Showing posts with label fairfax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fairfax. Show all posts
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Happy Hour Pavilion
The Happy Hour Pavilion was a dance hall operating on Lee Highway from at least the late thirties until around 1950 located in the current Capital Rentals building at 12716 Lee Highway. The building was built in 1928, but the earliest record of it being a dance hall is during the late thirties when it was operated by Michael Mohr. Mohr (b. 1891) was a German Catholic immigrant and a highly respected citizen in Fairfax County who owned the parcel of land along Lee Highway where Happy Hour was. In 1939 he ran for Sheriff, but lost to Eppa Kirby, who would go on to form the Fairfax County Police Department. Mohr died in 1952 and is buried at St. Mary’s in Fairfax County.
The first ad of Happy Hour is from February 18, 1938 featuring Bill McLean’s High Hatters on Saturdays and Elton Wakefield’s Virginia Corn Huskers played Wednesdays. Both bands are a bit of a mystery and don’t seem to have made it beyond gigs in Fairfax County. Elton H. Wakefield was a popular band leader and fiddler in Northern Virginia at the time and played at Dixie Tea Garden in Merrifield among other engagements. Elton, living on Columbia Pike in Falls Church, was a Fairfax native, born in 1892 and during the day he worked as a machinist for the Navy. Elton died in 1964. I can’t find any information about the other members of the Virginia Corn Huskers. Bill McLean’s High Hatters are a total mystery. It appears there were a few bands based in DC around the same time sharing the name the High Hatters. One was a vaudeville act and another featured two women and a piano player.
Unlike other dance halls like Social Circle, Bull Run, and Chimney Villa, Happy Hour seemed to be the spot for the more law abiding set since it is never mentioned as a trouble spot. Perhaps Mohr’s campaign for sheriff is testament to the type of place he ran. About the craziest thing that happened there was a young woman broke her ankle while attempting the Charleston for the first time. The article from the time describes a hillbilly band playing square dances and old favorites before breaking into a spirited rendition of the Charleston. It seems moving from a square dance to the wild abandonment of the Charleston was too much for that crazy kid.
For some reason, perhaps a zoning issue, Happy Hour closed during 1943 and 1944. Mohr tried to sell the property, but then applied for rezoning as a dance hall and resumed operations in late 1944. This time period is especially odd because the dance halls were booming with so many young servicemen in the area looking for a good time. Upon reopening, Raymond Woolfenden managed the dance hall Woolfenden was in the twilight of a country music DJ career under the moniker Cousin Ray. He was inducted into the Country Radio Broadcasters in 1999.Sometime in the late forties Happy Hour was taken over by Tom and Bob Lion. On March 25, 1949 Happy Hour featured Tom and Bob Lion and their “all-string band” The Gentlemen from Dixie. The advertisement boasts of “round dances, Paul Jones, square dances and all requests. Sadly, Happy Hour ceased operations sometime in the early fifties. During the seventies this location became an antique shop operating until 1985 when it became Capital Rentals. The building still stands at 12716 Lee Highway.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
The Drag Racing Menace
During the fifties and sixties the DC area was a hot bed for hot rodders. In NOVA hot rodders gathered at the various Tops Drive-Inn locations like Fairfax Circle, Harrison and Lee Highway in Arlington and Glebe and Rte. 50 in Arlington. They'd bring their cars to the drive-in and hang with their gang of friends. In some cases, the hot rod friends became clubs and sometimes evolved into greaser gangs. The greaser gangs evolved into the sixties and in some places continued well into the seventies. In PG County they were known as Grits during the seventies, but in NOVA some of them evolved into the Pagans.
In 1960 WaPo did one of a number of articles on the menace of drag racing in the DC area. Naturally the hotspots were the redneck areas of PG County, Arlington, and Falls Church. The Post reported that motorcycles, trucks, and even women were drag racing!
The drag racing hotspots in NOVA were (according to the Post): East Broad St. and Hillwood St. in Falls Church; Williamsburg and Yorktown blvds; George Mason and Sycamore; and GW Parkway.
In 1960 WaPo did one of a number of articles on the menace of drag racing in the DC area. Naturally the hotspots were the redneck areas of PG County, Arlington, and Falls Church. The Post reported that motorcycles, trucks, and even women were drag racing!
The drag racing hotspots in NOVA were (according to the Post): East Broad St. and Hillwood St. in Falls Church; Williamsburg and Yorktown blvds; George Mason and Sycamore; and GW Parkway.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
A Bone to Pick
Mark Opsasnick wrote a wonderful book called "Capitol Rock" that I've been wading through. The book covers the late country and early rock and roll period in Washington DC when great artists like Link Wray ruled the club circuit. I have one bone to pick with the book.
