A Boy In The 1940s

I first came to Elizabeth City on a very cold night in 1934. It was snowing so hard that my parents weren't sure the doctor could get to our house on the northeast corner of Burgess Street at Road Street to help welcome me; but he did.

Bennie Basnight of Basnight Boat Works (located in the forties and early fifties on Water Street at the bridge to Camden, but demolished when the bridge was expanded some years later) built my first sailboat in '46. I can vividly remember taking delivery of a new Moth Boat from Dorr Willy a couple of years later. Until I got a drivers' license and other interests gained priority, I probably spent more time on the Pasquotank than any other place.

Although I can't imagine it happening today, when I was about twelve years old I used to walk down Poindexter Street with a Colt Woodsman in a holster on my hip and a .22 caliber rifle in my hands to Culpepper Hardware to buy a box of .22 long rifle cartridges for shooting at bottles and cans at the old Dare Lumber Company. Nobody seemed to be at all disturbed. Of course, the man behind the counter at the hardware store was my uncle, Bob Jackson.

Basnight Boat Works had a hole in the floor about two or three feet square. The story was told that the boat shop had once been a warehouse where sugar was stored during World War II and that bootleggers moved a boat under the building and cut a hole through the floor to steal bags of sugar. The hole was covered by a a metal plate, anchored at one corner with a steel bolt. When sawdust and wood shavings accumulated, Mr. Basnight would sweep them into a pile, slide back the metal plate, and push the debris into the river. Environmental concerns hardly existed in those days.

Yep! Elizabeth City was, and I am sure still is, quite a place. Those of us who grew up there were very fortunate. I remember my mother telling many captivating stories, especially those about my grandfather James Monroe Richardson, for many years captain of the Annie L. Vansciver.