text: Interviewed on March 7, 2008, at South Hall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Steve: [0:00] My name is Steve Allred, and I am Executive Associate Provost at UNC Chapel Hill, UNC class of 1974. OK, so here's how this goes. Start it. I was on the Chapel Hill downtown partnership; I filled Nancy Suttenfield's unexpired term, so I did that for a year last year. One of the things that came before the partnership, which is a group that's got representatives from the town, town government and from business owners and the university, was a question about allowing street vendors downtown, its on Franklin Street, so that people could sell stuff off of carts or otherwise, with the idea of adding to the panache of Franklin.
  Interviewer: [0:49] Hot dog vendors or, even just crafts?
  Steve: [0:51] Or crafts and things like that. And so, it led me to talk about how that used to be the case on Franklin Street. Here's the story: I came here in the fall of 1970, and, up till that point, there had been a tradition, particularly on East Franklin Street, you probably know about this, about the flower ladies. You heard about the flower ladies? OK, so here's the deal: the flower ladies were a group of African-American women, probably as many as a dozen, who used to set up with an umbrella, sometimes, they'd have a little bench and they would arrange flowers and they would have these little buckets. There were a number of them, so they would have around their feet these white plastic buckets with flowers in them.
  [1:44] You could, I don't know if they grew them or bought them or whatever, but it was a common sight on East Franklin Street and people liked it, you know? Now, East Franklin at the time had a number of family-owned businesses. This was before University Mall; this was like where people shopped. Everyone was on Franklin Street, particularly East Franklin. So it was seen as a supplement to the downtown, not a competition. Now, you might ask Charles House about this, about how he felt as owner of University Florists-
  Interviewer: [2:23] I spoke with him yesterday, I didn't ask about the flowers [laughs]
  Steve: [2:25] He probably had a different view of the flower ladies. But for students, it was a great thing, 'cause it was cheap. I mean, you could buy, I've did this, you could buy a handful of Daffodils or whatever for a dollar and give them to a girl and impress her. So, it was fun. Here's what happened: We had this tradition of the flower ladies, it gets to be the late 60s/early 70s and the culture is changing. What people then start selling on Franklin Street, on the sidewalks, there was a guy called the Leather Man, who sold belts and a variety of leather goods, and then others who started selling drug paraphernalia and albums.
  [3:12] So suddenly, you go down East Franklin, and you'd have the stores, but then out on the sidewalk you'd have people who spread out a blanket and would be selling hash pipes, roach clips, jewelry, belts, you know, any kind of thing you could think of, all basically devoted to, a different time here, just basically devoted to the whole drug culture, for lack of a better term. You can imagine the merchants of Chapel Hill weren't fond of this, it was suddenly like "Good Lord, Chapel Hill has turned into a big head shop", which, of course, it was. [laughter]
  [3:50] In addition, there was The Shrunken Head, which now sells T-shirts, but used to sell hash pipes and roach clips and other stuff, I mean The Shrunken Head was a head shop. Cigarette papers and stuff. So, the town got concerned about this and the merchants got concerned about this. They decided to pass a town ordinance to ban sales of items on the sidewalks. The problem is that nobody wanted to get rid of the flower ladies, so there was a specific exception created that said you couldn't sell anything other than flowers on the streets, on the sidewalks of Chapel Hill.
  [4:33] So, the entrepreneurial minded folks had a brilliant idea, so they continued to set up shop, but now they wouldn't sell you a roach clip or a hash pipe or a belt or some earrings or an album, what they would sell you was a flower. As a free gift with every flower you bought, you would get a roach clip or a hash pipe or an album or whatever. So they were technically selling flowers. So then the town had to go back and amend the ordinance again to ban all sales on Franklin, which had the effect of pushing the flower ladies into the alleyways, later they were allowed to set up shop in the plaza that's now the Bank of America building, it was North Carolina National Bank then.
  [5:26] Over a period of time what that meant was the flower ladies disappeared as well. So the result was that by the mid to late 70s there were no sales of anything on Franklin Street, on the sidewalks, including the flower ladies.
  Interviewer: [5:43] There's one still that occasionally is out there. Do you know if she is one of the originals?
  Steve: [5:49] Could be one of the originals. I would interview her. There used to be a number of women; I'm not kidding, there was as many as a dozen at one point.