Mark claims that Northern Virginia didn't have much of a club scene, but I don't agree. There was a slew of nightclubs along Lee Highway and Wilson Blvd in Arlington such as Covered Wagon then heading out Rte. 29 there were a number of dancehalls between Fairfax City and Centreville including Social Circle, Hunters Lodge, Bull Run Dance Hall. Many of these were notorious for rowdy brawls and hillbilly music (you can see many of them on the side of this page). Northern Virginia was the center of bluegrass music with nightclubs such as the Admiral Grill and the Birchmere. I hope as this blog goes on I can begin capturing the richness of the area's music.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
The Moral Panic in Northern Virginia
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about sixties motorcycle gangs in NOVA during the mid and late sixties. Reading the WaPo’s coverage from 1965-70 is reading a classic example of the media molding a moral panic out of youthful disturbances. The WaPo especially takes aim at the Pagans as the motorcycle gang grew from a few young men to a huge regional club. The coverage culminated with the murders of Newland and Hartless in 1970.
The first article to mention the Pagans that I’ve found is from late 1965. Warner Ray Cockerille was arrested at the Social Circle dance hall in Centreville for his involvement in a brawl. The article mentions as an aside that he was part of the “pagan motorcycle club”. This article lays the first building block in the construction of a moral panic by alleging Cockerille fought a group of girls despite his 6'9" stature. In constructing a moral panic, it is critical to show them as living outside the norm and showing them in extreme deviancy such as fighting a group of girls.
In April 1966 the Fairfax City Times had an article about a gang fight in Fairfax City. The article describes the conflict between the “greasers”, “collegiates”, and the “pagans”. It’s interesting to see the use of the word greaser, which was a hidden national subculture among blue-collar kids from the 1950s-70s (see the Outsiders). Greasers typically had a fifties look, were into hod rods and motorcycles, and despised hippies. The “pagans” were described as an outside group, but were actually the beginnings of the Pagans coalescing into a gang in Northern Virginia. The article describes the groups in the typical language of moral panics in which they are described as engaging in deviant behavior that is contrasted with the “good kids” that warned police of a huge brawl behind the A&P across from the old Fairfax High School (now Paul VI) with the usual outrage from the adult squares.
In June 1966, the WaPo hit moral panic paydirt when the greasers (now called the Avengers) and the Pagans had a shootout behind Safeway at the Lee-Harrison Center in Arlington. The event had all the trimmings that the community needed for a full-blown moral panic. The adult squares saw out of control marginalized young men, strangely dressed, with no regard for the community’s norms. Add to that the allure of motorcycles, guns, and gang symbols and you’ve got a recipe for a sensational story. The result was the usual investigations by the County Board, the letters to the editor, and the conversations about what to do about these delinquents. While the rumble between the Avengers and Pagans established the Pagans as the dominant gang in Northern Virginia, it also began to change the nature of the gang. On that day, it began as transition away from a hard drinking, brawling, fun-loving group of young men towards the criminal enterprise it is today. Unfortunately, moral panics in the media often fuel the fire and the media coverage attracted new members to the Pagans. The interesting contrast in these articles was the “fruits”, which an Avenger girlfriend assures us does not mean homosexual, but refers to the kids that care about college. Again, this coverage of moral panics needs a bearing for the squares to establish the deviancy of the Pagans and the “fruits” served this purpose.
Following the Arlington rumble, the WaPo did a number of profiles of the Pagans. They ranged from the bizarre to the sinister, but they added to the allure of the gang and solidified the Pagans as the folk devils of Northern Virginia. In one article they profile Earl “Moochie” Swicegood and the article tries to reconcile the look and attitude of bikers with the squares’ world. At one point Moochie declares that he believes in paganism and then a policeman asks him if his swastika symbolizes anti-semitism which Moochie denies. The reporter also asks Moochie if the Pagans are basically hedonistic; you can hear the snickering by the reporter coming through the newsprint as he writes that Moochie scrunched up his face and didn't understand the word. When the reporter explained the word, Moochie said “Yeah its one big party baby”.
