THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 24, 1996 TAG: 9610240328
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 90 lines
Bonnie McEachin's Norfolk hotel was a musical hotbed - and a center of culture on the East Coast for blacks.
If Louis ``Satchmo'' Armstrong and his cronies were still around, they might have licked their lips, bent to their brasses and belted out their best for Bonnie McEachin's exit from this world.
The strains, at once mournful and joyful, might have been tears for her passing and fanfare for her life.
Norfolk's beloved restaurateur and hotelier, who played hostess to Satchmo and a host of other jazz greats, died Oct. 16 at the age of 87.
On Wednesday, hundreds of family members, friends and acquaintances gathered to bid her farewell.
They came to say goodbye to a woman whose charisma and hospitality as owner of Church Street's Plaza Hotel had endeared her to the likes of Cab Calloway, Nat ``King'' Cole, Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald and Mahalia Jackson.
From 1951 until 1980, McEachin ran the 23-room hotel at 18th and Church streets, home away from home for entertainers playing ``the Chitterling Circuit'' that spiraled through the segregated South. For them, the Plaza was an oasis.
It was the heyday of Church Street, famous as the center of black culture along the East Coast.
In his eulogy Wednesday, Dr. Robert G. Murray compared McEachin's famous hospitality to that of the biblical Martha. Quoting from the 10th chapter of Luke, the pastor of First Baptist Church on Bute Street - where McEachin had long worshiped - alluded to McEachin's certain welcome in heaven, then excused himself for using the vernacular and said, ``what goes around, will come around.''
Whether her sense of caring for and about others resulted from her upbringing in a small North Carolina town or from her African roots, ``she entertained everybody - stars, athletes, they all came to Bonnie's place,'' Murray said.
``She had an old country girl kind of spirit . . . made you feel at home,'' he said, the rising crescendo and intensity of his preaching bringing mourners to their feet. They swayed and echoed his words.
It is both ironic and fitting that the granddaughter of a former slave, who had grown up relatively untouched by prejudice, found her life's work catering to black performers denied entrance to Norfolk's white hotels and restaurants.
McEachin was once quoted as saying of her childhood on the former plantation in Rose Hill, N.C.: ``I saw the best. I read. I was taught to want the better things of life. I didn't know anything about racism.''
In 1924, at the age of 15, she wed Graham F. McEachin and moved to Norfolk.
Later, she remembered: ``When I got here, I learned it was quite different. I found out you couldn't eat in certain places, you couldn't sleep in certain places.''
It may have been the injustice she felt then that later moved her to go into the hotel and restaurant business.
McEachin received many honors stemming from her entrepreneurship. She was named ``Hotel Woman of the Year'' in 1955, for one thing. For another, she was dubbed, in 1959, ``one of the nation's most successful businesswomen . . . and one of the best-dressed'' by Sepia, a monthly magazine catering to blacks.
McEachin was a woman who cared about her community. She threw parties for children and took groups of them to the circus. Her friend Satchmo helped foot the bill.
But it was not just the famous who were touched by McEachin.
Alvin Palmer, 80, of Portsmouth came to say farewell to his old friend Wednesday. Formerly of Norfolk, the retired civil service worker had known McEachin for 55 years and had often patronized the Plaza's restaurant.
``Had many a meal down there, and she was just a beautiful person outside and in,'' Palmer said.
He remembered how impressed he'd been to learn that McEachin had a Cadillac, and a lavender one at that.
``Didn't no blacks have a Cadillac back then,'' he said. ``We couldn't go nowhere else, had a hard time'' during the era before integration.
But Church Street was definitely ``the place to be,'' Palmer said. ``You go down to the corner of Brambleton and Church, you'd be sure to see all your friends. It was the little New York, and if you didn't wind up on Church Street, you didn't come to Norfolk.''
Most of the jazz greats McEachin rubbed elbows with are gone now, but if they were still alive, Palmer said he knew they'd have been on hand for her funeral.
And if Satchmo had his trumpet handy, he likely played a few heartfelt notes of greeting when Bonnie McEachin walked through those pearly gates last week. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
From 1953 to 1980, the Plaza Hotel at 18th and Church streets in
Norfolk hosted the likes of Louis ``Satchmo'' Armstrong, left.
Proprietor Bonnie McEachin, below, was honored Wednesday, a week
after her death. by CNB