2 - Sunday Lunch with Grandmother Pleasants and Mrs. Kennedy

THE CARTHAGE HOTEL, Carthage, N.C.

The Carthage Hotel circa 1930

      I was a precocious kid in some oddly frivolous ways.  When I was about ten, I loved looking through my Aunt Martha’s old New Yorkers, always enjoying “Talk of the Town”, even though I surely didn’t understand the half of it. 

I imagined my more sophisticated relatives in the grandest of hotels (though now realize my imagination was working overtime), and I longed to be there, too.

My father with aunts Martha (l) and Frances (r), 1960's

My immediate family had none of the urban glamor of Uncle Nelson, the publisher-journalist, his wife Martha, nor of Aunt Frances, the Pinehurst decorator.  In fact, my father always poked fun at them for squandering their own money, spending other people’s, and generally putting on airs. 

Grandmother Pleasants, Frances and me, 1964   

The closest my family came to what I perceived as a sophisticated lifestyle was Sunday lunch at the Carthage Hotel.  It was a down-home, county seat hotel on the courthouse square boasting a family restaurant with those short-life plastic tablecloths with which I would amuse myself, stretching and otherwise damaging them underneath the table. 

China from the Carthage Hotel

My interest in cuisine came much later, and I was fairly indifferent then to what was widely considered the finest home cooked food in the county. The hotel particularly prided itself on its country biscuits.

No shrimp cocktail, 1951

 I don’t remember so much the food we ate as that which we didn’t.   It was strictly forbidden in our family for the children to order shrimp cocktail, a delicacy not included on the special luncheon menu, and which of course I dearly longed to order.  

Even today, when returning to the U.S., it is a particular comfort-food pleasure to eat shrimp cocktail with its uniquely American horseradish-ketchup sauce.

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  The Statler family, owner of New York’s Roosevelt Hotel and many others, spent a number of golfing vacations in nearby Pinehurst. Mrs. Statler, it turned out, always urged the family to drive up to the Carthage Hotel, insisting it was the only place around where you could get a decent lunch. (I discovered this little titbit in a recent, rather fascinating book, “Death of a Pinehurst Princess.”)

At the time the Statlers were coming to lunch in the 1930’s, the Carthage Hotel was owned by a local family called Kennedy.  At some point the Kennedys sold their property to the Womack family.

Mrs. Kennedy in younger days

In the years I remember going there,  Mrs. Kennedy, who was certainly a rather old lady by then, had returned (or perhaps she had never really left), and worked with great dignity as a waitress.  She lived in a room at the hotel and was ultimately adopted as an extra grandmother by the new owner’s children.


 She had been a friend of my grandmother in her youth, and she always gave us a special, joyful welcome, even more so when Grandmother Pleasants was in our party.
    
After more than 50 years as Carthage’s premier inn and restaurant, the hotel definitively shut its doors in 1972.  It was razed several years later to make room for a new courthouse.

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SIDEBAR : THE GREEN BOOK AND THE CARTHAGE HOTEL

1949 edition of the Green Book

 The Green Book is an almost forgotten guidebook that served a large minority during the decades of the 20^th century when unrelenting segregation was the law in the South and widespread discrimination against blacks rampant elsewhere. 

“The Negro Motorist Green Book” was published regularly from the 1930’s until the enactment of civil rights laws made it not quite so necessary by the mid-1960’s.  It listed, state by state, hotels which were welcoming to Afro-American guests.

  "The Negro traveler's inconveniences are many," wrote Wendell  Alston in a master of understatement  in the 1949 Green Book, "and they are increasing because today so many more are traveling."
 

Julian Bond, civil rights activist and long head of the NAACP, spoke of the guide in an interview last year on National Public Radio. 

“Segregation was practiced almost everywhere, North and South,” he said.  “and black travelers needed this guide badly.”  Bond says he remembers traveling with his family as a child growing up in the 1950’s, and using the book to plan their trips.

Most of the hotels and guest homes listed in the southern states were black-owned.  A few were not, and the Carthage Hotel was among these.

Given the spirit of the times, it seems more than unlikely that blacks would have been welcomed as “front door” hotel guests at the time I found it listed in 1949.  

 I spoke to Jane Womack Thomas, the daughter of the last hotel owners, who grew up on the premises, but she knew nothing about the Green Book.  She said there were many black employees with whom her family maintained exceptionally close bonds. 

Julian Bond 1968 (photo AP)

Whatever the explanation, the Carthage Hotel was the only listing in the Green Book for Moore County and one of the rare hotels cited in North Carolina.  Its inclusion remains somewhat of a mystery.  

I can only surmise there must have been some sort of referral service for Afro-American travelers, with  hotel personnel possibly offering rooms in their own homes.

Your input is welcomed:  hotel-musings@hotmail.fr

 Next Friday:  "Peggy's Trip to Paris 1972"