1942 - James (“Jim”) Crew with his wife Dixie Crew 

Jim Crew first moved into 413 Wilmington Street (at Polk Street) in 1942. He later returned to Oakwood with his wife, Dixie, and their two teenage sons, when they bought and restored 325 Polk Street to a single family home. Their two sons, Chris and Jim, both settled in Oakwood after getting married, and have raised their children in Oakwood.

Excerpt:

Jim: The Murphy School was a fairly typical school, I think. It went from first grade to seventh grade. I don’t remember. [It had] probably three or four-hundred students at the most there. I had great teachers and enjoyed all of them and know all of the names of them now. There was an interesting thing that happened when I was in the third grade. I was in Mrs. Thomas’s 3rd grade class, and she put on a play in the theatre that’s now been renovated at Murphy School. I played a part in a little skit that was my first chance to get on stage. I had a singing line. It was [from] Cinderella and I had to sing this line, “dear Cinderella, will you marry me?” and Cinderella sang back, “yes, my Prince Charming, and happy I will be.”

Peter: This all foretells the music careers of your two sons…

Jim: That was the beginning and the end of my stage career. 

Jim: [Oakwood] feels like the neighborhood was when I lived on Wilmington St. in the 1940’s. It is just a friendly safe sort of place, where everyone knows everyone. 

Full Transcript

OAKWOOD ORAL HISTORY PROJECT TRANSCRIPT
James (“Jim”) Crew with his wife Dixie Crew (Jim into 413 Wilmington Street in 1942, on the periphery of Oakwood. He and his wife, Dixie, moved into Oakwood in 1976.)
Interviewed by Peter Rumsey on August 29, 2013 at their current home in south Raleigh.

Peter: Let’s start, and if each of you will give me your names.

Jim: I’m Jim Crew.

Dixie: And I’m Dixie Crew.

Peter: Tell me when and why you moved to the Oakwood neighborhood.

Jim: My history with Oakwood goes back probably to 1942, when my family moved here from Portsmouth, Virginia. I was born in Durham, but lived in Portsmouth for a few years and I lived at 413 North Wilmington Street. And I went to Murphy school for 7nyears. Had a lot of friends who lived in Oakwood, though we technically didn’t live in Oakwood. Then my family moved away in 1952, and we came back and eventually bought a house in Oakwood in 1976. And that’s when our connection with Oakwood formally starts.

Dixie: And my experience with Oakwood began in the first Christmas tour in 1973 or 1974 when Jim and I came over and walked around and were kind of mesmerized with what the people were doing with the houses. And we decided when we did get ready to buy a house, this is what we want to do. I think it was 1975 when we found the house at 325 Polk Street and bought it. We worked on it for quite some time and moved in in March 1976. That’s how I got started in Oakwood.

Peter: Give me a quick summary of your time in Oakwood.

Jim: Well, the house at 325 had been made into 4 apartments. We converted it back into a single family dwelling and lived there eight years and then sold the house because I had a promise of a job offer in another city, which fell threw. Our two sons, Jim and Chris, helped us renovate the house. They still live in Oakwood.

Peter: Were they born in Oakwood?

Dixie: No, they were teenagers when we moved into Oakwood, which is why they helped so much. They liked Oakwood so much that when they married, they bought their first homes in Oakwood.

Peter: How many grandkids do you have in Oakwood now?

Jim: Well, they’re four. Each of the two sons have two kids, and they did grow up in Oakwood. All four of them are in college this year. The youngest started in UNC-Chapel Hill. They’re all in different schools.

[turns recorder off while turning off air conditioner]

Peter: Jim, tell me your recollections as a young boy living just outside Oakwood. What do you remember about the neighborhood?

Jim: Well, all along what is Wilmington Street now, where all those state government buildings are was residential homes, very much like Oakwood?  They were old homes built in early 20th century. The house that I lived in was a duplex but it was built probably 1910 or something like that. The whole neighborhood around that area was very much like Oakwood, all the way down to the capitol square. It was just a typical, I don’t know I guess, early twentieth century community with sidewalks, it was low key, fairly small city then, I think Raleigh only had about 65,000 people, so it was a small town atmosphere. I remember a number of good friends I had in Oakwood that went to school at Murphy School. It was a very pleasant place to grow up. Oakwood is very much like that today.