From this point forward, anytime a Pagan was involved in trouble, the media covered it and mentioned the Pagans. Occasionally the media gave readers a review of all the crimes committed by Pagans to make sure they understood the deviancy of the organization. This solidified the Pagans as NOVA's folk devils and merely mentioning in an article that someone was a Pagan was enough to feed the moral panic. The media coverage couldn't see any nuance in the Pagans and tended to protray them as monolithic and uniform in beliefs and behavior. For exampel, the Pagans that intimidated Vietnam protesters got a brief mention without analyzing how this behavior was at odds with the paper's strict portrayal of Pagans as deviants.
As I wrote in an earlier post, in 1970 a group of Pagans murdered members of a rival gang called the Saints. The Saints were an outgrowth of the Avengers, so this was a continuation of the early rumbles in Fairfax and Arlington. By now, the Pagans were huge and had become a much different gang than they were four years earlier with many members involved in drug dealing, prostitution, and other criminal activities. After the murders of Hartless and Newland, you can see a transition in leadership in the Pagans. One of the original Pagans, Richard Scarborough, declared himself retired because the gang had moved away from its origins of a group of guys attending races with their wives. This is probably an overstatement by Scarborough. The coverage of the murders further solidified the Pagans as a murderous,deviant and sinister gang by the media. Therefore, any trouble where Pagans were involved confirmed them as a threat to polite society and usually those involved were assumed guilty.
This was shown in the 1974 court case involving a late night fight in Georgetown between members of the Pagans and a group of African-Americans. Two Pagans were sentenced to long prison terms based on false testimony that was never questioned because the squares assumed that Pagans were inherently violent, racist, and deviant. The two Pagans were recently released when irregularities in the trial came to light including false testimony by an ex-girlfriend.
The point of this post is not to declare the Pagans as an entirely innocent organization. No doubt they were hard drinking roughnecks that had some members involved in criminal activities since at least the late sixties. However, there has been a long tradition of young men being hard drinking roughnecks and involved in criminal activities, which made the Pagans seem a bit more normal than the media portrayed them. In many early articles Pagans said they did not seek trouble, but just wanted to live their lives free of the shackles of regular society. The media couldn’t read this as a subtle request to butt out and let them live by their own code good or bad.
The first article to mention the Pagans that I’ve found is from late 1965. Warner Ray Cockerille was arrested at the Social Circle dance hall in Centreville for his involvement in a brawl. The article mentions as an aside that he was part of the “pagan motorcycle club”. This article lays the first building block in the construction of a moral panic by alleging Cockerille fought a group of girls despite his 6'9" stature. In constructing a moral panic, it is critical to show them as living outside the norm and showing them in extreme deviancy such as fighting a group of girls.
In April 1966 the Fairfax City Times had an article about a gang fight in Fairfax City. The article describes the conflict between the “greasers”, “collegiates”, and the “pagans”. It’s interesting to see the use of the word greaser, which was a hidden national subculture among blue-collar kids from the 1950s-70s (see the Outsiders). Greasers typically had a fifties look, were into hod rods and motorcycles, and despised hippies. The “pagans” were described as an outside group, but were actually the beginnings of the Pagans coalescing into a gang in Northern Virginia. The article describes the groups in the typical language of moral panics in which they are described as engaging in deviant behavior that is contrasted with the “good kids” that warned police of a huge brawl behind the A&P across from the old Fairfax High School (now Paul VI) with the usual outrage from the adult squares.
In June 1966, the WaPo hit moral panic paydirt when the greasers (now called the Avengers) and the Pagans had a shootout behind Safeway at the Lee-Harrison Center in Arlington. The event had all the trimmings that the community needed for a full-blown moral panic. The adult squares saw out of control marginalized young men, strangely dressed, with no regard for the community’s norms. Add to that the allure of motorcycles, guns, and gang symbols and you’ve got a recipe for a sensational story. The result was the usual investigations by the County Board, the letters to the editor, and the conversations about what to do about these delinquents. While the rumble between the Avengers and Pagans established the Pagans as the dominant gang in Northern Virginia, it also began to change the nature of the gang. On that day, it began as transition away from a hard drinking, brawling, fun-loving group of young men towards the criminal enterprise it is today. Unfortunately, moral panics in the media often fuel the fire and the media coverage attracted new members to the Pagans. The interesting contrast in these articles was the “fruits”, which an Avenger girlfriend assures us does not mean homosexual, but refers to the kids that care about college. Again, this coverage of moral panics needs a bearing for the squares to establish the deviancy of the Pagans and the “fruits” served this purpose.