  Interviewer: [5:56] I saw a picture of them standing out; I went to the Franklin Street exhibit at Chapel Hill.
  Steve: [6:02] Oh, yeah!
  Interviewer: [6:04] They had one picture, and that was the first that I had ever known that there was ever more than one. What did the leather man look like?
  Steve: [6:11] What does he look like? He's still around; I think he actually runs a little kiosk down at University Mall.
  Interviewer: [6:18] Really?
  Steve: [6:19] He was a guy who had, I remember he had young children, and he had a disability. He had crutches; he always had a brace that he used to walk with. I think he's still around. He was much younger; he's probably in his '60s now.
  Interviewer: [6:37] OK. Maybe I can go find him.
  Steve: [6:39] Yeah. I think, I don't know his name, but I think that there was a guy who runs a little kiosk down at University Mall who was a guy who at one time sold belts and things on East Franklin, and he was called the leather man.
  Interviewer: [6:51] Now, where did the flower ladies typically set up before they moved?
  Steve: [6:56] Before they moved? The 100 block of East Franklin, on the North side, out in front of what was then Julian's and Sutton's, and if we're going up the street, three or four places.
  Interviewer: [7:15] Now you did your undergraduate here, were you a North Carolina native?
  Steve: [7:22] I grew up in Raleigh.
  Interviewer: [7:23] So not so far away.
  Steve: [7:25] Not so far away.
  Interviewer: [7:26] That's where I did my undergraduate. [laughs] You said you were here during the early 1970s. What would have been a typical night out then, where would you have gone?
  Steve: [7:37] We can talk about that. I can pretty much remember every store that was on East Franklin down to the bars. Campus was a different place, in terms of now as an administrator I shudder to think about this, to think about it on the other side, but liability concerns were not nearly as great. The major function of the Resident's Hall Association was to provide kegs for big parties with bands and open kegs, so people would drink a lot. The legal drinking age was 18, the wink and a nod drinking age was 16. There were places like Clarence's Bar and Grill, and The Shack and others that people would just go to and drink and nobody ever checked ID for anybody.
  [8:23] So the town was more wide open, there was a significant amount of open and prevalent drug use, mostly marijuana but other stuff as well. So, the nature of downtown was kind of bifurcated. On the one hand you had these well established, good, high-quality clothing stores. I mentioned Julian's, still survives in one legacy today. Milton's Clothing covered a place called The Hub. There was a place called Town and Country, and there was a women's dress store called The Little Shop.
  [9:07] So there was a whole series of very upscale clothing stores that catered either to the more preppy crowd, but also to faculty and staff, but also to the more "hip" crowd if you will. Even there, places like Milton's and others, they sold what were considered "hippie clothes", but they weren't bell-bottoms with rags. They were nicer clothes. So they were very nice stores. Juxtaposed with that you had Wentworth and Son, which is still there, Sutton's, which is still there, Carolina Coffee Shop, the legend, and The Rat, which is another whole story.
  [9:49] We can talk about the Danziger legacy if you'd like. Then you had all these other, basically bars. So you had the new establishment, the "New E", which was called Harry's Delicatessen, which is where Four Corners is now. You had The Record Bar; one of their first stores was here. You had a couple of little hole-in-the-wall bars, there was a place called The Endangered Species, which was actually on West Rosemary. There was various versions of the Cat's Cradle, there was He's Not Here, which is still there. They had a big place called Town Hall, which was a place where they had live music every night.
  [10:34] So, there was kind of this odd juxtaposition of peacefully coexisting, nice stores during the day, and bars at night kind of thing. You had a lot of music. I played in a band. You had lots and lots of bands that were just kind of playing all the time, all around town. Any given night on the East Franklin, you'd have four or five places with live music. It was very vibrant, it was where everybody went. It actually drew people in from around the state because people knew Chapel Hill was a fun place to go.
  Interviewer: [11:13] What was the name of your band?
  Steve: [11:15] Oh, God. I played in a couple of bands; I played in a little trio. We had a singer whose first name was Treva, T-R-E-V-A, so it was me and another guy and Treva. Rebecca was her name, we called her Becky, but her stage name was Treva. We used to play at this place; we played at Town Hall, but we also used to play at the old Endangered Species. We would split nights with a guy named Mike Cross who actually became quite a famous performer; he basically "passed the hat". You'd do a one hour set, pass the hat, and then the other person would do a one hour set and pass the hat, then you do another hour and he'd do another hour.