Dixie: In the 40’s I think I remember you telling me that many of the houses in Oakwood during the war years had been converted into apartments, divided into smaller homes, so that is kind of the condition it was when we came back, many of the houses in the 70’s were still in apartment buildings.

Peter: Is your house still around?

Jim: No, it was torn down, but it’s an interesting story. It was torn down about the time that Oakwood began to pick up the development over there and we ran into Billy Makepeace, who was a resident of Oakwood at the time, who was restoring houses and he told me they got some of the banisters off of 413 North Wilmington, my old house, and it went into Tilly Matthews house, is what he told me.

Peter: Where is her house?

Jim: That is on the corner of Polk and Bloodworth.

Peter: That was the Makepeace house that they...

Jim: I am not sure of the address on the corner of Bloodworth and Polk. It faces Polk Street.

Dixie: Right across the street.

Jim: It is right across the street from 325, the house that we renovated. It is a one story home now.

Dixie: Another interesting thing I can remember about Billy Makepeace, they had been in school together, Bob and Jim, and Billy Makepeace, and I had found a book when we were going through some boxes of books, with Billy Makepeace’s name on it, so when we moved back to Oakwood, I saw him one day and I said, “wait, I’ve got something I want to give back to you.” I gave him the book that Jim had had for years and years I am sure. He was really surprised to get back a childhood book.

Peter: Tell me about Murphy School.

Jim: Well, it was a fairly typical school, I think. It went from first grade to seventh grade. I don’t remember probably 3 or 400 students at the most there. I had great teachers and enjoyed all of them and know all of the names of them now. There was an interesting thing that happened when I was in the third grade. I was in Mrs. Thomas’s 3rd grade class, and she put on a play in the theatre that’s now been renovated at Murphy School. I played a part in a little skit that was my first chance to get on stage. I had a singing line. I had to sing a little part... Let’s see if I can remember how it went. It said, it was Cinderella and I had to sing this line, “dear Cinderella will you marry me.” and Cinderella sang back, “yes, my Prince Charming, and happy I will be.”

Peter: This all foretells the music careers of your two sons...

Jim: That was the beginning and the end of my stage career.

Dixie: I also remember on a side from Murphy’s School, when we first moved back to Raleigh, we lived in the Raleigh town apartments. One of the ladies that lived there had been principal of Murphy School many, many years ago. She was in her 90’s. She told us all the things that went on at Murphy School. Do you remember the lady, I can’t think of her name now?

Jim: The teacher, the one that I had?

Dixie: No, she wasn’t a teacher you had, it was the one that lived in the apartment, remember and if the electricity went off, she would call me to make sure I was up on time to get to school, cause she knew I was teaching school. She also said to us one time, remember I asked her if she played bridge with anyone in the apartments and she said “no, they were all too old for her.” she just couldn’t put up with those old people.

Peter: Okay, was this lady living in Oakwood?

Dixie: She had taught at Murphy’s School and was principal.

Peter: Do you remember her name?

Dixie: No, I am sorry, I can’t remember her name.

Peter: Mrs. Emma Conn was the principal there, and there was another school named after her later. Her sister was the librarian. Her name was Mrs. Walker. They were pretty formidable people, you didn’t cross them, and they were pretty stern.

Jim: I served on the school safety patrol while I was there; it was an honor to get to be on the safety patrol. I had a lot of good memories going to Murphy’s School.

Peter: How did your parents decide to be in Raleigh and live where they did?

Jim: Well, at the time my father was working for the railroad and he was working for the railroad in Portsmouth, VA and an opportunity came up for him to manage the railroad company store and so he moved back to this area.

Peter: Where was the company store?