Following the Arlington rumble, the WaPo did a number of profiles of the Pagans. They ranged from the bizarre to the sinister, but they added to the allure of the gang and solidified the Pagans as the folk devils of Northern Virginia. In one article they profile Earl “Moochie” Swicegood and the article tries to reconcile the look and attitude of bikers with the squares’ world. At one point Moochie declares that he believes in paganism and then a policeman asks him if his swastika symbolizes anti-semitism which Moochie denies. The reporter also asks Moochie if the Pagans are basically hedonistic; you can hear the snickering by the reporter coming through the newsprint as he writes that Moochie scrunched up his face and didn't understand the word. When the reporter explained the word, Moochie said “Yeah its one big party baby”.
From this point forward, anytime a Pagan was involved in trouble, the media covered it and mentioned the Pagans. Occasionally the media gave readers a review of all the crimes committed by Pagans to make sure they understood the deviancy of the organization. This solidified the Pagans as NOVA's folk devils and merely mentioning in an article that someone was a Pagan was enough to feed the moral panic. The media coverage couldn't see any nuance in the Pagans and tended to protray them as monolithic and uniform in beliefs and behavior. For exampel, the Pagans that intimidated Vietnam protesters got a brief mention without analyzing how this behavior was at odds with the paper's strict portrayal of Pagans as deviants.
As I wrote in an earlier post, in 1970 a group of Pagans murdered members of a rival gang called the Saints. The Saints were an outgrowth of the Avengers, so this was a continuation of the early rumbles in Fairfax and Arlington. By now, the Pagans were huge and had become a much different gang than they were four years earlier with many members involved in drug dealing, prostitution, and other criminal activities. After the murders of Hartless and Newland, you can see a transition in leadership in the Pagans. One of the original Pagans, Richard Scarborough, declared himself retired because the gang had moved away from its origins of a group of guys attending races with their wives. This is probably an overstatement by Scarborough. The coverage of the murders further solidified the Pagans as a murderous,deviant and sinister gang by the media. Therefore, any trouble where Pagans were involved confirmed them as a threat to polite society and usually those involved were assumed guilty.
This was shown in the 1974 court case involving a late night fight in Georgetown between members of the Pagans and a group of African-Americans. Two Pagans were sentenced to long prison terms based on false testimony that was never questioned because the squares assumed that Pagans were inherently violent, racist, and deviant. The two Pagans were recently released when irregularities in the trial came to light including false testimony by an ex-girlfriend.
The point of this post is not to declare the Pagans as an entirely innocent organization. No doubt they were hard drinking roughnecks that had some members involved in criminal activities since at least the late sixties. However, there has been a long tradition of young men being hard drinking roughnecks and involved in criminal activities, which made the Pagans seem a bit more normal than the media portrayed them. In many early articles Pagans said they did not seek trouble, but just wanted to live their lives free of the shackles of regular society. The media couldn’t read this as a subtle request to butt out and let them live by their own code good or bad.
Friday, February 12, 2010
KKK in Fairfax
The Klan was a presence in most southern town's during early part of this century. They enforced, with intimidation and violence,racist and bigoted norms across the south. While I knew they were a common presence across the south, I was still shocked to read about them in Fairfax County.
I was surprised to learn that in 1930, at the annual Fairfax Fair (which continues today)the Klan were given responsibility for the last day's program. The Washington Post article reported, with no sense of shock, that the Klan was in charge of the "program on [the] closing day of [the] event. The article goes through the usual county fair-type event such as pony races, gold hunt, etc. Then J.L. Baskins, the Grand Dragon of the KKK of Virginia gave a speech "followed by a large display of fireworks.
I did some further research and apparently this was normal from the late twenties to early thirties in Fairfax County. The Klan even sponsored a baseball team!
I'll file this under WTF?
I was surprised to learn that in 1930, at the annual Fairfax Fair (which continues today)the Klan were given responsibility for the last day's program. The Washington Post article reported, with no sense of shock, that the Klan was in charge of the "program on [the] closing day of [the] event. The article goes through the usual county fair-type event such as pony races, gold hunt, etc. Then J.L. Baskins, the Grand Dragon of the KKK of Virginia gave a speech "followed by a large display of fireworks.
I did some further research and apparently this was normal from the late twenties to early thirties in Fairfax County. The Klan even sponsored a baseball team!
I'll file this under WTF?
Saturday, January 30, 2010
How did NOVA become redneck? Pt. 2
The DC area was a sleepy backwater town untl the thirties. During the mid-1800s the city experienced an influx of immigrants, mostly Irish. The area didn't experience the turn of the century immigration like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. However, southerners did flock to the city starting in the thirties. This migration was a gush at first and then became a trickle until it stopped in the early seventies. The large numbers of "hillbillies" turned the area's nightclubs into honky tonks and the area came to have a much more southern feel.
