|
‘That’s My Home’
Kent Street: Accomplished People and A Lot of Good Stories To Tell By: Stephanie M. Mangino The Winchester Star Most Winchester residents know about Kent Street. But what they know may be wrong. When Kent Street is mentioned, often the first thing that comes to mind is the image of a neighborhood infested with drugs. That negative perception may have created a bit of emotional distance between the rest of the city and the street. But this is a neighborhood where teachers, writers, military personnel, medical professionals, company presidents, entrepreneurs, and even entertainment legends grew up.
A Presbyterian church once stood at Kent and Boscawen streets, the current site of The Winchester Star. Confederate Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson once worshipped in the sanctuary. Legendary singer Patsy Cline spent her formative years, under her given name of Virginia Hensley, in a small South Kent Street home. She was married in another house on the street. Several blocks to the north and a few decades farther into the past is the childhood home of Johnny Kirk. Around 1926, he left North Kent Street for Baltimore and New York, shedding his old name for a new one: John Kirby. With the new identity came fame, resulting from the musician’s decision to combine classical music and jazz, according to “Fall from Grace: The John Kirby Story,” written by his grandson, Alan Williams of Norfolk. Cline and Kirby mixed and melded musical styles, and both died young — he at the age of 43 from diabetes, she at 30 in a Tennessee airplane crash. Each had a different relationship with home. Cline returned frequently to visit her mother, while Kirby never came back to the place where he was raised by a minister and learned trombone from Douglas School Principal Powell W. Gibson. *** Much of Kent Street’s story involves the Douglas School. The learning institution, opened in 1927 as a segregation-era school for the city’s black students, is known today as the Douglas Community Learning Center. For 39 years, the Douglas School educated an entire community, at first through grade 9, and later through all 12 grades. The school became an intermediate school, then an elementary school, before becoming a community learning center in the 1990s. Gibson was the school’s first principal. His son, Willard, published the city’s only newspaper for blacks, The Virginia Informer, in the late 1930s through the 1940s, according to information from Winchester’s Black History Heritage Tour. “Kent Street was the gateway to education,” said June Gaskins Davis, the daughter of Kirk N. Gaskins, who was the Douglas School’s principal from 1940 until the city school system completely desegregated in 1966. Davis’ family tree includes Kent Street connections not just through her principal father, but also her mother, Ella Virginia “Tessie” Finley Gaskins, who was related to Dr. Taylor F. Finley, an educator and the city’s first black dentist. Also, Davis’ grandmother was a sister of John Kirby’s mother, Dolly Kirk. Davis said students called her multitalented father Professor Gaskins — he taught algebra and Latin and played the piano. “He was Mr. Bell’s and Mr. Mulvey’s,” she said, referring to the downtown stores where he bought his clothes. “Daddy’s school to me was almost like a private school,” Davis said. It was small and everyone knew each other. The Douglas School fostered a deep respect for education, which left a lasting influence on its students. *** Judy Humbert, 57, has spent almost every year of her life in a North Kent Street home. While she did not attend college, one of her three children teaches at Lord Fairfax Community College, and another has an architecture degree from Howard University. Sitting in her small, comfortable living room, Humbert listed the names of numerous Kent Street families who encouraged their children to further their education. “There was a rich legacy to send our kids to college to do better,” she said.