Jim: It was the big round house down near Peace Street. There are still some railroad tracks going through there, but it was something of a switching yard in those days. There was a lot more rail activity in there. Now there is a roundhouse in there and that company store was down there. Some of those streets have been closed in that area and I don’t remember the exact name of the street. It was the street that dead-ends into Wilmington St. one block north of Polk St. It is no longer there. It has been closed off. It is about two blocks from where we lived.

Peter: We all grow up in towns and places where there are things that we probably never told our parents that we did in the nearby neighborhood. Tell me one of those stories of you as a kid.

Jim: We had a lot of freedom to go around the neighborhood in those days. In the summer time in particularly, we would go exploring and go to all sorts of places. I probably went to some of those places that were sort of forbidden that I should not have gone. I remember one time we went down to the ballpark and this railroad roundhouse was down there in that area, of the Devereux Meadow Ballpark and that was pretty far away from home, but my brother and I went down there one day. There was this sort of a neighborhood bully down there and we knew, we saw this guy and it sort of frightened us a little bit. Sure enough he came up and started bullying us a little bit, punching us in the chest. He was a couple years older than us, and he was talking about how he could beat us up and this sort of stuff. I was really pretty frightened and my brother said, ‘ you might can beat us, but you can’t beat us both.” (Laughs) It kind of caught him by surprise and he had some second thoughts about whether or not he wanted to push his luck or not.

I remember playing with the Presley children. Dr. William Presley was the president of Peace College. They lived a little further north on Wilmington St. We sort of grew up with them. All of the Presley children were older than we were, but George and Jimmy were the two boys. They were 3 or 4 years older than us, but I can remember playing kick the can and all those sort of things in the summers. A lot of good memories.

Peter: Dixie ,where did you grow up?

Dixie: I grew up in Morganton, which is in the western part of the state. That’s where Jim moved when we both started high school. We were all Presbyterian, and we all ended up being in the same church. The strange thing about the Presley’s , after we married and moved back to Raleigh, for Jim to go to graduate school, it was about 1963… I got this telephone call, not long after we had moved in and this lady was saying “Is Bubba there?” I said, “Bubba? You must have the wrong number, there is no one here by the name of Bubba,” and she said, “oh yes there is, you see if there is a Bubba in your house.” I said to Jim, “somebody wants to talk to Bubba.” It was Mrs. Presley. That was what his nickname had been when he played with her children and she remembered it and she called to welcome us to Raleigh.

Jim: Her daughter, Mary Lou Presley, was a teacher and was teaching at the same school Dixie was teaching at, and that’s how they made the connection.

Peter: Of the people you grew up with, who today or recently lived in or been a part of Oakwood, you mentioned Billy Makepeace.

Jim: Dixie, help me out here.

Dixie: Rich McMillian did not live in Oakwood, did he?

Jim: No, who were some of the people that lived there? I can remember the names of some of them. Ray Bagley, who lived in Oakwood, he lived next door to where Jimmy Stronach’s house was. In fact, I think he rented from Jimmy Stronach. I remember he used to talk about Jimmy Stronach when we were in grade school. I never met Jimmy Stronach until we moved to Oakwood. Ray Bagley was always talking about Jimmy Stronach, and after I left in 1952 to go to Morganton, I came back to school at Chapel Hill, and Ray Bagley was a freshman over there in my first year and we sort of got reacquainted. There were some other people from Raleigh that I connected with. There was a girl, Sadie Ann Boyd, who lived in Oakwood. She was a really fine musician. She was in the North Carolina Symphony. She played violin. There were several other people that I can remember going to school with. I think there was an Adams family over there… that had several kids. I lost track of most of them when I moved to Morganton in 1952. The neighborhood had changed quite a bit since then. It had been changed into rental property and apartments and, when we came back and got involved in the renovation of our house at 325 Polk St., most of those people had gone.

Peter: Tell me about when you came back. Was the highway still [under consideration] or was that defeated at this point?

There were discussions about everybody should have porch lights or not have porch lights, there were a variety of things like that. What do you remember from those early days of Oakwood and the Oakwood organization?