  So you'd do a four hour night, and basically Dale White, who owned the place, the deal was: [11:57] You could pass the hat and you get a free beer. So we were playing on Friday and Saturday nights. [laughs] I've played in a number of other bands; I actually play in a band here now called Equinox which is a Jazz band, with Holden Thorp, Terri Houston and some other folks.
  Interviewer: [12:15] What do you play?
  Steve: [12:16] I play bass. I've had it there for years. Anyway, the point is, there were lots of places to play, lots of music venues. For the musicians, you almost never made any money, but it was OK because you liked to play and you could have a place to play. A good night, you made 10 bucks.
  Interviewer: [12:36] Now, while you were here, did you meet your wife here?
  Steve: [12:40] I met my wife here in Davy Hall in an undergraduate statistics class, a psychology statistics class, in January of 1974.
  Interviewer: [12:49] So the very last year.
  Steve: [12:50] The very last year. Our first date was a Joni Mitchell concert on March 24th, 1974 at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
  Interviewer: [13:00] The dates are very impressive. [laughs]
  Steve: [13:03] I love that girl to death and I remember everything about her. We have our 30th anniversary this year.
  Interviewer: [13:08] Coming up?
  Steve: [13:09] Yep.
  Interviewer: [13:09] Congratulations.
  Steve: [13:10] Thanks.
  Interviewer: [13:12] Where would you have gone for a date on Franklin Street?
  Steve: [13:16] For a date on Franklin? Well, there was a Baskin Robbins ice cream store, you could go there. All these bars, you could go to a band, go hear music. A lot of people did that. There were also; a funny thing about bars, they had their own identity. The fraternity scene was still pretty active then, it is now, but different bars had different personalities. Clarence's and The Shack were where you went if you were in a fraternity or sorority.
  [13:44] The new establishment in Town Hall is where you went if you were more into the counterculture side. Bars had their own identity. We had the movies, we had the Carolina Theater, and we had the Varsity Theater. That spring of my senior year when Julie and I started dating we'd get ice cream; we'd go to the movies on Franklin. We'd go out to dinner, if you had enough money you could go to a place that was kind of nice. You could go to... the Danziger chain was still running, places like the ZuZu, which had Tuesday night all-you-can-eat spaghetti for $1.29. [laughs] That was a good, cheap date. People would do different things, kind of like they do now I assume.
  Interviewer: [14:24] The Danziger place was located?
  Steve: [14:27] Well there were five Danziger restaurants.
  Interviewer: [14:28] OK, at one point.
  Steve: [14:30] Yeah, the Danziger family came here. They were Jewish refugees from the war. They opened a bakery on East Franklin, and it was just called "Danzigers". Danziger's Sweet Shop. They had a sign, a guy like a baker hanging out over there. You've probably seen pictures of this out in East Franklin. Great bakery, you could just go in and get fresh made daily baked goods. They also had the Ratskeller, they had the ZuZu, and they had a place on East Franklin called the Villa Teo, which was very fancy. It's now Whitehall Antiques. So they had those three restaurants, and the bakery, and they also, I think, were involved in running The Ranch House, which was a steakhouse down Martin Luther King Blvd., its no longer there but it was on the edge of town at the time.
  [15:27] So they actually had the major franchise of restaurants. West Franklin was much less developed. You had some restaurants up there, a little Greek place called Leo's at South and Lantern. You had what was then University Chrysler-Plymouth, which is closed now. You had a bus station down there. There were some other stores on West Franklin: a music store called Bergner's, Night Campbell Hardware was a big store up there. But West Franklin wasn't much activity. There was an old dairy bar up there that closed, now is where Penang is, but that was a dairy bar. Obviously you get milkshakes and ice cream and things like that.
  Interviewer: [16:13] Was Sloane's still there? Sloane's at the corner of Spanky's?