Even after familiar faces moved away, the intimacy of the neighborhood remained. “You walked everywhere you went,” said Lucille Long, a 76-year-old who has lived most of her life just a block or so off Kent Street. Stores and homes sat easily next to one another, as did restaurants, the Finley Recreation Center (founded by Dr. Taylor Finley), and a church. Taylor Evans operated his taxi service out of 414 N. Kent St. Later, the building housed the Southern Aid Society insurance company before it became a lodge for the Elks Club. Eighty-one-year-old Russell “Rusty” Mason, a jazz musician and former Holiness minister who was raised on Fremont Street, recalled Evans and his 1931 Buick. “Man, we thought he was a king,” Mason said. Mason also remembers his musical beginnings at the Finley Recreation Center. “That’s where I got my start,” said the saxophone and piano player. “It was a first-class place — hardwood floors, with a stage in it.” From its 1940 opening through the 1960s, rhythm and blues musicians — some destined for bigger things — played at the center. Performers included James Brown, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Ray Charles, Lloyd Price, Little Richard, Ruth Brown, Bo Diddley, and The Platters. “The recreation center was where everybody went,” Long said. “That was really the fun place.” Long and her brother, Arthur Gales, loved to dance at the centerm which opened when she was about 12 years old. Their favorite step was the jitterbug. “He’d throw me over his shoulder and bring me back,” she said. “We’d have a good time.” *** “There was activity up and down the street,” said Floyd Finley, 72, who had relatives on Kent. “It was the center for black social activity, anyway.” Residents also gathered at Henderson Cook’s pool hall and Steve’s Restaurant. Sundays were spent at Shiloh Baptist Church. And at the end of their days, many ended up in the care of Cartwright Funeral Home, which operated in the 200 block of North Kent Street in the 1940s. (The funeral home is still in business. It moved to Fairfax Lane in 1999 after being at 437 N. Cameron St. for about 50 years, said Bruce Cartwright, who owns the business established by his uncle, Joseph.) A few small stores once dotted Kent Street, including Harry Ransom’s place to the north and Hilda and Russell Jackson’s Community Food Store to the south. They’re now closed. A cleaning business, some hairdressers, and a deli have also had Kent Street addresses. They, too, are gone. Haldeman’s Creamery remains, but it is now an office building called The Creamery. The area occupied by the Frederick County Office Complex was once the Health Center Bowling Alleys. In the early 20th century, the Lewis Jones Knitting Mill made cotton undergarments at 126 N. Kent St. On the same block, at Kent and Piccadilly streets, the Virginia Woolen Mill manufactured its products. *** Almost every kind of career was represented by the street’s residents. In 1880, the Census reported carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, foundry workers, a court clerk, a telegraph operator, a glove-maker, and a railroad agent living on Kent Street. By 1910, sisters Clara and Lucy Parker were firmly ensconced in their North Kent Street home. They were 36 and 33 years old that year. Long and her friend, Mary Street, recall Lucy Parker well. “She was really a lady,” Long said. “She was more like a foster mother to me,” said Street, who spent summers with the sisters. Myles Cartwright came to his South Kent Street home in 1947, when he married Helen Jennings. He and Helen raised a daughter, Beverly Richardson, who, after moving away for years, returned in 1986, just before her mother died. Helen Jennings Cartwright was a woman of note, being the first black head nurse at Winchester Memorial Hospital (now Winchester Medical Center). While the Cartwrights were one of the only black families on Kent Street during the city’s segregation years, relations weren't overly strained between them and their white neighbors. The people next door “were very friendly,” Myles Cartwright said, even though some other white people up the street weren’t. Virginia Hensley lived several blocks south. Myles Cartwright remembers older men, white and black, helping the young Hensley cross the street when her mother sent her to the store. Retired Zeropack President Richard Boxwell Jr., also known as “Dick” and “Butch,” was raised at 520 S. Kent St., a few houses away from the Hensleys. “I was born in the front bedroom on June 22, 1932,” he said. People in the neighborhood looked out for each other. “Kent Street was family,” Boxwell said. “We were considered poor people, I guess, but we lived good.” Boxwell knew of Virginia Hensley before she became famous as Patsy Cline, but he was more familiar with Charlie Dick. The two delivered newspapers together. Dick married Cline in 1957 at 720 S. Kent St. After Cline’s 1963 death, the couple’s children would regularly return to Kent Street to visit their grandmother, Hilda Hensley. “It didn't change a lot,” over the years, Dick, who now lives in Tennessee, said of Kent Street. *** But some changes did appear, and not all of them were positive. Many of the people whose lives have been defined by Kent Street say that drugs started to move into the neighborhood in the late 1980s. Humbert, who still resides on Kent, said it’s not the only place in the city with a drug problem, and added that not everyone who lives on Kent is associated with that world. Most neighborhood residents, she said, share the same cares and concerns as most other people. “It [is] no different out here.” Even though some families have moved on, and some unfamiliar neighbors have appeared on certain parts of the street, Humbert said she still knows almost everyone on her block. Her neighbors check on her when they think she may have a problem. She rarely has to shovel her sidewalk when it snows, and a neighbor helps her with the lawn in the summer. “You don’t find that everywhere,” she said. Humbert has stayed because the street is home, and its residents have made it special. *** “Our heritage is all we know of ourselves,” Long said. “What we preserve of it is our record.” And the record shows that Kent Street has a hold on people’s hearts. Even though Boxwell doesn’t live there anymore, he occasionally drives by the house at 520 S. Kent St. “I always look and say, ‘That’s my home.’” |
Originally Published In The Winchester Star on March 6, 2004
WLC © 2005. All Rights Reserved.