Dixie: I remember it had just been decided that no, the freeway was not going to happen. That is when we bought the house and moved in. Well, we didn’t move in, we started working on the house. The neighbors that had moved back in… like Valley Henderson, Stella Forest had lived there all her life, they all brought us food up until the first day we moved in. I thought it was a very nice neighborhood gesture. The most touching one came from the apartment house right across the street. There must have been six apartments in that house and this lady and her husband brought us over a bag with a loaf of bread and a Coca Cola bottle. I thought that was very touching, because I know that it was difficult for her to share that from her budget. That was the way people were in Oakwood. They were very friendly from day one.

Jim: We sort of regard ourselves as urban pioneers. We were interested in saving some of the historical houses. I just didn’t want to move out to a cookie cutter neighborhood. That was a strong motivation for coming back to Oakwood. We had a lot of good memories from restoring the house. It was a formidable project. We had the house rewired. We had the plumbing done, we did most of the plumbing. I hired a plumber to help me. We tore out all the plumbing from the four apartments. I think there were eight water heaters under there. When they went bad, they would just connect a new one in. We tore more water heaters out of that house. We completely tore out the water system and I hired a plumber and he advised me on how to set this up. I had another fella by the name of Avery Tully who was a high school industrial arts teacher… he had done a lot of work on houses, he and I, and my two sons met the plumber over there and we replumbed the whole house in one day and got the plumbing system together. Then we fixed one bathroom and the kitchen before we moved in. Then we sort of lived in there and worked on it, several rooms at a time to get it completed. It was a lot of challenges in fixing up the old house. We had to find doors, the doors on the Bloodworth side that go out onto the porch were double doors. We had a lot of trouble finding those doors. My sister found a set of antique doors and we brought those doors from Morganton. We restored those. It was a very nice complement to the doors on the front of the house that were still intact. We found some interesting things. The main staircase had been enclosed and we tore it, I think it was more like paneling, we tore all that down and the newel post was gone, but we found it in the basement and we were able to get the post back in there. There was a lot of challenges with trying to get the house put back the way it was. The two boys were very helpful. They got excited about the renovation and did a lot of grunt work to get it restored.

Peter: Tell me about that first Christmas Tour.

Dixie: The first Christmas Tour. Jim Stronach’s house was on it and it was very much old fashioned. He had not done much work on it through the years, but it had been kept up. It was very impressive to walk into those big doors and see all the old furniture, which I liked so much. Valley Henderson had used her influence I am sure. Each window had a little white candle and was lit when it was dark. She was very instrumental in how the Oakwood Christmas Tour should be approached. I am glad they had her. She had a lot of history connected with her. (Laughs) She was very interested in things being done right.

Peter: Was your house ever on tour?

Dixie: Yes, in 1979 we had our house on tour. In 1978, I had been chairman of the Christmas Tour. In 1977, I was the assistant chairman. I just gradually worked my way up to having our house on tour.

Jim: I was thinking of another interesting thing in the restoration, the posts on the front of the house, on the porch, one of them was in real bad shape; we had a lot of trouble finding a replacement. We finally found one that was almost identical, it isn’t quite. If you go over there today you will find one post that doesn’t quiet match in terms of the turning, but it is almost identical. When we went back recently to one of the Christmas Tour, 325 Polk was on the tour. We were standing outside and people were lined up and I pointed it out to the people waiting in line. I said there is one thing about this house, all these posts on the front porch don’t match. I said, “you will notice this one does match.” They got a laugh out of that. They didn’t know who I was and that I had restored this house decades earlier.  There is a little sidewalk that comes around from the back of the house to the front, a brick sidewalk that is about two feet wide, which we installed. We put those brick in there, some of the bricks had initials in them. The prisoners made those bricks and signed their names in them.

Dixie: The state prison.