DC and surrounding areas had significant (possibly majority) southern sentiments during the civil war, so the addition of southen migrants just added to the southerness of the city. The migrants settled in Southeast DC, Prince Georges County, and Northern Virginia, but grappled with huge housing shortages. This led to enormous, almost ramshackle, housing developments populated almot exclusively by southern whites. For example, Pimmit Hills in Tysons is a huge neighborhood of homes that look identical and are quite small. Way back the legend told that the Fairfax police were too afraid to go into the neighborhood so it was some kind of hillbilly free for all. I doubt that was really the case.
Nonetheless, these newcomers wanted nightclubs to themselves and they got their wish. Across the area, including NOVA, there were nightclubs hosting legendary country artists playing to their kin folk. This was how the DC area was until things began to shift in the nineties. The redneck nature of the area disappeared almost overnight and has been washed from the area as if it were never there.
DC and surrounding areas had significant (possibly majority) southern sentiments during the civil war, so the addition of southen migrants just added to the southerness of the city. The migrants settled in Southeast DC, Prince Georges County, and Northern Virginia, but grappled with huge housing shortages. This led to enormous, almost ramshackle, housing developments populated almot exclusively by southern whites. For example, Pimmit Hills in Tysons is a huge neighborhood of homes that look identical and are quite small. Way back the legend told that the Fairfax police were too afraid to go into the neighborhood so it was some kind of hillbilly free for all. I doubt that was really the case.
Nonetheless, these newcomers wanted nightclubs to themselves and they got their wish. Across the area, including NOVA, there were nightclubs hosting legendary country artists playing to their kin folk. This was how the DC area was until things began to shift in the nineties. The redneck nature of the area disappeared almost overnight and has been washed from the area as if it were never there.
How did NOVA become redneck?
Sitting in Arlington now, it's hard to believe how redneck the DC area used to be. DC has always been a magnet for people looking for better opportunities. Economic downturns are always blunted by government spending. Nowadays, folks come here to work for government contractors, but back in the middle of last century there were a ton of unskilled jobs available and they were primarily related to the federal government.
1950 marked the first census in which a majority of Americans lived in metropolitan areas. The DC area grew during this time from the expansion of the government during the depression and World War II. By 1960 DC joined the top ten metropolitan areas in population. Looking at the population numbers show the explosive growth: Arlington grew from 6430 in 1900 to 135,449 in 1950; Fairfax grew from 18,850 in 1900 to 40,929 in 1950; and Alexandria grew from 14,520 in 1900 to 61,787 in 1950. Meanwhile, Appalachia was experiencing difficult economic times and the people living in that region began migrating to find better jobs. In some cases they ended up as coal miners, but many came to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and DC. In fact DC was the second largest recipient of Appalachian people. The folks that came were among the poorest in the nation and often came to cities directly competing with African Americans and immigrants for jobs.
These folks were called hillbillies back then and reports show they did not fit into their new communities. People wrote about them being disorderly, clannish, untamed, with an affinity for alcohol and violence. We all know when people arrive in large numbers to a new area, these reports are typical and probably overblown.
The wonderful thing they brought to DC was their music and made the DC area the major hub for Appalachian music which was evolving into Bluegrass and Country. Thank god for that.
1950 marked the first census in which a majority of Americans lived in metropolitan areas. The DC area grew during this time from the expansion of the government during the depression and World War II. By 1960 DC joined the top ten metropolitan areas in population. Looking at the population numbers show the explosive growth: Arlington grew from 6430 in 1900 to 135,449 in 1950; Fairfax grew from 18,850 in 1900 to 40,929 in 1950; and Alexandria grew from 14,520 in 1900 to 61,787 in 1950. Meanwhile, Appalachia was experiencing difficult economic times and the people living in that region began migrating to find better jobs. In some cases they ended up as coal miners, but many came to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and DC. In fact DC was the second largest recipient of Appalachian people. The folks that came were among the poorest in the nation and often came to cities directly competing with African Americans and immigrants for jobs.
These folks were called hillbillies back then and reports show they did not fit into their new communities. People wrote about them being disorderly, clannish, untamed, with an affinity for alcohol and violence. We all know when people arrive in large numbers to a new area, these reports are typical and probably overblown.
The wonderful thing they brought to DC was their music and made the DC area the major hub for Appalachian music which was evolving into Bluegrass and Country. Thank god for that.
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