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Advanced ‘first-graders’

Posted on December 25, 2009December 25, 2009 by Staff

By Valarie Schwartz, columnist

Last week brought a visit with five women who have spent long lives knowing each other. Their relationship started in 1929 as they entered first grade at Chapel Hill Elementary School (where University Square is today), where they continued their schooling until graduation in 1940 (there were only 11 grades at that time), as part of the last class to graduate from the school before it burned to the ground.

“It was a very small place,” said Edith Crockford Welch, who grew up on Park Place. “[The school] was divided by the kids who lived in Chapel Hill, in Carrboro and in the county.”

It wasn’t that any group itself themselves superior; but as is always the case, students congregated based on experience – and at that age, the experience that mostly separated them was lunch.

With no cafeteria in the school, the county and Carrboro kids, who rode buses, brought their lunches. The Chapel Hill kids walked home for lunch, where most mothers could be found with meals waiting. Some, like Jewell Hogan Altemueller, had to walk really fast to make it home and back in time.

Altemueller grew up in a house that no longer exists at 124 N. Columbia, approximately across the street from today’s police station on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, requiring her to walk up and down the big hill twice a day. She has heard all her life about how fast she walks.

“People tell me, ‘You walk so fast,’ and I say, ‘I didn’t have a school cafeteria,’” Altemueller said, laughing. She now lives at The Cedars, where she enjoys a fine dining room.

Though they grew up in a village, one of them would later perform on Broadway and all of them grew up knowing classmate Anne Carmichael Jeffreys, who arrived in town at an early age with her mother – who raised her alone to become a famous actress (with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame) – and Nancy Smith, daughter of author Betty Smith.

“We would go to Nancy’s house and Betty would read us chapters from her book as she wrote it,” Welch said. The book she read from was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which would be the first of several bestsellers Smith would pen in Chapel Hill.

Lunch continues to keep the “First Graders” close, as they share that meal regularly at Breadmen’s. But we met at the Carol Woods apartment of Margaret Pickard Sirvis, who moved back to Chapel Hill in 2006. Like most of her classmates, she married and left town, soon after graduating from UNC in 1944, ahead of the population explosion brought by the end of the war, when veterans arrived for their free education. Sirvis grew up at 211 Vance Street.

She’s the granddaughter of George Pickard, who ran the livery stable and later became head groundskeeper at the university, a job his only son (with seven sisters), George Jr., inherited.

Sisters Frances Bason Boyd and Johnsie Bason Wilkins grew up in the house their mother researched and named the Widow Puckett House, at 501 E. Franklin Street.

“When we moved to Chapel Hill [in 1927], the house was a piece of property belonging to the university, used for faculty members,” said Wilkins, whose father was recruited from Cornell when she was six. “I can remember Mother walking into the house while we sat in the car.

Mother came out with tears just streaming down her face. She and Daddy had just gotten through doing a complete makeover of a lovely Victorian house in Ithaca. She said everything was falling apart, it needed a complete restoration.”

Not only did she restore the house, built in the 1810s, but, because so many visitors were interested in the antiques with which she decorated it, she started Whitehall Antiques there, which later moved down the hill, where both Boyd and Wilkins later worked. Wilkins is also the one who performed on Broadway. She was named after her aunt, Johnsie Burnham, who was one of the first female violinists with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York City. Burnham moved to Chapel Hill in 1930 after her young husband died, where she took her talented namesake under her wing, helping launch Wilkins into a singing career.

The women grew up here, some graduated from UNC and, except for Altemueller, left here. But they have returned to their roots. The village has grown into a town they wish was small again. But for them, the memories and good living continue in their hometown.

Contact Valarie Schwartz at valariekays (at) mac (dot) com

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