There was once a building at 408 W. Princess Anne Road in Norfolk, purchased in 1959 by a record store owner named Frank Guida who used the space to record the works of local singers and musicians, such as Gary U.S. Bonds, Gene Barge and Jimmy Soul. Numerous hits were cut here during the early ’60s, including Bonds’ raucous “New Orleans” and “Quarter to Three,” and Soul’s exotic calypso rock ‘n’ roll tunes, “If You Wanna Be Happy” and “Twisting Matilda.”
This is the spot where the Norfolk Sound was born, the rambunctious party rock that influenced generations of musicians, among them the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead and the New York Dolls.
Carl Lounsbury is used to letting folks down gently.
“Their buildings are often not as old as people think they are,” Lounsbury, senior architectural historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, says about people who send the museum photographs of their houses. “We urge them to do it because you never know what’s around the bend,” he says. “But it can be disappointing to them. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to give the bad news: ‘No, George Washington did not live in your house or stay there.’”
The College of William & Mary history professor and his accompanying team of Colonial Williamsburg Foundation historians are so seasoned and battle-tested that not only can they tell you whether Ol’ George stayed in your crib but also the likely room where he ate his supper.
A short row of cars is lined up at the entrance to Hull’s Drive-In Theatre, which sits just off Route 11 in Lexington, not far from a fireworks vendor and a truck stop. The warm late-April Sunday is turning brisk as the sun lowers and longtime Hull’s ticket taker Sam Newcomer stands outside the rickety ticket booth nursing a cough.
“Fridays and Saturdays are busier. Sundays are usually the slow night,” he tells me after he collects $7 for admission from a man and his Shih Tzu in a late model truck.
The sounds of “At The Hop” are echoing off the mostly empty drive-in movie lot, and the smell of popcorn is in the air. Hull’s opened in 1950 as the Lee Drive-In Theatre and, unlike many open-air cinemas constructed during that time, is still doing business today. When longtime owner Sebert W. Hull passed away 15 years ago, a group of Lexingtonians formed the Hull’s Angels and rallied to save it, boxy metal speakers and all. Today, Hull’s is the only community-owned, nonprofit drive-in theater in the U.S.
It was the lip lock felt ’round the world.
When the U.S.S. Oak Hill came home to Virginia Beach on Dec. 21, 2011 after a long deployment, Petty Officer 2nd class Marissa Gaeta kissed her girlfriend, Citlalic Snell, to commemorate the dock landing ship’s ceremonial first kiss. Gaeta, like many of the sailors on board, had purchased several $1 tickets in the Oak Hill’s raffle in order to compete for the opportunity.
The act was much publicized and discussed. It was the first time in the naval homecoming tradition that a gay serviceperson had done the honors and embraced a person of the same sex.
With no advance hoopla or protests—the ship’s commanding officer, David Bauer, called it a “non-event”—this simple gesture was seen as a symbol that President Barack Obama’s then-recent signing of a repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, a controversial initiative that asked gay soldiers to keep their sexuality hidden, was being accepted by a majority within the ranks.
In a few hours, cars will roll into the Family Drive-In Theatre and settle into neat lines next to row upon row of waist-high speaker poles. For tonight at least, that is just as it was during the first show in 1956.
“These speakers and posts are getting harder to deal with because there’s only one manufacturer that still makes the parts,” says James Kopp, manager of the Stephens City, Va., theater. “It’s in Kansas City.”
News flash: Richmond’s Public Art Commission will receive $2.8 million next year. That’s about three times what Richmond has allotted for public art in the entire 22-year history of the commission.
“We’ve been so under the radar, mostly dealing with budgets of $25,000 to $35,000, that this is coming as kind of shock to people,” says longtime commission member and artist Paul DiPasquale, who has created such indelible (if privately funded) public art pieces as Richmond’s Arthur Ashe statue and the likeness of King Neptune in Virginia Beach.
Click here to read the rest of "Out in the Open."“It’s not a wish any longer, it’s reality.”
I arrive at the Bolling Haxall House in downtown Richmond just as a gaggle of feather-headed dames in black gloves and smiling men in penguin suits step from their car out into the night. It would look like a scene from an old TCM flick, or HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” except that they exit from a Chevy Tahoe.
Our destination is the Jazz Age Preservation Ball at an 1858 Italianate-style mansion, the perfect place to have a Great Gatsby flashback. Tonight’s sold-out soiree is being hosted by the Art Deco Society of Virginia, a Richmond-based club founded in 2012 whose members see themselves as ambassadors for the eclectic art deco style—and lifestyle—that was the rage in the Roaring ’20s and art moderne ’30s, the days of flagpole sitting, speakeasies and Busby Berkeley musicals.
“Art deco was the last full style movement of our time,” says Bradley Hubbard, tonight’s top-hatted master of ceremonies and ADSVA board member. “There’s art deco music, art deco architecture, decorative arts, furniture, advertising, films, interior design ... every facet of society was somehow affected by it.”
It’s the second most deadly form of cancer, but Dr. Doumit S. BouHaidar maintains colorectal cancer is one you can do something about.
The gastroenterologist at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Massey Cancer Center is something of a pied piper for colonoscopies. They work, he says. “Screening is a very important strategy to fight this cancer.”
The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame is hardly the place you’d think of finding a trio of singing South Norfolk country cowboys. But among the recent additions to the Cleveland music museum’s collection is the original recording console that the Phelps brothers—Norman, Willie and Earl—used in order to capture a slew of area rockabilly artists in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll, right here in Hampton Roads.
“It had been sitting for years in my dad’s garage, and when he passed away it sat in our garage,” says Bobbie Beard, the daughter of Willie Phelps. “I was pleased that anyone wanted it.”
It’s one more reminder of how, starting in the late ’40’s, the Phelps Brothers transformed sleepy South Norfolk—now Chesapeake—into a musical hotbed.
It’s the last day of the Richmond Folk Festival, and Jon Lohman, Virginia’s state folklorist, looks plum tuckered out as he stands on the Virginia Folklife Stage—one of the special attractions at the three-day music and folk arts gathering that takes over the riverfront in mid-October.
Lohman is about to introduce the delicate Sephardic balladry of Flory Jagoda, 87, a Jewish exile from Bosnia who lives in Northern Virginia. Responsible for programming two days of music on this stage from artists across the Commonwealth, and for curating and displaying at the festival a collection of indigenous crafts, food and folk art, including a functioning whisky still, Lohman’s heavy-lidded eyes are watery by this point, his shirt partially untucked as he stifles a yawn. It’s the home stretch of a haul that has taken three months of planning, logistics and navigating nit-picky details.
Andrew Heidelberg wondered what the commotion was about.
“Why are all of these guys walking past the shower, looking at me,” he asked a white friend one day after PE.
“Andy, I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you,” his buddy said.
“Believe what?”
“They’ve been told that black people come from monkeys, and they want to see if you’ve got a tail.”
Today, recounting this incredible story, the dark-skinned Heidelberg has to laugh. “This was real, man.”
He was one of a group of African-American teenagers known as the Norfolk 17, the first to attend formerly all-white high schools in Norfolk after a well-publicized standoff between the city and new federal desegregation laws in 1959.