  Steve: [16:20] Sloane's Drugstore. Yes. Yes. They later became Mayberry Ice Cream Shop and then became Spanky's. Across the street where Top of the Hill is now was a Texaco gas station. You had a lot more gas stations along the street. You had an Exxon station; you had a Pure station where the Kinko's is now. So, there were five or six gas stations on Franklin Street.
  Interviewer: [16:46] I was going to say where the Kinko's is. And the Caribou.
  Steve: [16:49] Right, the Caribou. It was a gas station.
  Interviewer: [16:51] Well it looks like it was built as one, the way it's laid out.
  Steve: [16:53] It was built as a Pure gas station, it was a commercial franchise architecture. They built these all over the United States in exactly the same way.
  Interviewer: [17:01] And I'm assuming Franklin was still two lanes at the time?
  Steve: [17:05] It had parking for a while that was diagonal, then they changed that. I'm trying to remember when they did that. Then they had parallel parking to widen it. I can't remember them ever widening the street, I think since the time I've been here it's been the same width. They just changed the parking orientation to create four lanes across. If you do angled-in parking it takes out a lane on both sides.
  Interviewer: [17:36] I'm assuming it was a more walk-able kind of area.
  Steve: [17:40] It felt very walk-able, yeah. It was the only place to go, literally. I remember when I was a sophomore here, they opened University Mall. We all just thought Chapel Hill had become the most sophisticated place in the world because there was a mall. It was just this big fancy place, it had a Belk's and an Ivy's and a Rose's, suddenly there was a different place to go shopping.
  Interviewer: [18:04] Were there any memorable nights or?
  Steve: [18:06] Well, here's what I remember. I mentioned playing in a band, we played at the very first Apple Chill, which was 1973, and it was called the Apple Chill Art and Music Fair. We did it right here on McGoracle place. We actually, we didn't close Franklin Street but it was the very first one. They had artists who would set up their displays, and I remember people running clotheslines between the trees and hanging paintings that were for sale and things. So my band played along with, there was a band called John Santa, S-A-N-T-A, and Mike Cross played.
  [18:47] The big headliner was a new band called Arrogance, which was just starting. This was Don Dixon and a number of folks who were students here. Arrogance became a very big band here in North Carolina, kind of a regional favorite. Great band. So that was the first Apple Chill, I remember that. It was a Sunday afternoon and there were probably a grand total of a thousand people there.
  Interviewer: [19:12] When you would play, were you playing original songs or?
  Steve: [19:15] Oh no, we were doing covers. This was a trio. We had this woman who could really imitate Joni Mitchell well so we did Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell and stuff. Later there was some original stuff, but none of it memorable.
  [laughs] Sufficed to say, when I finished undergraduate school of my choice I was playing another band, this woman's band, there were five of us. We had this discussion one night about, you know, what do you do with the band because we ended up going forward.
  [19:44] The point was "Do you go to graduate school?" which is the choice I had, or do you go on the road. I said "OK, lets be realistic guys, I'm going to graduate school. I'd actually like to eat regularly and get groceries." Two members of the band actually went and tried to make it professionally- didn't.
  Interviewer: [20:00] You did grad school here also?
  Steve: [20:02] Yeah.
  Interviewer: [20:03] In what area?
  Steve: [20:05] Public administration, political science and then it went on. My doctorate's actually from Penn, University of Pennsylvania. I actually lived in D.C. for a while, and then came back.
  Interviewer: [20:19] And your wife was here... was she younger or?
  Steve: [20:21] She was my age. She actually was a transfer student here; she had taken a year off to work in Atlanta so she graduated a year later than I did. Then she was in graduate school here as well, in speech pathology. So there was a while when I actually lived in Washington when we were still dating, we got married a year later. I moved up there in '77, and then we got married in '78.
  Interviewer: [20:53] I saw online you have kids who are here now?
  Steve: [21:00] Well, my son James graduated last May. He was student body president here. He is now living and working in England, he is teaching chemistry at Winchester College. My daughter Meredith is a sophomore here.
  Interviewer: [21:14] I want to go back to the Danzingers a little bit and talk about the Rat. I'm looking for people who can talk about some of the places that aren't there anymore, do you know?