Jim: The state prison. We got those bricks, and some lady said, “yeah, these convicts installed this sidewalk over here because they have their initials in the bricks.” Dixie and I got a good laugh. Hey, that is a little bit of a stretch, we did install that sidewalk and it was still there. (Laughs)

Dixie: Another thing about the front porch that we changed, when they had all the apartments in it, on the side porch, they had cut away the banisters and put these cement steps in. When we moved in, we wanted to put the porch back like it was originally. We took the steps away and we found this lady, in Oakwood that turned and made banisters and things. We took her one of our original ones and she made us some to put back in and they did look exactly like the ones that were there.

Peter: In some of the other interviews, in these very early years, I understand there was some tension among the various people who had come recently to Oakwood, about the extent to which there would be common character, house color, porch lights, things like that. Do you remember any of those disputes or discussions?

Dixie: Well, not really, because everyone that we were working with at the time, seemed content to want to get something that would be appropriate to the era. I remember we spent a lot of time picking out the light fixtures on the outside of the house. Since they are still there to this day, we must have made a good choice. (Laughs)

Jim: I think there was some tension about what directions to go in and what was appropriate. I didn’t particularly get involved in that and Dixie was a lot more involved in Oakwood in the early years and working on the Christmas Tour and stuff. I don’t remember. I think there was a lot of discussion about what role society should play and the regulations the city had about restoration, and all that. There was a lot of discussion about how you decided what color to paint it. How that all got resolved I don’t remember but I think there was a lot of back and forth.

Peter: When did you decide to leave and why? Tell me about that process.

Jim: Well, I was in graduate school. I had been teaching community college level for about six years, working on my PHD. I had assumed at some point I would leave, if I couldn’t find a job in Raleigh. I had been applying for jobs, and I had applied to College of Charleston. I got a call from them after the interview from the chairman of the search committee. He said that they are going to offer you the job. We figured we were going to be moving to Charleston, so we put our house on the market.

Dixie: Barbara Wishy was the one who listed the house and she explained to us, as we were sitting at the table filling out all the forms that it is going to take probably a long time to sell this house. As soon as we got the papers filled out and signed, the next day she had someone coming over. (Laughs) The Wheatleys, they bought the house, so it happened very fast.

Jim: We thought it would take some weeks, or months, so we should get it on the market. About a week later, I got a call from this search committee at the College of Charleston that they had decided to postpone the hiring of anyone for another year, because of budget problems. He said, “I am sorry.” I had not gotten a formal acceptance yet, but he had told me that it was a done deal. We had put the house on the market, but we were still wanting to leave because of the job I was in at that time. This wasn’t the only reason we left Oakwood. We probably would have gone anyway... eventually. We moved into an apartment after this and I was teaching at North Carolina Central University in Durham, then a year or so later I got an offer from Elon University and we moved down to Burlington. This one was a full time tenure track job. It turned out we didn’t like it down there so we came back to Raleigh. We have been in Raleigh ever since.

Peter: Tell me how the Oakwood that you see today is different from when you had lived here.

Dixie: I see my two sons; I have one who is very active in the Oakwood Historical Society. The other who is not. They both live on Elm St. They both love Oakwood still. They wouldn’t think of living anywhere else. In that light, it is the same. All the people that we remember are gone. We used to run into Bobby Dudley. She just recently died. She moved in the same time we did. Saber Taylor moved in the same time we did. She is still there. Pat Edgerton was there when we moved in. There are some things that have not changed, but so many people we do not know. So many more houses that have been infiltrated, or put into the empty lots.

Jim: I think in terms of the way it looks, it is still pretty much the same. There are some new houses that have been built in there, but they fit in very well. The overall look of the place is the same, when we go back to the Christmas Tour and we meet the new owners. It seems very much the same. It is a very friendly place, a close knit community. It is a very unique community of people. In that respect, it is very much like when we were there.

Dixie: It’s the best neighborhood I have ever lived in, knowing people, and having people support you in whatever you needed or wanted to do.

Jim: It feels like the neighborhood was when I lived on Wilmington St. in the 1940’s. It is just a friendly safe sort of place, where everyone knows everyone. It is very much like it was in the 1940’s to me.

Peter: That is a great way to end. I will ask my follow up question which is, anything else come to mind?

