over medical journals at night, or rushing off to meetings of the Rotary and other civic or professional organizations. Up at daybreak in the morning to feed the chickens and perhaps superintend the milking of the cows. Thus, day after day.
Once a year he goes off for a bear hunt in the mountains of east Tennessee. He told me that he had been at this 13 years and ha never got a shot at a bear yet. His fellow huntsmen have tried to give him the best location whenever a bear is about to be flushed, but every time the bear goes the other way and somebody else in the party gets him.
Guy Roberts
Coming through the town of Marshall, in the valley of the French Broad a few miles this side of Tennessee, I halted long enough to drop in at the office of my classmate Guy Roberts. His length of more than six feet is the same as when we did our classday exercises around the Davie Poplar in 1902, but his girth is considerably greater. He told me of having gone to England last summer with the several hundred other American lawyers who were guests of the British bar. When I expressed regret that I could not see him in the high hat and cutaway coat that he had worn at the King’s garden party, he said these ornaments were packed away and would probably never be used again.
From the street in front of the courthouse he pointed in what seemed to be the direction of the sky and told me that was where he lived. His home is on one of the mountains that rises from the river valley. From the porch you can very nearly throw a stone down upon the courthouse roof. It looked to me as if the stone would have to fall about a mile before it hit anything. It might be convenient for Guy, when he goes downtown to work in the morning, to descend in a parachute.
Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Holt
At Asheville, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Holt, I was much interested in a letter which Mrs. Holt had recently added to her collection. It was written in 1818 by Mrs. Thrale, who became celebrated through her long association with Doctor Johnson. The writing on the four pages was regular, and all of it easily legible. A quaint document.
In Lawrence Holt’s library is a bound set, complete, of the installments as they originally appeared on the news-stands in London, of H.G. Wells’ “Outline of History.” The publication of books in this fashion is not practiced in America. Each installment is a sort of magazine in itself and has somewhat the aspect of a “penny dreadful”—with a brilliantly colored cover and with several pages of advertisements. It is of about the side of the Literary Digest, but is far more lurid in appearance.
From the front page of The Chapel Hill Weekly, Friday, July 31, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073229/1925-07-31/ed-1/seq-1/
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