THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508130300
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 195 lines
WAVES OF HEAT ascend from the pavement of the Wright Memorial Bridge, distorting the station wagons and sedans rushing toward the salty sea. On the side of the road two grown men sweat, scan the sound, and sweat some more.
They are waiting - waiting for the porpoises to roll. Around 4 p.m., one of the photographers gets to thinking.
``Can you tell me why we are standing here baking our brains out waiting for a porpoise?'' Jim Mays, then news editor at WTAR, asks his buddy.
``Sure,'' answers Life magazine photographer David Douglas Duncan. ``Aycock said to.''
Lots of people have come to the Outer Banks simply because Aycock said to. Newspaper editors have published bad photographs of bathing beauties draped over driftwood because Aycock said to. And magazines like National Geographic and Life have featured glorious multi-page spreads about the area . . . because Aycock said to.
The late Charles Brantley Aycock Brown, the first director of the Dare County Tourist Bureau, spent most of his life extolling the virtues of the Outer Banks. And from mid-century until his death in 1984, Aycock Brown buried editors across the country in news dispatches and black-and- white prints featuring everything from beached whales to ``The Lost Colony'' actors to cottages crushed by storms.
Although his artistic talents were modest, he combined common sense, persistence and his own flamboyant personality to get the word out that the Outer Banks is the place to vacation.
``Most of the photos that Aycock took have the aesthetic value of a shoe,'' said Wynne C. Dough, curator of the Outer Banks History Center. Though he lacked an artist's eye, he had the spirit. Dough believes that Aycock Brown did more to promote tourism than anyone since the late Wash Baum, who in the 1920s and '30s pushed for the roads and bridges that led to the development of the Dare beaches.
``The tourism boom of the last 20 years wouldn't have unfolded,'' Dough said, ``without an indefatigable promoter like Aycock.''
For nearly three decades, Aycock Brown cruised Dare County wide-eyed as a lemur, a straw hat on his head, an outrageous shirt on his back and at least three cameras slung around his neck. He could talk faster than anyone in the county, and if he wasn't talking he was whistling - badly. He knew everyone and he was everywhere all the time. His impact was incredible.
When Aycock came to town as a freelance promoter in the 1920s, tourism was measured in the thousands. In the '50s it was measured in the tens of thousands, and by his death, there were millions of tourists pouring into the area. But Aycock's success in helping develop Dare's multimillion-dollar tourism industry belies his simple beginnings.
Born in 1905 into a family of five children in mountainous Happy Valley, N.C., Aycock decided early on to be a journalist. He was fired from his first job at The Elizabeth City Independent newspaper after six months.
So he went to New York City to take some courses at Columbia University, still one of the most respectable journalism schools in the country.
Aycock left Manhattan and eventually got a job as a copy editor at the Durham Herald. ``That lasted two days. That's how long it took them to find out I couldn't spell and didn't know where to put commas.''
Sometime during the 1920s, Aycock found his forte: promotions. He joined the campaign of Alfred E. Smith, the Democrat who opposed Herbert Hoover in the 1928 presidential election. Smith lost, and so did Aycock, because he wagered his pay on the wrong man.
Broke, he went to Ocracoke. There he met his bride, the late Esther Styron Brown. For six years, Aycock did odd promotions for hotels and the island. He painted the Ocracoke Lighthouse on conch shells in India ink and sold them to tourists. And he sold a photo essay titled ``Cape Stormy'' to the Saturday Evening Post.
Aycock learned a thing or two in those lean years on the island. One, ``I had discovered that a tourist will buy anything,'' Aycock once said. And his daughter, Gale Ballance of Wanchese, believes that he developed the fine art of conversation on the porches of the tiny village. That skill, learned in endless hours of leisurely ``jawing,'' would more than anything else make Aycock Brown a success.
But there was plenty more ahead before he would land behind the desk at the Dare County Tourist Bureau, including a stint as an editor in Beaufort, where he kept a live baby alligator on his desk.
During World War II, Aycock moved his family back to the beach and joined the Navy as a civilian. Driving his old jeep along the shore, it was his job to identify bodies, photograph sinking ships, interview survivors and arrange proper burials for the dead.
The experience must have haunted him. A decade later, Aycock sold a piece to ``Male'' magazine. In his straightforward style, Aycock detailed how in 1942 he secured a set of fingerprints from a dead sailor, a victim of the torpedoed British tanker, San Delfino:
``The black, bony fingers were gnarled and twisted into a claw more forbidding, more frightening, than anything I've ever seen. My job was going to be a tough one.''
Aycock snipped the skin around the fingers, peeled it off - nail and all - and plunged the casings into a bourbon preservative he just happened to have handy. (Several newspaper articles and old friends allude to his love of drink.) Later, to make the prints, Aycock slipped the skin onto his own fingers.
Titled ``I Wore A Dead Man's Hand,'' the story got top billing in the October 1955 ``Male'' table of contents, but got bumped off the cover by a story titled ``I Fought the Bloodsuckers of Ceylon.''
