ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 12, 1996 TAG: 9605100003
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
THERE IS A DEEP, dark secret lurking on Clare White's birth certificate.
It's sort of an ironic secret in the context of White's unofficial title as Roanoke's resident historian and her reputation as a stickler for historical fact. Her birthday is listed as Nov. 26, 1912; in truth, she was born on Oct. 26 of that year.
The affable White shrugs off this contradiction in her own past like she might any false notion - by offering proof of the original birth announcement her mother sent out with the correct date clearly written: Oct. 26. Then she laughs with coy assurance.
``I've made sure that my tombstone will have the right date, by golly.''
It is vintage Clare White.
She discovered this discrepancy on her birth certificate quite by accident in 1960, years still before she cultivated the acute preoccupation with history and accuracy and fact that is such an important part of who she is today.
White had needed her birth certificate to get a passport for a trip overseas. It was then she learned that her father mistakenly wrote the wrong month for the date of her birth.
Her father was a doctor, raised in Pittsylvania County and educated in Louisville, Ky., who started his medical career before the turn of the century in the Virginia coalfield town of Crumpler. It was in Crumpler that he met a woman from Georgia who introduced him to her sister.
In 1900, they married.
But Crumpler was an adjustment for the doctor's new wife. According to family lore, the housemaid she brought with her from Georgia ran off with a miner. And their house was less than what she had been accustomed to back home.
``Mother swore you could throw a cat through the cracks in the wall,'' White said.
In 1907, they moved to Roanoke, to a house on what was then Union Avenue, now Wasena Terrace. It was located across the street from the Fishburn mansion - and a step up from Crumpler.
By this time, the doctor and his wife already had a son and a daughter. A second daughter soon followed, and then another daughter, born Clare Norton Stone, on a day that serves appropriately enough as a footnote in the history of Roanoke and Southwest Virginia.
It was the same day that father and son Floyd and Claude Allen were transferred under the cover of darkness from the Roanoke jail to the state penitentiary in Richmond where they would be executed for their roles in the famous Hillsville courthouse killings.
White was unaware of this fact until recently. She has never been much interested in her own history, although she is aware of her great-grandfather's reputation within the family for marrying four of the most beautiful women in Georgia.
Still, she enjoyed learning about the Allens making headlines on her birthday. Learning is something White has always enjoyed. In fact, it is probably the main reason she is more active at 83 than some people half her age.
Union Avenue was a dirt road in 1912, as were most Roanoke roads outside of the cobblestone streets downtown. Electric streetcars and horses were still the main sources of transportation. The number of automobiles only amounted to 1,300, while the city's population was pushing 40,000.
The Mill Mountain Incline had recently opened. Most homes still didn't have telephones.
William Howard Taft was president.
As a girl, White attended West End Elementary School at Campbell Avenue and 10th Street, where a park sits today. She spent a year there before transferring to a private school run by a somewhat strange woman who held her clothes together with oversized safety pins, but offered her pupils a solid education.
White stayed at this school through the ninth grade. She was part of the school's largest class of eight. Then she moved on to Jefferson High, graduating in 1929, the same year the stock market crashed.
She was always an avid reader. She read everything in the family library, including all of her father's medical books. But she wasn't always a stellar student. She remembers scoring a failing 33 percent grade on a Latin test once during her first year of college.
She attended Hollins, double-majoring in philosophy and English literature. She wanted to be a writer herself, only she says she wasn't very adept at plots. She came away from her four years of college with a degree and an unfulfilled passion for learning.
The study of history would have been a natural fit.
The study of history, however, was still 45 years away.
First, she followed a more conventional path. She met a man, Jimmy White, a supervisor for Appalachian Power Co. with a good singing voice from a singing family who was impressed that she knew the words to ``The Man on the Flying Trapeze.'' They wed in 1934.
``I fit into the family because I sang alto and they needed one,'' she said with another characteristic coy laugh.
Children came next, Martha and Clare. They lived in Back Creek, then on Carolina Avenue in South Roanoke. She taught piano and served as president for the Women's Auxiliary of the Roanoke Symphony. She also played percussion in the symphony, where she shared a memorable moment with Arthur Fiedler of Boston Pops fame.
Fiedler was in Roanoke as a guest conductor. During his performance, White in the percussion section crashed a pair of cymbals on the wrong cue. She had turned to the wrong page of music. From the podium, Fiedler looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
Later, the maestro teased her about the miscue.
``You've got one thing that's very important in playing percussion,'' he said. ``Courage.''
It was through the symphony that White moved into the next phase of her life - newspaper work. And it was through the newspaper that she eventually found her life's calling.
At the symphony, she worked with the newspaper in writing and designing promotions for upcoming concerts. That led to a job offer, as women's editor of the city's morning paper, The Roanoke Times.
The year was 1966. White was 53.
It was a different era for newspapers, when there were still women's editors and traditional women's sections and they picked the brides for the Sunday section front based solely on how pretty they were. But it was also a changing era. During her tenure, White became the first woman editor at The Roanoke Times to supervise a male reporter.
