THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606210224
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY JANIE BRYANT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 243 lines
WILLIE E. CHAMBERS stands near the entrance to Douglass Park, pointing out where things used to be.
He doesn't live there anymore.
But he still knows the place like the back of his hand.
So do most of the people who grew up there half a century ago, when the neighborhood served families of black wartime defense workers.
Douglass Park was supposed to be a temporary solution for some of the thousands of workers who streamed into the city for shipyard jobs.
However, Douglass Park turned out to be anything but temporary. The neighborhood is still there, and, in the majority of cases, the homes have been renovated and improved over the years.
The friendships formed there have proved to be just as permanent as the homes.
That's why no matter how many times someone plans a reunion, people are always ready to come home.
``Douglass Park is something to remember, I tell you,'' said Albert Eure, a twice-retired educator. ``You can't find anybody in Portsmouth who didn't have some connection to Douglass Park - that was the place.''
Part of the reason for holding the reunion is to give back to that community, said Purvis Richardson, a retired postal worker. It gives people a way to come together again while paying tribute to their old neighborhood.
``We want to let people know that we are proud of where we came from,'' Richardson said.
Although the community started as a federal housing project, Richardson stresses, ``We never considered Douglass Park a project. We always considered it beautiful housing.''
In 1956, the government offered the homes for sale to veterans and residents. At the time there were nearly 700 houses, and prices ranged from about $3,000 for a single unit to $6,000 for one of the four-home units that allowed the owner to live in one and rent the others.
The homes had started off as plain brown wood-sided homes. Later they were painted either green or red. In 1961, homeowners were offered urban renewal loans to renovate homes.
Now many have second stories and various shades of brick or shingle siding. Details such as bay windows or raised dormer windows have been added, and many of the yards demonstrate the pride that many homeowners still take in their homes.
``You go out there and people have done great things to houses that weren't supposed to last but five to 10 years,'' Richardson said.
This is the fourth reunion of the neighborhood, according to Eleanor Boyce, who organized the first several years ago.
``The last one was in 1994,'' she said. ``We try to do them as regularly as possible.''
About 250 people are expected to show up during the three-day event, which begins Friday night with a banquet and dance at the Drydock Club. On Saturday, old neighbors will reunite at John F. Kennedy Recreation Center, which sits in the heart of the neighborhood.
On Sunday, they'll worship together again at Noble Street Baptist, which was considered the neighborhood church, according to Chambers.
The parsonage at the entrance to the neighborhood was built on the site where the neighborhood's housing office and first recreation center used to be, he said.
From the same spot, he can see Douglass Park Elementary School, built in the 1960s on the same site of the old school that used to serve students, first grade to graduation.
Before the latter school was built, students made do going to class in homes on Bedford Court. Each grade was in a separate house in the court, he said.
But the neighborhood's first school was the small Key Road School on what is now called Portsmouth Boulevard.
Half a century later that schoolhouse is still there, serving as home to the Olympian Sports Club. It sits on Portsmouth Boulevard, which now carries a steady stream of traffic.
But in the days that street was called Key Road and then Gosport Road, it still had a bit of country atmosphere.
``On all of Gosport Road, maybe two cars would go down two lanes or something,'' Chambers said. ``It was mostly buses.
``There weren't that many cars. You couldn't drive a car then anyway. Gas was rationed, so the bus was the biggest form of transportation.''
In fact, there were so few cars owned by families then that the neighborhood historians still can list the first handful of people who had cars and the make of those cars.
During the war years, the neighborhood's earliest residents recall there was a tent city for the military men manning an anti-aircraft battery that protected the shipyard.
Chambers pointed to the left down Portsmouth Boulevard to show where the city line once stopped and where Norfolk County started. He swung his arm to the right to show how that line moved a few years later.
That boundary change sent some of the neighborhood's teenagers to Norcom High School and routed others to what was then Norfolk County's high school in Cavalier Manor.
But that separation was just at school.
No one could split up those Douglass Park friendships once the bell rang at the end of a school day.
The children met at the neighborhood's well-kept playground areas. There most of them played sports, and, sometimes in the summer, a recreation worker would teach the girls how to knit or crochet.
After school, young people would congregate at the drugstore on Rodman Avenue, just a part of a small business complex that also included a grocery store, barber shop, pool hall, dry cleaners and restaurant.
``We like to brag about having the first shopping center in the city of Portsmouth,'' Eure said.
Mary Buffington remembers bobbing for apples at Halloween parties at the Douglass Park school, and she remembers the first year that everyone in the neighborhood put Christmas lights out and her mother won first prize.
``The memory that really sticks out in my mind is Christmas time when we all got skates,'' Buffington recalled.
She recalls that the parents would rope off a portion of Grand Street - formerly called Grant Street - so cars wouldn't go where the children were skating.
``Everybody got skates for Christmas, and we were perfectly satisfied with getting a pair of skates,'' Eure said. ``And we would stay out all day long.''
Most of them got Union No. 5s, he said, adding that he still has his in good condition.
``The boys from Douglass Park were known as skaters,'' Eure said.
They used to skate several miles, making a circle from Douglass Park to Downtown, coming back home by way of Mount Hermon, he said.
They could skate backward and sideways, do jumps and something Eure recalls was illegal, called ``a train'' where they linked together, 10 to 15 in a row behind a bicycle, bus or car snaking around streets and curbs.
Richardson, a retired postal worker, remembers that he wasn't a great athlete, but he definitely could skate.
``I was a kind of slim fellow, and I could do a lot of tricks,'' he said.