Dixie: There is one thing that we need to put into this. There was an old hotel called the Andrew Johnson Hotel in Raleigh when we moved in and they were getting ready to tear it down and we needed a few solid wood doors to put into the house. We went down and we got up on the third floor and there were these beautiful doors, with this brass hardware on them. I understood the auctioneer to say “put in a bid for this door” and no one said anything. I said “3 dollars” and no one said anything. Then he said sold. Turns out I had bought the whole floor of doors. There were thirty-three of the doors, so for 100 dollars I brought all these solid beautiful doors to Oakwood. I took all the brass off and put them all over the house, eventually we got rid of all those doors in the neighborhood.

Jim: We used one or two of the doors, but we were able to recycle them to other people who needed doors. We did use a lot of the hardware off of them. The hinges, doorknobs, to replace those that needed to be. Dixie got those doors for three dollars apiece.

Peter: Anything else?

Jim: To reiterate again, the most unique thing about Oakwood is the sense of community that is there. We have been in this community for twenty years now. It is a nice little subdivision. We have some friends here, but you still don’t get the feeling that you had in a place like Oakwood. A lot of people we don’t know here. It is something real unique about Oakwood.

Dixie: When you were outside working on the porch, or anywhere, it never failed to have someone come by in a car and say, “my mother used to live here, or this is where my grandmother grew up.” People were interested in what you were doing. It was really a community affair.

[Recorder turned off, then turned back on]

Peter: This is the first addition to the interview, picking up just a few other things that Jim and Dixie remembered.

Jim: The thing we were thinking about was called the Athletic Club. I guess it is still called the same thing, with the periodic social events that bring people together in the neighborhood. That was another thing that was an important part of Oakwood back in those days in addition to the Christmas Tour. I understand that still goes on.

Dixie: The athletic club got its name because Ronnie Ellis said at one time, that when someone questioned the Athletic Club, he said, “well, it takes a lot of effort to lift your arm and put something in your mouth, so that is athletic enough for me .” (Laughs)

Peter: Tell me about the Oakwood Society.

Dixie: The Oakwood Society was formed very early. Especially when they were trying to get people organized against the road that they wanted to put through Oakwood. People in the neighborhood were elected to the board and we had a chairman and we were very active. The ones that organized the Christmas Tour, [everyone] really worked on that, even if you made cookies to give out to the people who came. Also, the neighborhood got very interested because of the money it raised. One year we had this special event in the summer and we raised money to give to the carousel, to help restore the carousel in Pullen Park. We had this fancy modeling show and I was a clown that year...Sara Stronach and I decided we would be the clowns. They had all these models modeling clothes. We had Miss. America there, thanks to Ames and Bill Callegheri. We had a fancy affair and gave money to the carousel. We did things for Oakwood, but we did things for the community at large.

Jim: I remember another example. They were trying to promote Oakwood and one time we got Governor Hunt to come on a tour there. It was during the Christmas Tour. Dixie and I took Governor and Mrs. Hunt and some other people from Oakwood and the Society around to tour the neighborhood and show them what we were doing. We made some money from the Christmas Tour and one of the projects those funds were used for was to buy housing and try to get it stabilized and resell it. I worked on the committee of the society one time along with Barbara Wishy. She was the chairman of the committee. “We bought a house,” Dixie said. It was the first one we bought and I don’t remember the details. Dixie said she thought it was about 100 dollars. We spent a few thousand on it to upgrade it and sold it. That was one of the activities that the society took upon itself to help stabilize and develop the neighborhood.

Dixie: Another amount of money was spent on a corner lot, right across from the Oakwood cemetery; it was just a disaster that caught all the garbage and all of people going up and down Oakwood Ave. We bought that little lot and we landscaped it and put a few things in it and named it the Valley Henderson garden, and the city took it over and maintained it after that. That was another good thing we did.

Peter: Thank you for all you have done that allows your children and mine and others to enjoy the neighborhood, and grandchildren.

Jim: It has been fun, Peter