In 1967, she started writing a Monday morning column, titled ``The View From Here.'' Finally, 33 years after dropping her college ambition to write, she was indeed writing. And in newspaper work, she didn't have to worry much about plots.
``Until I got to the newspaper, I never knew where I belonged,'' she explained.
White continued her column through October 1977, when she retired.
But before she retired, she was given a special yearlong assignment to write feature stories from different counties around Virginia. Her subjects ranged from a Baptist circuit rider in Giles County to an old-time mill in Washington County.
Perhaps most significantly, she wrote about Green Springs, a town about 15 miles east of Charlottesville in Louisa County. It had been settled originally by the Quakers. At the time of White's visit, however, the state had plans to build a prison in the town.
After her story was published, the Green Springs Historical Society hired her to write the history of Green Springs. It was a daunting task. One family alone had 11,000 letters, journals and other historical items left for White to sort through.
She even uncovered a scandal involving a prominent Green Springs family and a mistress and illegitimate children and a complicated climax in the mountains of Kentucky. In all, the project took her a year to complete.
She loved every minute of it.
In particular, she loved the research - the learning. She remembered, too, the lesson taken from her own birth certificate: Go to the original source. It is a motto she has steadfastly stuck to ever since.
After Green Springs, the Roanoke Valley Historical Society commissioned her to write a concise, factual history of Roanoke to counter the voluminous, more factually liberal history by Raymond Barnes that served as Roanoke's main historical reference guide at the time.
By poring over old courthouse documents, deeds and other records, she found things that Barnes had overlooked, like the existence of Long Lick, and how it could be just as fairly adopted as a second moniker for Roanoke as the more popular Big Lick.
In pioneer times, Long Lick was a natural salt lick that stretched along what is today Campbell Avenue in downtown Roanoke. Big Lick was located where Orange Avenue now intersects Hollins Road. ``I don't think anybody knew there was a Long Lick until I got into it,'' White said.
Her book, ``Roanoke 1740-1982,'' published in time for the 1982 centennial celebration of Roanoke, crowned her as a sort of grande dame of Roanoke history. She has since written a history of Roanoke's St. John's Episcopal Church, and for the past six years she has been laboring over a historical biography of William Fleming.
In addition, she works two mornings a week in the library named in her honor at the Roanoke Valley History Museum at Center in the Square. Her job is to catalog the museum's collection of books, papers and photographs, and to answer questions from the public. White also edits the museum's newsletter.
Yet, for all of her efforts, she seems somehow underappreciated - or at least strangely anonymous - in a community that generally treasures its history. She's like a hometown hero, in a way, who has never had a parade.
Not that she wants one.
White lives her life and pursues her work quietly. At home in her apartment at Brandon Oaks Retirement Community, her latter day preoccupation is evident only on close inspection, by the reference books, for example, lined across her desk.
``Annals of Southwest Virginia 1769-1800.'' ``The Wilderness Road.'' ``Great Valley Patriots.'' ``Captain Staunton's River.'' ``The Lees of Virginia.'' ``Early Adventures of the Western Waters.''
Above the mantle hangs a portrait of a girl, a distant relative of her late husband.
In someone else's home, the painting would likely be relegated to the attic. But in Clare White's house, it's displayed prominently. And of course, the painting has a history.
It was painted in Rome, but White found the portrait in an old house in Halifax County. The girl in the picture was from a prominent New Orleans family that fled to Europe during the Civil War. Her name was Grace.
White learned about Grace and her family through a collection of letters that were donated to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. Again, it was vintage Clare White, going, as always, to the source.
And again, she laughs modestly.
She says it didn't take any great historical detective work to uncover Grace's past, and she debunks any inflated notions of herself as a great historian. Her skill, she says, isn't a mystery.
``The only thing I know is where to look things up.''
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LENGTH: Long : 219 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. Author, historian and former women's page editorby CNBand columnist for The Roanoke Times, Clare White is like a hometown
hero who has never had a parade. color. CINDY PINKSTON Staff 2.
In the 1920s, Roanoke's first library opened in Elmwood Park, and
the city's first radio station, WDBJ, came on the air. The city was
expanding geographically, having annexed seven suburbs in 1926:
portions of Rugby and Forest Park, the rest of Villa Heights, Weaver
Heights, Lee-Hy Court, Morningside Heights and Raleigh Court Annex.
3. In 1915, when Clare was 3, Roanokers voted in Prohibition,
some 1,300 automobiles were creating traffic jams along the town's
streetcar lines, and Big Lick joined the rest of the nation in
collecting money for relief across the Atlantic, where World War I
was raging.
4. White started writing a Monday morning column, ``The View From
Here,'' in 1967. Finally, 33 years after dropping her college
ambition to write, she was indeed writing. ``Until I got to the
newspaper, I never knew where I belonged,'' she explained. White
continued her column through October 1977, when she retired. This
column is from January, 1969. KEYWORDS: PROFILE