Exhibitions
The Dixie Restaurant
The Dixie Restaurant: Glance at the recent past
Somehow, families have a way of protecting each member even as they expose their vulnerabilities. Those twin facets of family, the vulnerabilities that simply define existence, and the safety in which frailties are revealed and forgiven occasionally extend to the community as well. The Dixie Restaurant, formerly known as Dixie Quick Lunch, is such a place. Here, the day-to-day life shared among families is recreated daily by friends and strangers over cups of coffee and a meal. This is a special, dependable time, a time of day when we stop, make connections, and think of home while enjoying familiar faces and simple recipes prepared for us.
The Dixie has been in business since 1920. Each decade leaves its impression on the restaurant and its generations of customers, a variety of people in an old southern town. Before its recent restoration, Dixie’s history was visible, and its caretakers were weary. Having owned and operated the restaurant for the last twenty years, Geneva Ramsey and her family had many “regulars”, steady patrons who knew they were welcome. Menus were not required reading for most. Geneva and staff knew what they wanted, even if they did not. Loretta worked primarily as a waitress at the Dixie for more than 40 years under four owners. “If we didn’t see someone for a few days, we would call them and make sure they were alright,” she said. Loretta served enumerable orders of chicken and dumplings, meatloaf with two sides, sandwiches, hot dogs with chili, grits, eggs, salted herring, banana pudding, and more. These familiar meals were prepared by recipes handed down for generations, with ingredients measured to taste. The relationship between the waitress and the customer was an important ingredient, too. “If your favorite waitress didn’t wait on you, you didn’t feel like you had a good meal,” Loretta stated.
Geneva did not expect to work at the Dixie. She was to keep the books. Eventually, she found herself involved in every aspect of the operation. By the end of her reign, she arrived daily at three in the morning, first starting the bacon, then the water for grits. If it were chicken and dumpling day, the chicken would go on at 3:30. She knew her first customers of the day would stroll in at 5:30 a.m.
Geneva and husband Al bought the Dixie because AL liked to eat and always wanted to own a restaurant. In the 1940’s, he would stop at the Dixie for a hot dog each Saturday before going to the movie theater across the street. Louie Plakas (Dixie’s previous owner, 1947-70) made the Dixie hot dog famous with the addition of his signature chili. Louie also believed in the power of simple food served in a friendly atmosphere. Geneva reflected, “I think anyone who came into the restaurant didn’t feel an outsider. We didn’t put on airs; we couldn’t if we wanted to. Nine out of ten somebody they knew came in.” Sometimes meals at the Dixie offered more than comfort and community. Looking at the restaurant and the role it played in her life, Geneva remarked that, “it became part of my life because that’s where my friends came from. It saved my life when Al passed away. I’d probably not be here now.”
The Dixie nurtured and protected others too. Bobby, a local native, is seen delivering newspapers for the Progress-Index on foot every afternoon at about 2 p.m. Each morning, he worked the Dixie. “I am a busboy. This is the longest job I’ve ever had, 23 years,” Bobby says as he starts off remembering when the Dixie found him. Karen Becker (owner of the Dixie, 1983-87) and her mother went to my church. She asked me if I wanted a job because they needed help at the restaurant. I’ve been here ever since.” Bobby’s long-time companion died unexpectedly on a Tuesday and was buried on Friday, yet Bobby worked that Wednesday and Thursday. While holding his sorrow close, he served water, coffee, and cleared tables, working through his grief. “I like the customers and the atmosphere. It’s like a family.”
Beyond Dixie’s careworn facade, community memories remain as deep as the layers of paint on the pressed tin ceiling. On March 4, 2006, the last day that Geneva operated the Dixie, the tufted aluminum above the grill proudly glowed as the morning sun danced off its surface. Before the doors closed at 2 p.m., people shuffled in for hours. Standing in line to taste and feel and reminisce. Stories shared with extended family members for decades past were heard everywhere. At the end of the counter, a woman relished her memories as she ate a hot dog with chili. It was Louie and Emma Plakas’s daughter, Florence Rocchelle. She recalled the years her parents operated the Dixie. “I was remembering momma and papa and how hard they worked. I was thinking it was the end of a chapter in my life, the end of an era, she said. Thirty-six years have not erased her recollection or that of her sister Annie. Annie worked at the restaurant with her parents for two decades and another with the Colliers (1970-83), who bought the Dixie from Emma shortly after Louie died. At 83, Annie recalls the hard work and traditions her parents instilled.” You always had to have a smile on your face and show people that you appreciated their business.” She remembers cooks like Marie Lewis and Joe Massenburg who, “could make anything taste good.” Her father, Louie, immigrated from Greece. “Taking over a business when you were poor was not easy. Another Greek man lent my father the money,” she recalled. Florence’s son, Robert, was crazy about trains and was Louie’s inspiration for constructing the track and acquiring the trains that trimmed the walls of the Dixie just below the ceiling. Those trains would become an informal symbol of the Dixie, well-known to all of its regulars. Over the years and through the owners, the train was transformed into a train of circus wagons. A sign of the changing times, the train eventually left the building when Geneva Ramsey sold it. But not all vestiges of the past are gone. A glimpse of the painted backboard from the display is mounted in the new Dixie Diner owned by Andrea Matthews.
The Dixie’s seasoned, worn surfaces, its signs of age, belonged to each patron, employee, and proprietor who contributed to its spirit. Change is inevitable, and we adjust because we have no resistance against time. This is true of Dixie as well. With each new owner, people return to the Dixie. In that familiar setting, the recipes may be a little different, the look slightly altered. Amid old friends, we see a few new faces and remember a few who are now beyond our reach. With each, we sense that we are part of a large and growing family.
