THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408190052
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LARRY BONKO
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
IF YOU LIKED riding a streetcar from downtown Norfolk to Ocean View or got a kick out of steaming across the Chesapeake Bay on the ferry Pocahontas or looked forward to shopping at The Famous in Portsmouth, they were the good old days.
But if you were an African-American who didn't eat at the best restaurant in downtown Newport News because the dining room was for whites only, they were the bad old days.
The good and bad of living on both sides of Hampton Roads in the 1940s and 1950s will be on view Monday at 8 p.m. on WHRO in ``Gone, But Not Forgotten,'' writer-producer Mike Sinclair's documentary that has been eight months in the works.
It's the local showpiece in public television's summer pledge drive.
Sinclair begins his documentary with whimsical stories about sailors in wartime riding the long red trolleys in Norfolk and trolling for entertainment on the city's East Main Street.
The program is well along before viewers are reminded that four decades ago some of the country's leading entertainers, including Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, were bound by Jim Crow laws to stay in segregated lodgings on Church Street while playing at the Attucks Theater.
Gone, but not forgotten in ``Gone, But Not Forgotten'' are the days of Norfolk's rock-ribbed segregation laws and wretched housing for the poor and black. For a while, there, I thought producer-writer Sinclair was taking viewers on a strictly blissful nostalgia trip with scenes of ballroom dancing at the Oceanfront and Washington's birthday sales at Nachman's in Newport News.
Andy Roberts, the narrator, is so upbeat that there isn't any sting in his words when he talks about the cities of Tidewater - nobody referred to the area as ``Hampton Roads'' back then - being segregated.
Eventually, this Channel 15 documentary comes down to the real world from the Ocean View roller coaster and the stage of the Gaiety Burlesk. It shows how in the years before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, African-Americans on the Southside and the Peninsula were setting about to alter the fabric of a rigidly segregated society.
It was the time when ``colored attractions'' played in Norfolk.
The most compelling moment in ``Gone, But Not Forgotten'' takes place when former Newport News mayor Jessie Rattley recalls the day she decided to have lunch with a friend in downtown Newport News in the dining room of the Warwick Hotel. Rattley recalls how a waiter ever so politely told her that ``we don't serve Negroes here.''
Undaunted, Rattley asked to see a menu.
As the waiter walked away, Rattley assumed he had gone to call down the law on her. WHRO's program notes tell me that Rattley left the deed to her home on her kitchen table should friends need it for posting bail.
There was no need for bail, however.
``We were served, ate, paid our bill and left,'' she said.
Just like that, the walls of segregation began to tumble in Newport News.
To his credit, Sinclair included this episode in a documentary that is mostly fluff about Glenn Miller and his orchestra playing at the Oceanfront, the neon coffee pot outside Antine's (where I ate often when I worked for The Daily Press in Newport News) and the tattoo parlors and taverns on East Main Street.
``I felt I had to do it. I couldn't leave it out,'' said Sinclair of the area's long tradition of segregated life.
``Gone, But Not Forgotten'' will be on the air Monday night, as well as Wednesday at 9:30 p.m., and Aug. 28 at 7 p.m., because it is a program that appeals to Channel 15's core audience of older viewers who support the station with generous pledges. Reruns of Lawrence Welk's show air on the station for the same reason.
Sinclair said he accepted film, photographs and other materials from about 200 viewers in producing ``Gone, But Not Forgotten.'' It's about the trolleys, the Kiptopeke ferries, the baseball games at old Bain Field in Norfolk and how downtown Norfolk, Portsmouth and Newport News used to be - grand and exciting places where everyone went to shop or browse, to dine and see the latest films.
I was here as a young sailor in the 1950s to take that all in.
What I remember most of that time is not the sweep of CinemaScope movies on the wide screen of the Loew's Theater in downtown Norfolk or feeling wicked while attending the midnight jamboree at the Gaiety when Georgia Sothern was on stage.
Gone but not forgotten for me are all those ``whites only'' signs. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
NORFOLK PUBLIC LIBRARY
Out of the past: Granby Street looking north, circa 1937.
Back in 1946, trolleys were the way to go in Norfolk. WHRO's ``Gone
But Not Forgotten'' offers a glimpse into the area's past.
by CNB