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Touch
of Gray - February / March 2005
Erwin
and Betty Danziger
Mac
Secrest
Erwin
and Betty Danziger
When Erwin and Betty Danziger moved into
their villa at Carolina Meadows in November 2003, they were
completing an odyssey that began for Erwin 75 years earlier
with his birth in Vienna, led him and his family in a flight
from Nazi oppression to distant Chapel Hill and a globe-girdling
career at the cutting edge of computer science.
The
Danziger family’s earlier story is recorded with humor
and insight in an autobiography by Erwin’s father, Edward,
Papa D: A Saga of Love and Cooking (John Blair, Winston Salem,
1967). A native of Vienna, Edward was wounded in World War
I while fighting in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Back home in Vienna, he started a successful Viennese coffee
house and candy story and a business manufacturing candy and
candied fruit.
In
the 1930s, Austria was swept into the orbit of Nazi Germany.
While the Danzigers were members of a Lutheran congregation,
the Nazis discovered that Edward’s grandmother had been
Jewish, and this defined her descendants as Jewish. He was
forced to resign from his professional associations and abandon
his businesses. As he wrote: “I now realized that the
days of justice and civil rights were definitely over and
that all that was left to me was to protect my wife and children
as best I could and see to my own safety.”
A
Quaker organization agreed to transfer young Erwin, then aged
nine, to another country—no one could say which one.
A few weeks later the family in Vienna received a postcard
from Erwin reporting he was living with a farm family in a
tiny village in Sweden. The following summer, in 1939, Erwin’s
older brother, Ted, joined him in Sweden.
Back
in Vienna, father Edward, through the good offices of Quakers,
received an offer from an American professor to sponsor Edward
as an immigrant to the United States. With further help from
the Quakers, Edward made his way to Chapel Hill, where with
a few hundred dollars of borrowed capital, he opened the town’s
first Viennese coffee house.
In
the summer of 1939, Erwin’s mother, Emily, walked out
of her Vienna house leaving behind all her possessions except
a few pieces of jewelry and a small amount of money to join
her sons in Sweden. Mother and sons were unable to book passage
on the same ship, but in separate ships the Danzigers made
their way to New York and on to Chapel Hill. As they traveled,
Germany invaded Poland and World War II was on.
All
the members of the Danziger family pitched in to help in the
coffee house - later a restaurant - even young Erwin, who
washed dishes and swept out the store after closing. As the
business prospered, the Danzigers dug out a space beneath
their restaurant and opened the Rathskeller, a Viennese style
beer cellar. In the years to follow, they added a steak house
known as The Ranch House; Zoom Zoom, a pizza outlet; and Villa
Theo for European food.
Erwin
attended UNC for two years, then won a scholarship from the
U.S. Military Government in Germany to attend Heidelberg University
in the summer of 1948. Afterward, because of the developing
Berlin crisis, rather than return home, he enlisted in the
US Army in Germany, and was assigned to personnel work, using
an earlier version of IBM punched cards to assign soldiers
to specialties for which they appeared to be qualified. With
his fluent German, he doubled as a translator for his commanding
officer. Finally home again, he returned to UNC for an undergraduate
degree and an MBA.
With
his business degree in hand and no fondness for the family
restaurant business, Erwin recalls, “I wanted to get
away from Chapel Hill. I took a globe and measured and saw
what was farthest away from Chapel Hill and it turned out
to be the Indian Ocean.” He was granted a Fulbright scholarship
to the University of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to learn all about
the tea industry. The foreign education and further exploration
in India and Indonesia were interesting, but opened up no
job opportunities in the tea business.
Home
in the US again, Erwin scattered job applications among many
corporations, until a personnel officer at Chrysler spotted
reference to his Army training in personnel and data management,
and hired him. Erwin recalls: “They were looking like
crazy for people who had any knowledge of punched cards or
data processing. The computer revolution was just beginning
and people were trying to move from punched cards to the earliest
computers.” One of the computers he worked with, the
Bizmac, based on vacuum tubes, was big as a living room and
was serviced by attendants on roller skates to move the heavy
metal tapes it required. He learned to program the new computers,
including the IBM 650, and was increasingly excited about
the revolutionary new technology. “It was a whole new
world, but it was logical and somehow things that seemed rational
and logical have always appealed to me.”
In
1956, he married his college girlfriend, Betty Heath. The
young couple moved to Midland, Michigan, and Erwin’s
new job with Dow Chemical programming the IBM 704.
