Writing of South Toward Home was an Unlikely Journey

By Carolyn Harmon
charmon@rrdailyherald.com

Reprinted with permission from the Daily Herald.

Sit a spell and hear the church bells that called worshippers on Sunday morning — visit Greensboro when UNC-G was the Woman’s College — travel along on other adventures.

Alice Joyner Irby of Raleigh recently had her book published, “South Toward Home: Tales from an Unlikely Journey,” by the Outer Banks Publishing Group.

Alice was born in 1932 and lived in Weldon and after she moved away, she returned regularly until her mother died in 1991. She also visited her very good friend, the late Ruth Gregory Proctor of Halifax.

“Weldon has always been my home,” Alice said. “It is a book about my life, starting with Weldon and ending with Weldon.”

Alice grew up in Weldon, graduating from Weldon High School in 1950. She has lived through the Great Depression and the Korean War, in which her friends were drafted, she said.

“It was scary — and the polio epidemic — my brother, George Joyner, and I were quarantined for a summer, so reading about the pandemic now brings back some of those memories,” Alice said. “They didn’t know how you could get it, but they knew you could get it from other people. So we couldn’t have visitors.”

That is when she learned to play badminton. Alice’s parents were the late Margaret and William B. Joyner. William set up a badminton net during the polio quarantine.

“We couldn’t play ball, it would roll down the street,” she said. “We couldn’t go out in our yard.”

Alice’s sister is Margaret Joyner Kinker. Her brother, George, live in Morehead City and is married to a Roanoke Rapids girl, Gwen Dickens.

“We all came from Halifax County,” Alice said. “My parents were very active in the Methodist Church, and my mother’s family were some of the founders of that church in Weldon — the beautiful Gothic Weldon Methodist Church on Fifth and Washington — it is closed now.”

That is where Alice’s book begins — the first of 26 stories contains a picture of that church.

“The first section is about my growing up in the church, the importance of the church and the town. The second is about my brother, and our adventures — partners in crime — then I had a story about the four of us in Weldon.

“The four of us used to sing for funerals out in the country — sometimes in the family home and sometimes in a country church. They contacted the church, or they wanted some music, the four of us would pack ourselves in Ben Wyche’s car, he was always the driver and we would go sing.”

The four of them were Alice, Wyche, Blanche Selden Bullock, a classmate from Weldon High, who married Thurmond Bullock; and J.P. Ellis.

The first set of stories continues with Alice growing up, the train coming through, the second World War and what it was like living in Weldon during that time. The second set is what happened in Alice’s young adult life.

“One story has to do with how I was discriminated against trying to get on a United Airline Flight just for men in the early 1960s,” she said. “Some of the stories are about me hitting those barriers in those days. Another one has to do with my first job out of graduate school at Merrill Lynch in Greensboro, when I applied I was told, ‘You have the credentials that exceed, but we can’t hire you because you are a woman.’ The laws permitted that at the time.”

Another section is about her career while working for the Lyndon B. Johnson administration’s Job Corps, part of the war on poverty. She attended Rutgers University where she was the vice president for student services, followed by working for an educational testing service that makes the SAT and a lot of the admissions tests, she said.

In other sections, she writes about celebrities and her friends — her daughter, Andrea Irby, growing up with a horse; the time she met George W. Bush on a golf course in Pinehurst; her yard man; her sister, Margaret; two of her friends named Mary; her father; and the fortitude and courage of women in an earlier time, she said.

“I wanted to celebrate a lot of people who have been important in my life,” Alice said.

The book came out of a suggestion and encouragement of her editor in Raleigh, Linda Hobson, and a friend and fellow scribe, Ron Rhody, Alice said.

“We lived in Pinehurst — he said, ‘You really need to write your story for your family if nothing else.’ ”

An incident that happened in 2018, also encouraged her to write the book, she said, when her daughter’s husband, Cecil Bozarth, died suddenly of a heart attack at the peak of his career.

“And that was a blow, it was really difficult to endure — I couldn’t write for awhile,” she said. “There were at least two stories that focused on my daughter and her family and I decided I should get those printed. I worked very hard for a year and got it published in April. I realized when I was doing it, when I really got going on it, I wanted to do it for another reason — to celebrate the people in my past — in Weldon and Halifax — that had meant so much to me.”