2006
snow - barbering in petersburg
“Snow” a local Petersburg barber has been barbering for 61 years. At 83 he continues to work one of the oldest professions.
Snow and Billy’s Barber Shop is presently occupied by a sole proprietor, Snow. Snow has been at his current location, on High Street since 1977.”I moved from down off of Gill Street” (Farmer Street) he remarked, where his mother who owned a shoe shine parlor and he started the Blue Bird Barber Shop.
Snow, born 1923 in Blackstone Virginia moved with his family to Petersburg in 1938.”I came on down here, my daddy he gave up farming”replied Snow. During the war Snow worked making P38’s and 105mm shells in a plant in Pennsylvania.
Eventually he acquired a position with Brown & Williamson in Petersburg before learning to barber in September 1945. William Smith “Billy” started barbering with Snow in 1954. “He has not felt well recently, I miss him a lot,” Snow commented. Snow remarked,”I just got started barbering and was gonna give it up in a few days and go on doing the job I was doing. But I just got hooked up in it and kept on going and practicing and kept on practicing. I just got old at it.”
…In the 1850’s what were some of the occupations followed by free Negroes other than factory labor?” The answer is barbers, coopers, carpenters fishermen, wheelwrights….. These free negroes were skilled artisans who held key positions in industrialism of the urban South just prior to the Civil War. They owned property and businesses eventually passed down to their heirs. Such is the case of Major Elebeck, a mechanic who came to Petersburg from Pennsylvania in 1802. By 1810 he had purchased several lots of ground, erected buildings and made improvements thereon. Accordingly the father’s holdings passed on to his children. One son Henry, became a barber and property holder of standing in Petersburg. Free black businessmen purchased slaves or slave relatives for the purpose of setting them free.
Negro Labor and Property-Holding In Petersburg Before Emancipation
(1830-1860)
Luther P. Jackson, Professor of History
Virginia State College
Greenport's Men of the Sea
GREENPORT — “If a fisherman agrees to talk with you, it will be the honest truth,” Greenport’s Capt. Mark Phillips told photographer Angela Orrell.
Several North Fork fishermen did agree during the past year to speak with her and she captured their pictures and stories for an exhibit that opens Saturday at the East End Seaport Maritime Museum. “Greenport’s Men of the Sea — Part I” opens with a 7 to 9 p.m. wine and cheese reception. The exhibit, which continues through Aug. 8, is the first of what she hopes will be an ongoing series that will reflect the lives and challenges of men who may be a dying breed.
Ms. Orrell, a former Cutchogue resident who now lives with her husband and daughter in Virginia farm country and works as a registered nurse, brought a sense of “romanticism and curiosity” to her project. What she discovered was a group of people with “strong characters and a strong work ethic” who were surprisingly open to telling their very personal stories of struggle and survival.
Her commitment is to “keep it true” in the pictures and stories she relates. Some were “too personal” and out of respect for her new friends, she’ll keep some of the secrets they shared. But she will share many pictures and tales that depict the lives her subjects have lived. And next year’s exhibit will include a “sharing of visions” of pictures the fishermen are sharing with her as well as more pictures and stories of people she hasn’t yet met. Throughout the next year, she plans to continue her quest to talk with and photograph many more who make their living from the sea.
“It’s their life’s calling — it’s actually almost a genetic disposition,” says Ms. Orrell about the fishermen she met. Braving the elements and being away from home and loved ones for weeks and sometimes months at a time makes them and their families strong and unique, she says.
Their lives are “challenging, dangerous” and full of “a lot of inconsistencies,” says Ms. Orrell. Capt. Phillips told her he’ll stop fishing if it ever ceases to be a challenge.
The fishing village of Greenport held a “sense of mystique” for Ms.
Orrell when she was a child growing up on the North Fork. But as she approached the project last year, looking to discuss the romanticism of the sea, she found the fishermen kept bringing her back to many hard, cold realities of their lives.
Today’s fishermen try to strike a balance between ecology and economy, she says. They’re beset by a host of regulations that affect the size, numbers and kinds of fish they can catch. There are rules about the locations where they can fish, the kinds of equipment they can use and even the number of days they can spend at sea.
“There are a tremendous amount of things that impact this industry,” says Ms. Orrell. The fishermen certainly don’t want to deplete supplies of fish, she says, noting that it would ill serve their livelihood. “They have an ecological consciousness about them,” she says. Couple that with “intelligence, a hard-work ethic and honesty,” and it’s clear to her that they’re intent on not “adversely impacting the environment.”
But times are changing on the North Fork. More than 40 offshore boats were once based in Green-port. They plied the waters up and down the East Coast. There are now only two offshore fishermen left: Capt. Phillips and Capt. Sidney Smith.
Capt. Phillips typically sails out 140 miles east of Nantucket. He, like Capt. Smith, comes from a long line of fishermen. Capt. Smith represents the fourth generation of his family to earn a living on the water. Because of the economics, Ms. Orrell wonders how many more generations will be able to follow in their footsteps.
“It’s survival now,” Capt. Joe Angevine told her. He started fishing with his father back in Brooklyn, and has spent 40 of his 77 years at sea. “I can be my own boss and I like what I do,” he says.
Long before he turned his attention to the sea, Capt. Smith grew up knowing the story of his great-grandfather who, at 54, died at sea when his boat exploded. One of his great-grandfather’s sons died with him, while the captain’s grandfather survived the accident. Capt. Smith’s father and grandfather spent their lives at sea, but his father tried to dissuade him from following. It didn’t work.
Now, Capt. Smith could be the clan’s last fisherman, unless his 7-year-old daughter someday follows the family path.
“He has overcome a personal history of pain and successfully continues his life’s work,” says Ms. Orrell.
“We’re doing a job not everyone can do,” Capt. Smith told her.