Eventually
he was offered a job with RCA to open a new sales office and
computer-training center in Stockholm. “We sold to banks,
primarily, and to large cooperative associations,” Erwin
recalls.
After
Stockholm, Erwin was assigned by RCA as Systems Manager into
its sales office in Atlanta, serving 13 southern states. From
Atlanta, Erwin made contact with officials at the University
of North Carolina, where Dr. Fred Brooks was creating a computer
center to train students and to do research in computer science.
Erwin proposed that UNC’s punched cards operation be
converted to a computer. One of the strong supporters of the
proposal was Victor Bowles, then a financial officer in the
University, now a Carolina Meadows resident. To the delight
of Betty, who was happy to return to Chapel Hill, Erwin took
on the job of doing the conversion to a computer.
In
the turbulent 1960s, word reached Erwin one night that students
protesting the Vietnam War were headed for the administrative
computer center to burn it down. Some of Erwin’s operators
were young enough to pass for students, so they joined the
mob and directed it toward another building. A cloudburst
arrived in time to discourage the protesters from their dangerous
plan. On another occasion vandals poured gasoline and oil
on the floor of the administrative computer center, prepared
a fuse consisting of twisted toilet paper and set the paper
afire. The toilet paper proved to be of too poor quality to
burn, and the center was saved.
In
1990, Erwin retired from the University and concluded with
Betty that “we wouldn’t want to be anywhere but
Chapel Hill.” Retirement gave Erwin more time for stamp
collecting, a hobby he has cultivated since boyhood. “Stamps
allowed me to roam all over the world,” he recalls, “teaching
me geography and history. In the Army in Germany, I found
myself with rationed cigarettes that I didn’t smoke,
and Hershey bars that I didn’t eat and I traded them
for stamps.”
Years
later, in Chapel Hill, he says, “I joined the Triangle
Stamp Club thinking that I could sell my stamps. But after
attending two or three meetings of the Stamp Club, I was buying
stuff, not selling it.” He often serves as an advisor
to other collectors. To this day, his collection fills shelves
in his Carolina Meadows villa, where Erwin and Betty have
settled down at last, among familiar scenes, old friends,
and many reminders of their eventful lives. -- Bob Parker
The writer gratefully acknowledges the use
of some background and quotes from an interview with Erwin
Danziger by Beth Millwood, for the Southern Oral History Project
sponsored by UNC.
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Mac
Secrest
For eighteen years every month, Carolina
Meadows residents have welcomed writers to its popular "Meet
the Author" program. Authors who have come here have
included such notables as Lee Smith, William Leuchtenburg,
Wallace Kuralt, Doris Betts and Terry Sanford. We have had
a good share of in-house authors too. Within the past year,
for instance, we heard from two Carolina Meadows residents,
Sam Baron and Ralph Kirshner, historians of note, one an expert
on Soviet Russia, and the other on generals in the American
Civil War.
More
recently we have heard from a third notable resident, Andrew
(better known as Mac) Secrest. He recently published his fascinating
554 page memoir, "Curses and Blessings" (www.amsecrest.com)
and told us all about it at a recent Meet the Author session.
Mac
subtitled the book "Life and Evolution in the 20th Century
South", and indeed it does tell a remarkable tale of
the transformation of the old segregated South to the modern,
industrialized and racially transformed South we know today.
Few
are better equipped to tell that remarkable story than Mac
Secrest, editor and publisher of South Carolina’s weekly
Cheraw Chronicle from 1953 to 1968. His was often a lonely
voice of moderation in those troubled years when passions
ran so high.
Mac
is a native son of North Carolina, born in 1923 in Monroe
in Union County where his father and uncle owned and operated
a very successful pharmacy and other enterprises. After graduating
from Monroe High School, he entered Duke University at the
age of sixteen. Actually he was familiar with Duke from three
years earlier when he spent weekends on campus with his Aunt,
Mary Covington, who was the head librarian at the Law School.
Mac recalls that he bunked at night with one or other of the
law school boys in their cabins in Duke Forest. "One
young fellow was a dark-haired reserved sober-sided student
from Whittier, California, Richard Milhaus Nixon," Mac
recalls. "He spent most of his time in the Library so
I didn’t see him much," Mac remembers."
Occasionally
he would come home early and engage me in casual conversation.
I saw nothing in the Nixon of 1937 that suggested the President
of Watergate shame in 1974", Secrest noted. Secrest received
his AB degree from Duke in 1943 and joined the Navy. He was
commissioned as an Ensign at Harvard University just short
of his twenty-first birthday. He saw service in both Atlantic
and Pacific theaters over the next three years, largely on
destroyer escort duty.