  Steve: [21:25] You know it's funny; I went there in high school. We'd come over for ball games and stuff. Everybody has a Chapel Hill story, here's my first Chapel Hill story. I'm five years old. I came over to a football game with my family. My dad, UNC class of '34. We're walking by Old East and he points out, he said "When I was in school here, this is where I lived. And maybe when you come to school here, you can live there too." To which I responded "OK Dad!" I literally applied to one school, which was, in retrospect, pretty stupid because if I didn't get into Carolina I'd be going to Saigon. It was 1970. [laughs]
  [22:11] Turns out I got lucky and got in. So for me its always been "When you go to Carolina." Different for my kids. They had lots of choices and I think every child that grows up in Chapel Hill has a point where, maybe in their junior year in high school, they just resolve firmly. They don't know where they're going to be but it sure as hell isn't going to be in Chapel Hill 'cause they're sick of living in the place. Turns out they both had a great time here and love it.
  [22:39] So, the Rat. I went there for the first time with my dad, probably in the mid '60s. We came over for a game, we used to go to baseball games with him to. It was a lot of fun. Everybody would go there, it was very popular. It's actually a funny thing, they had some pretty good things to eat. They had a rare roast beef sandwich that was kind of famous, I think it was $1.10, which was a lot of money at the time. This was a time when you could get a hamburger for 20 cents.
  [23:06] So it was kind of exotic and cool and had all these different rooms. I remember going on dates in the Rat now and then, you'd go and you'd get lasagna or they had this thing called a Gambler's Special. Has anyone talked to you about the menu?
  Interviewer: [23:23] I've been over here maybe four years. I've been in there while it was still open but I knew it was always kind of presented to me under the guise of "Oh, it used to be so much better."
  Steve: [23:35] Oh, of course. Of course.
  Interviewer: [23:37] They still had the Gambler and like the pot of lasagna.
  Steve: [23:40] Right, the pot lasagna. Then you'd have the rare roast beef sandwich. There were three or four things they were known for. Pizza, they had pretty good pizza. People would just go, and it was just, maybe it was because there were multiple rooms and it just seemed kind of exotic, maybe it was 'cause the wait staff was unchanged. There was this group of guys, I believe all of them African American, every one of them had been there a long time. They weren't obsequious; they weren't trying to make you feel like it was really special.
  [24:21] They just came up to you and said "What do you want?" and you'd tell them and they'd go get it and they'd bring it back. They were very efficient, very fast, but they weren't fawning all over you and everything. They were very good. They were kind of characters, and that also gave it a bit of a charm.
  Interviewer: [24:45] And then... I'm trying to think going through. The Zoom Zoom, where was it located?
  Steve: [24:49] The Zoom Zoom was on West Franklin, right on the corner where there's a Cordova or whatever Mexican restaurant there now. That's the old-
  Interviewer: [25:00] Right intersection.
  Steve: [25:01] Yeah. The Zoom was there on that corner.
  Interviewer: [25:04] What did it serve?
  Steve: [25:06] A lot of the same stuff that the Rat did. Spaghetti, pizza, you know. Same kind of stuff.
  Interviewer: [25:13] So the charm was?
  Steve: [25:14] Cheap. Tuesday night, all you can eat spaghetti, $1.29.
  Interviewer: [25:18] And that was at the Zoom Zoom?
  Steve: [25:20] At the Zoom Zoom, not at the Rat. You'd get salad and you'd get bread and you'd get literally as many plates of spaghetti as you could handle. When you're 19 years old and you're living in a dorm, the idea that you can go and stuff yourself on Tuesday night for $1.29, and of course you could drink beer as well, it was great. [laughter]
  Interviewer: [25:42] Now if you walked in, what did it look like? Since this is audio I'm getting people to describe things.
  Steve: [25:47] The Zoom? Two rooms. You'd come in, not on the corner. You'd actually walk past the corner a little bit and turn in to the right. Big room. On the walls, paintings of scenes from Greece. The Acropolis, different scenes of hills and things, that was in the front room. And then there was a second room in the back, a little smaller but basically the same layout. A little darker. Two rooms, front and back, and then a kitchen in the back. They actually opened a bar downstairs called Bacchus, that you could enter off of an alleyway off of Columbia Street between the insurance building and what's now that Japanese restaurant.
  [26:40] That was downstairs, and that was just a bar, although you could get pizza and stuff there as well. That was linked to the Zoom by a set of stairs but you had to come in by a separate way. Danzigers owned that for a while too, I think. That was called Bacchus, B-A-C-C-H-U-S.