He did the tango, he said, ``where you were skating with one leg behind the other, and it was real pretty when you saw it done,'' he said.
Richardson and Chambers, like most of the people who grew up in Douglass Park and stayed in Portsmouth, are still close friends.
Both came to Portsmouth from Rocky Mount, N.C., when their fathers got jobs at the shipyard in 1942.
``My father and Mr. Richardson put their applications in the same letter,'' said Chambers, who retired as a third-generation boilermaker.
Richardson was 9 years old at the time and remembers his family was the first to move into one of Douglass Park's four-home units.
``When I left Rocky Mount, we had no indoor hot water,'' Richardson said. ``We had an outside what-you-call toilet. We had oil lamps - no electricity.''
Richardson said at that time ``very few black neighbors had electricity, refrigerators or what have you.
``So when we came to Douglass Park in this war housing you got an electric refrigerator . . . inside plumbing. We got hot water, and this was basically something we never had before.
``Although the houses were plain it was really kept up.
``Your father had to be working at a federal installation. That was the only way to get a house at Douglass Park, and so everybody was gainfully employed. And you had a mother, father and intact family.''
That family atmosphere reached from one house to another, former residents say.
``We still talk about how it was when we were growing up,'' Buffington said. ``Everybody was family and you not only had your parents, everybody else was your parents, too.
``And you didn't have to worry about misbehaving because the word got back to your mama or your father and you were in for a spanking - which people don't believe in now, but I'm still living.''
But children in the neighborhood got love along with the discipline and watchful eye of their neighbors.
``The old adage, `It takes a community to raise a child' - that was really prevalent in Douglass Park,'' Eure said.
Wherever he happened to be in the neighborhood when he got hungry, he knew he would be fed. And when a family bought the first television in the neighborhood, Eure recalls everybody got a share of the entertainment.
On Wednesday nights, boxing would come on, and neighbors of all ages would go over to that house to watch.
``I can remember the TV was located so you could sit on the porch or stand outside if you couldn't get in,'' he said.
Eure retired from the Portsmouth Public School System in 1991 after coaching and working as an assistant principal, mostly at Norcom High School. He went back to work as an academic adviser for juvenile offenders after earning a doctorate.
School was important in the close-knit community, he said.
Youngsters could usually go outside again after doing their homework, but the Naval Shipyard's 9 p.m. gun was the signal for everyone to head home.
When people graduated from high school, there was no question they were either going to college or enlisting in the military, Eure said.
As they got older, Richardson recalls young men in the neighborhood formed a social group they called the Douglass Park Fellows. They used to hold regular meetings and sponsor events such as an annual dance, he recalled.
It's no longer an organized club, but the fellows still know who they are, and they gather ``on all important occasions'' from weddings to funerals, he said.
``We made lasting friendships,'' Eure said. ``Those people are still part of you. That's just the way it is, and I'm pretty sure that attitude will never change.
``I guess you have to be from Douglass Park to know that feeling.'' MEMO: REUNION EVENTS
Retired Army Col. Samuel Eure of Hampton, a former resident, will be
the guest speaker for a banquet to be held at 7 p.m. June 28 at the
Drydock Club. The dinner will be followed by a dance. The cost is $25
for adults, $15 for children.
A cookout and picnic will be held from noon to dark June 29 at the
John F. Kennedy Center.
Persons attending the reunion will worship together at 11 a.m. June
30 at Noble Street Baptist Church.
For more information, call Mary Hines, reunion chairperson, at
393-4271.
THE FACTS
Douglass Park was named after Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century
African-American writer and orator who spent his life fighting slavery.
Facts about the Douglass Park neighborhood compiled by Purvis
Richardson and Katherine Singleton for the reunion include:
The late Paul Singleton, an educator, was the first president of the
Wilson Ward Civic League, which represented Douglass Park beginning in
the early 1950s.
His widow, Katherine Singleton, a retired educator, is the only
living charter member of the neighborhood's Woman's Forum, organized in
1949 to do community work. The organization still exists today.
The late Dr. E.S. Lee was the first doctor in the neighborhood, with
an office in Bedford Court. His wife was the first public health nurse.
Former School Board Chairman Matthew Peanort's son was the first
child born in Douglass Park.
The late Kelly Briley had the first taxicab company in the
neighborhood.
There was a set of triplets who grew up in Douglass Park.
Eleanor Turner Boyce, who started the reunions several years ago, is
one of those triplets.
Boyce said her mother's insurance man gave her mother the idea of
naming the triplets after Franklin Roosevelt, who had just been
re-elected president, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Boyce's brother, Franklin Roosevelt Turner, is now a merchant seaman.
Her sister, the late Frances Turner Cornelious, was named after
Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins. ILLUSTRATION: Staff color photo on cover by MARK MITCHELL
Purvis Richardson, left, and Willie Chambers are members of the
reunion committee that draws former residents back to Douglass Park.
File photos
ABOVE: In 1964, neighbors gather for the dedication of the J.F.
Kennedy Recreation Center, where they will gather again Saturday for
their fourth reunion. BELOW: The neighborhood's first school, Key
Road School, on what is now called Portsmouth Boulevard is still
there, serving as home to the Olympian Sports Club.
Current staff photos by MARK MITCHELL
The homes in Douglass Park started off as plain brown wood-sided
homes, shown in the 1962 file photo at left. Today many have second
stories and various shades of brick or shingle siding, like the
homes pictured above. Details such as bay windows or raised dormer
windows have been added. by CNB