Another reason was to talk about the UMC Woman’s College in Greensboro, she said. The university had a sequence of names as it evolved. It was known first as the State Normal and Industrial School, and after 1897 as the State Normal and Industrial College until 1919. During the period 1919-1931, it was known as the North Carolina College for Women, and became the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina from 1932 to 1963.

Alice said she graduated with an economics degree in 1954 and then earned her Masters in Economics from Duke University.

After “South Toward Home” was published, Alice had plans to share it in Halifax, but COVID-19 has changed her plans for now.

Her close friend and former classmate Glenn Dickens said the book will be sold in Halifax at the Bass House.

“And hopefully, if this pandemic gets over she can have a book signing here,” she said.

Dickens said Alice’s mother taught her French and was her favorite teacher. She said Alice is “a mighty fine person.”

“I am very impressed to have her as a friend,” she said. “I read the book and I thought it was wonderful and so well written I couldn’t put it down. I am reading it over because I am sure I missed a lot. It is so informative of things back in that time — it brought back a lot of memories.”

The book’s cover has its own story — it is a picture of the Roanoke River in Weldon, captured by Weldon resident and photographer, Lee D. Copeland.

Alice had a copy of the picture, without identification, and she wanted to find out the photographer’s name. She found it at the Riverside Mill in Weldon, where Copeland has several photographs for sale, he said.

After searching for a couple of days, she received some help from her daughter Andrea and Nancy Mueller, board member of the Halifax County Arts Council. Andrea found Copeland’s wife, Dee Riddle Copeland, on Facebook.

Dee’s mother, Janie, who also lives in Weldon, is 98 — they all live in Weldon, Alice said.

“She responded to my daughter on Facebook and Lee gave us permission to use it for the cover,” Alice said.

Copeland said the photo was in Weldon at the first falls on the Roanoke River near the boat ramp on the first cold fall morning several seasons ago.

“I had been watching the river for some time, waiting for three things to come together,” he said. “The falls colors to peak, the river to be low enough to flow through the rocks, the air to be cool enough to allow the mist to rise on the river from the warmer water.

“The three elements came together early on a weekend morning where I spent 90 minutes with my Nikon, photographing the area until the sun got high enough to dissolve the mist,” Copeland said. “I have always felt it was one of my best photos of the river and am very pleased that Mrs. Irby, after seeing the picture on a greeting card, was moved enough to track me down and ask permission to use it on her book cover.

Copeland said, after the book was published, Alice and Andrea, while passing through the area, stopped by the Copeland’s front porch.

“And spent a delightful 45 minutes visiting with my mother-in-law, Janie Riddle, and Dee and I, reminiscing and discussing friends brought together by the Roanoke River,” he said.

Copeland said he has been taking pictures for 50 years, working professionally for about 20 and as a hobby the rest of the time.

“I worked at several newspapers in Eastern North Carolina, including The Daily Herald with Dick Kern as my editor. I covered the Nixon, Ford and Carter White House while in the Army, the bicentennial in Washington, D.C., and was appointed to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Inaugural Committee.”

As a result of the book, Alice has submitted it for two awards from the N.C. Literary and Historical Society Association and the North Carolina Society, she said. The suggestion came by way of a retired professor at NC State, James W. Clark. He is a well-known award-winning North Carolina writer, who went to Littleton High School, and who read Alice’s book, she said. The two became acquainted.

“I am not sure when I will find out if I won, but I did send them in,” she said.

When asked why folks should read her book, Alice said it is what she calls a comfort book.

“They are stories about people who lived ordinary, but at the same time exceptional lives,” she said. “I think for many people it will connect to their own memories of their growing up. It is also a social history of about seven or eight decades.

“I am 87 years old, I lived through two-thirds of the 20th Century,” she said. “It will remind people of their own lives in those times. I have heard from people I knew when I was growing up and people who I don’t even know, and they identify with someone in the story. It triggers their memories of their own lives in those times.”

The book is available at Amazon.com and the Outer Banks Publishing Group Bookstore.