After
demobilization he held a variety of jobs over the next few
years. One of these was as the manager of a restaurant in
Saranac Lake, NY, where he met Ann, his future wife. Not wishing
to go into the family business, he enrolled in the Master’s
program in History at UNC Chapel Hill in 1949. Mac recalls
that housing was tight in Chapel Hill in those days. Victory
Village was full and Mac and his wife Ann finally found a
room to rent on Airport Road. When Alex Muirhead developed
Chapel Hill’s first apartment complex, Glen Lennox, on
Route 54 the Secrest family was the second one to move in.
A
year later Mac decided to switch from history to journalism.
His ambition was to become editor of a small town newspaper.
Late in 1950 he began his apprenticeship in journalism by
working for a year at the Laurinburg Exchange, followed by
a year at the Charlotte News, and a final year with the Westwood
News in New Jersey. He spent much of his time on the road
looking for a newspaper property to buy.
He
found what he wanted in the Chronicle, a weekly paper in Cheraw,
South Carolina, only 48 miles from Monroe. The old historic
antebellum town had fallen on hard times during the Civil
War and Reconstruction. The Chronicle, under Secrest’s
guidance became noted for its local news coverage as well
its progressive stance on race relations.
During
Mac’s fifteen years at the helm, that stance won the
paper national attention.
At a time when South Carolina was strictly segregated, The
Chronicle was the only newspaper – weekly or daily –
that spoke up for equality for all of the State’s citizens.
As Mac recalls it, "The Chronicle managed to deal honestly
with race and local issues at home and abroad, combining information
and civil discourse in the newspaper with participation on
human relations boards, civil rights committees and interracial
councils."
In
1963 Secrest was named the National Education Association’s
Editor of the Year. Secrest spent fifteen years at the paper,
taking time out one year when he was named a Nieman Fellow
at Harvard University for the 1960-1961 class. The Nieman
program is the oldest mid-career fellowship for journalists
in the world. Since 1938 more than one thousand US and international
journalists have studied at Harvard in this prestigious program.
Following
President Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson
set up the Federal Community Relations Service, charged with
the responsibility of settling racial disputes and disagreements
all over the country. The idea was to offer mediation and
seek compliance with civil rights laws and so avoid lengthy
and aggravating litigation and get the problem off the streets
and out of
the courts. Secrest took another leave of absence from The
Chronicle (1964-1966) to serve served in the agency and was
involved in many Civil Rights confrontations, negotiating
settlements and seeking conciliation in compliance with the
Civil Rights Act of 1954 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965
and 1966.
Calvin
Kytle, then acting director of the Community Relations Service
and now also a resident of Carolina Meadows, decided to send
Secrest to Selma, Alabama, early in 1965 in anticipation of
racial conflicts expected to surface there. Mac was a prime
player in negotiating a peaceful end to the classic confrontation
between Sheriff Clark and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
on the march to Montgomery two months later. Mac describes
these historic events in detail in his memoir.
Mac
sold the Chronicle in 1968 and decided to make a major career
change and come back to the groves of academia. He returned
to Duke as a graduate student in the History Department, the
same year his two sons were enrolled in the undergraduate
school. He earned his Master’s degree in 1970 and his
doctorate in 1972. He served as Professor of Journalism in
UNC/CH from 1971 to 1976.
In
1975 Mac was asked to accept an appointment at NC Central
University in Durham to set up a journalism curriculum. "I
somehow felt that I could make a useful contribution at a
predominantly black university now under a mandate to become
more racially diversified." Mac recalls. "My professional
experience from 1951 to 1968 and my personal involvement with
civil rights had, I believed, prepared me for the job."
After
nine years at NCCU, Mac retired. After several years in Carrboro,
the Secrets moved to Carolina Meadows in 1997. Nowadays Mac
likes to read, write and travel, spending summers in the mountains
and at the beach. Mac has also lately cultivated a neglected
interest in classical music. Always an animal lover, Mac likes
to walk his most recent boxer, Camilla Parker-Bowles, at Polk
Place in UNC. "I often hold impromptu seminars with students
from whom I learn more than I teach," he declared. Mac
was called out of retirement in 2000 to teach classes for
an ailing Jim Shumaker, an old friend and former colleague,
who died later that year. "But it was a one-time revival,"
he notes, "not to last at my age then of seventy-seven
years." -- Des Reilly, Resident
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