  Interviewer: [27:00] Like the god?
  Steve: [27:02] Like the god of wine, yeah. Like Bacchanalia. That was in the early '70s as well. So anyway, the Zoom was basically just two rooms, and the setting of tables. Nothing particularly fancy, but nice. Nice enough.
  Interviewer: [27:19] Would you say most of these places, the crowd was mostly college students?
  Steve: [27:22] Oh yeah. Hugely college students. Some graduate students, but you wouldn't see families there. If you'd go to The Zoom or to The College Cafe which was a cheap cafeteria on East Franklin or any of these places to eat at night, you have to remember that we didn't have, in the early 70s, we didn't have a dining hall on campus. We had the cafeteria worker's strike, and the dining hall shut down. The North Hall was the art department.
  [27:48] So there was a little place called The Pine Room in the basement of the North Hall, it was just awful. Crappy food, nobody wanted to eat there, and they had a little hamburger stand in the Student Union. But there was no place to eat on campus. I mean, there was Chase Cafeteria on south campus, but I wasn't going to go down there. So everybody went to Franklin Street every night for dinner, so it was just nothing but students. But its interesting, to look back on it now, where were the families eating? Where were the families, I guess they all went home or they called takeout.
  Interviewer: [28:19] One of the things, as I've been talking to people, that I didn't know; I guess this would have been a little bit earlier, so more to speak of Granite Lap, but there was such a division between Carrboro and Franklin Street. One because the street stopped at some point, but two, Carrboro was kind of where your worker families lived.
  Steve: [28:38] Yeah, it was a mill town. Students didn't live in Carrboro, and University faculty didn't live there. It was just an adjoining mill town, and it felt very different. Carrboro became kind of a hip place to be in the 80s I think.
  Interviewer: [28:53] Well 'cause talking to them, it seemed like, and this would have been back in the 50s, that there was even, I don't want to say class-based, but there was an elitist kind of vibe here compared to that because this is where the faculty was.
  Steve: [29:07] Here's a story attributed to Henry Louis, who was Director of the Institute of Government from 1973 to 1978. Henry was a bachelor, and he used to eat on East Franklin Street for breakfast every morning at a place called the College Cafe. A friend of mine, Joe Farrell, tells the story that when the College Cafe decided in the early in the early 80s to move from, maybe it was late 70s, from East Franklin Street to what became Carrboro Mall. Where Elmo's is now, that was originally the College Cafe over there.
  [29:47] Someone turned to Henry and said "Well, I suppose you'll just have to follow there, start going there for breakfast." Henry Louis turned with disdain and said "I choose not to dine in Carrboro." That tells you what you need to know about the difference.
  Interviewer: [30:05] [laughs] Yeah, no, I would think so. Its so funny now just because it never even dawned on me that they would be considered these two seperate entities because its just not how I've experienced them.
  Steve: [30:16] Yeah, well, I think there's no difference now. If anything, Carrboro is more hip than Chapel Hill. Where's Weaver Street Market? It ain't Chapel Hill. The music scene is in Carrboro.
  Interviewer: [30:28] The cradle moved and-
  Steve: [30:29] The cradle moved. Weaver Street Market, you know, some great funky restaraunts, its just a great place to be.
  Interviewer: [30:36] When did you finish your graduate degree?
  Steve: [30:39] '76.
  Interviewer: [30:40] And then you left after that?
  Steve: [30:43] Yeah, and then came back.
  Interviewer: [30:45] When did you come back?
  Steve: [30:49] 1986.
  Interviewer: [30:51] When you got here, were things markedly different? Were there changes that, what struck you when you came back?
  Steve: [30:58] What struck me when I came back? Mid 80s versus mid 70s, anybody would say the same thing: growth, the breaking down of barriers between the triangle towns, the merging of identities. The fact that people referred to living in "The Triangle", whereas when I was growing up there were huge differences among Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham. People wouldn't say they were from "The Triangle", they would say they were from Raleigh.
  [31:25] So those two things; Franklin Street still seemed pretty vibrant when we came back. The Intimate Bookshop was still there, institution in and of itself. Still good stores, University Mall was doing well but Franklin Street was still a place people came to. My wife would bring our young children down to Franklin Street and they would ride the trolley. It still seemed like a vibrant place. It doesn't now.