After World War II, Aycock returned to breathing life into Dare County. In 1948 he landed a publicity job with the outdoor drama ``The Lost Colony,'' and vacationers and editors started doing things that Aycock told them to do. But his hometown clients sometimes found his stunts farfetched. Once Aycock suggested that J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee on the old ``Today'' show, be given a cameo role in ``The Lost Colony.'' Monkeys might have been on board the Elizabeth II, Aycock reasoned.
``But the director said, `There'll be no damn monkey in MY show,' '' Aycock told a reporter in 1978, still feeling the affront. ``And that was it.''
OK, then how about chorus girls from Las Vegas? That would make a heck of a promotion.
The answer was no.
By 1951, Aycock was a busy promoter. His clients included the Morehead City and Dare County chambers of commerce, ``The Lost Colony,'' the Carolinian Hotel, the Carolina Racing Association, the Virginia Beach-Nags Head Toll Road.
Aycock's stationary said ``Covering the Waterfront.'' This was not another of his catchy cutlines. It was the truth.
When someone reeled in a record blue marlin, Aycock was on the Oregon Inlet dock in the afternoon to greet the proud angler. When the Ash Wednesday Storm unexpectedly chewed up the coast, Aycock gave newspaper readers across the country their first glimpse of the devastation.
How did he do it?
Simple, his secretary Sarah Owens said. ``People called him.''
See, Aycock was nice to most everyone - he gave holiday gifts to bank tellers and widows and kept a trunk full of trinkets for journalists, children, tourists and politicians. His generosity was genuine, but it also won him friends.
A key friend was the man who ran Manteo's Western Union telegraph office in the 1940s and 1950s. When prominent visitors sent a telegram, the Western Union man would notify Aycock that they were in town. Aycock would hunt the person down. If it was a journalist, he or she'd be treated to a fat promotion packet and perhaps front-row seats to ``The Lost Colony.'' If it was a French journalist, Aycock might be wearing a beret when they met. Aycock also believed in going to the post office, sometimes three times a day, with fodder for newspapers across the country. Some of it would be stamped ``News Rush!'' Other items would say ``Upcoming Blue fish Blitz,'' or ``The Pirate's Jamboree.''
And there was always the possibility that inside the envelope marked ``News Rush!'' would be a ``cheesecake'' shot of a seaside beauty languishing against a shipwreck or with starfish held to her earlobes. The history center has dozens of them in the collection.
``He combined the appeal of Norman Rockwell with the salaciousness of the old Esquire magazine and managed to get away with some fairly randy stuff,'' Dough said.
Today, this would be considered Neanderthal, but the mostly male editors of the '40s, '50s and '60s loved the stuff. And so they, too, did what Aycock said and ran shots of Outer Banks beauties.
At least one editor tired of the stuff. Larry Maddry, a colum nist with The Virginian-Pilot who was a cub reporter at The Coastland Times during Aycock's tenure, recalls an editorial in the local paper calling for fewer glimpses of the female form.
Aycock was also a man of paradoxes.
Despite his fondness for ``cheesecake,'' he was a solid family man, a father of three who cooked his children breakfast each morning, returned home for lunch and a 30-minute nap every day and never missed dinner.
While he spent half his life praising and preaching about the seaside, he neither fished nor swam in the ocean.
``To tell you the truth, it has always looked filthy to me. Have you ever had a look at some of the things that come out of there?'' he told Maddry.
In spite of his downhome demeanor, Aycock, many say, was an intellect. He read daily newspapers from around the world, had one of the area's largest libraries and could converse on most any subject.
Journalists loved describing Aycock's character as much as he loved describing Dare County.
``Aycock Brown's Outer Banks'' is a book of Aycock photos and confessions from prominent newspeople about why they did what Aycock told them to do (including the porpoise rolling account from the late Jim Mays). Edited by author David Stick, the book includes the following characterizations: Don Quixote-look alike, the Outer Banks Oyster, the blue-eyed peacock, Publicist for Paradise, the Con Man of the Outer Banks, the luckless sort of chap that muscle men kick sand on at the beach, Mr. Tourism and Mr. Carolina Banks.
Perhaps the last name is the most enduring. Seven months after Aycock's death in 1984, the Aycock Brown Welcome Center was dedicated in his honor. Aycock's picture hangs on the wall there, witness to the streams of tourists who are his living legacy. ILLUSTRATION: Photos courtesy of the OUTER BANKS HISTORY CENTER
[color cover photo - no cutline information]
In top photo, Shirlie and Connie Barnett don starfish as ear
ornaments in a 1950 Aycock Brown photo. Above, Brown captured a
photographer shooting Chief Manteo in ``The Lost Colony.''
Brown rushed to the scene of this car accident on the then uncrowded
stretch of road on the Outer Banks.
Photos courtesy of the OUTER BANKS HISTORY CENTER
Not all of Brown's photographs were of bathing beauties or tourist
attractions; he also shot this ocean rescue.
by CNB