  Interviewer: [31:58] Where was the trolley?
  Steve: [31:59] There were a couple of little... they were green buses, but they were made to look like they were San Francisco streetcars, cable cars. They were just regular rubber tired buses but they were open on the sides and you could ride them, it cost a dime. They just did a little loop around downtown and the idea was to easily move folks around the downtown area from one store to another. They were fun. There were two of them.
  Interviewer: [32:31] So you didn't have to carry your packages?
  Steve: [32:33] Yeah, and frankly, when my kids were young it was something fun to do; they just loved to get on the trolley and ride the trolley.
  Interviewer: [32:39] Now you mentioned the Intimate Bookshop.
  Steve: [32:42] Yeah, the intimate bookshop. Charles Kuralt- no, not Charles Kuralt.
  Interviewer: [32:44] His brother.
  Steve: [32:47] Wallace.
  Interviewer: [32:48] Right. That was another sort of institution I'm also trying to find stories about.
  Steve: [32:52] Yeah, great place. It was a couple stories, and you could buy your books there, in addition to student stores. They were a regular supplier of textbooks, but also they had lots of just other kinds of books. It was just a great, family-owned place that had wooden floors. The stairs creaked when you go up the stairs. It just had a great atmosphere; it had a great feel to it. The Intimate was at one point kind of a mini franchise, there were a number of branch offices in it, both in Chapel Hill, there was one down in the old East Gate Shopping Center, and there were some in other parts of the state.
  [33:33] I think at one point there may have been 11 Intimate Bookstores around North Carolina. But, the market changes. You go to Borders and Amazon and the market changes and it's really hard for an independent bookstore to stay in business. There was a fire, the Intimate Bookstore burned, and I don't think they ever fully recovered from that.
  Interviewer: [33:53] There was one, was it arson?
  Steve: [33:57] Yes, it was arson. It burned, and they did re-open the Intimate for a while, but it never really flourished again.
  Interviewer: [34:05] It's in the spot where the Tar Hill bookshop is now. Where they rebuilt the, I guess they redid the facade.
  Steve: [34:12] The facade is kind of glass and open now. Yeah.
  Interviewer: [34:16] They have a lot of speakers; did you ever go see anyone talk there?
  Steve: [34:20] Authors would do book readings and stuff. Not very often, I have to admit I wasn't as intellectual as I should be. I was more likely to be in a bar. God, that's a terrible thing to say.
  Interviewer: [34:31] Well, no, were there any bands that came through that you saw on Franklin Street?
  Steve: [34:37] I saw some great bands here, but they were not on Franklin so much as they were here at Carolina. We used to have a three day Spring celebration called Jubilee. Has anyone talked about Jubilee?
  Interviewer: [34:48] No.
  Steve: [34:49] Jubilee, 1966 to 1971, until the athletic department shut it down, there was a three day weekend where there was a group that would organize this. It was for Carolina students, you had to buy a ticket, I think it was ten bucks for three days. They had bands, they did sometimes in Kenan Stadium, they did it once on Polk Place, and they did it on Navy Field over by the law school. I went to Jubilee in 1970 and 71, '71 was the last one.
  [35:21] Here are the bands from 1970: James Taylor, Joe Cocker, Grand Funk Railroad, and a bunch of others. 1971: Chuck Barris, the Allman Brothers, Tom Rush, God, I can't remember. So, that was a lot of fun. Then Duke had something called Joe College, they were different weekends. So there were two weekends every spring that were great band weekends, in each case you'd bring in famous bands and have a good time. I saw the Grateful Dead at Joe College, it was a great time. That stopped, again, concerns about liability and tearing up the place and all that.
  [36:07] The best bands I saw were not on Franklin Street, they were actually on campus. We used to have music in Carmichael. Carmichael's a terrible place for bands, bad acoustics, but we saw Chicago, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Stephen Stills was there. Judy Collins, I saw Jackson Browne there once. He was just starting out. Then we had later bands in Memorial Hall, before, now of course we have the whole great performing arts series. The best band I saw in Memorial Hall was Chick Corea and Return to Forever; fabulous band. Herbie Hancock was there once.