[bright music] [lilting music] - [Faye] We didn't have a car.

We went everywhere by boat, even when I was in high school.

- [Jack] The cook is, he's ringing the bell four o'clock in the morning or three o'clock in the morning to get you ready to get up and eat because as soon as day break, you're out trying to catch fish.

- [Billie] Even being a block away from the water, my father could be on our sofa at our house or on our porch, and tell you which boat it was from the sound.

- [Ann] Call the grocery store and say, "I need a loaf of bread and a pound of butter.

Can you bring it to me?"

and so they'd put it in a bag and get the boy on his bicycle and he'd pellet right down to your house.

- [Carolyn] Two blocks down, the big flags would be flying and they could be red or they could be different colors.

But if it was red with a huge black dot in the middle, that meant get ready, it's gonna be a big one.

- [Curtis] Cedar Street used to be the main business for the African Americans and Pine.

- [Andrew] Even if you weren't in the town, you were raised nearby.

Everybody knew your daddy, they knew your granddaddy, they knew your mama so you're kin one way or the other.

[lilting music continues] [lilting music fades] - [Narrator] Menhaden fish are not particularly good for eating.

In fact, the Native Americans used the entire fish for fertilizing their corn and other crops.

The fish are oily and not very large.

But when a seed is planted with a menhaden fish, it's given a boost of nutrients and a headstart in growth.

Eventually, colonists in the northeast begin to use this method and the industry was born.

- The menhaden industry actually was discovered by Yankee troops when they were here towards the tail end of the Civil War.

And they went back, a lot of 'em from New Jersey, which was big.

The menhaden industry was very big in New Jersey.

But the big operator was J. Harvey Smith from New Jersey and Long Island.

And his father had been in it a number of years and they were very well off and sent their son down here to open the plant.

- [Narrator] The industry continued to grow and years later, in the early 1900s, there were a number of factories in Beaufort.

Menhaden fishing had become a way of life in this community and many remember the impact it had on their world.

- The prosperity that the menhaden industry brought to Beaufort, when they did, all these fishermen had all this money, and they would come and on Saturday nights, like Ward worked in a men's store, and they would come in and buy coats and ties and suits and the groceries, just the economy, it really helped it.

And Daddy was friends with a couple of captains that would always come to the house, and one of them always brought us popcorn.

I remember that.

And we called him Buckhorn.

- You know, Beaufort was just really different then.

I mean, if you lived in Beaufort, you did something associated with the menhaden fishing.

Even after I came back to Beaufort and was in heating and air conditioning, we did a lot of the heating and air or mainly heating on the menhaden boats, the fleets.

Our office was right beside the Gulf Station, which now is Fins.

So that's where the fleet would come in every year though.

So Beaufort changed in the fall, Beaufort got really busy in the fall.

In the summer and winter it wasn't like that, but everybody depended on menhaden fishing.

- And they would come in with menhaden all over the decks.

All shiny, loaded down and blowing the horn to show off how much they had and to let the factory know they were on their way down.

And they had trailing lines in the water.

We grabbed the lines and let them pull us.

I thought, "The Lord knows why we weren't chopped to pieces by the propeller," I don't know.

- The boat would be almost sunk.

They would have batter boards up holding all the fish.

And they would just come in, just almost sunk to the bottom.

- I remember that and it was a lot of hustle and bustle.

The motors were running all the time, there was music, there was a lot of talking, a lot of singing.

They'd come in at night and that's when they would rest and it was a lot of activity.

- Number one thing you remember about a shad factory is the smell.

It was very, very bad.

- I was in the choir at St. Paul's for a while, and we would sit on the front steps waiting for choir practice and somebody would say, "Ooh!

Ooh, what a stink!

Woo, that's terrible!"

And somebody else said, who was a native here, said, "Don't even think about it.

That's money."

- People did look forward to the mullet harvest in the fall because they got those mullets and what they did was break those mullets in half and you found this wonderful sack of eggs.

It's called fish roe.

And people loved fish roe, but you have to be a mature fisherman to eat fish roe because they sometimes are a little strong.

And my daddy used these fish roe pieces to lay out on a board in the sunshine.

And that would dry these eggs up into the sacks.

And then he'd use it like jerky and things.

You had to be a very mature fisherman to try to eat some of that stuff.

But anyway, a fresh mullet roe is fishy tasting and he put that in there with a bunch of eggs, then you got a real good meal.

- Some good friends and I would go down in the fall and break roe every night.

And like I said, we didn't take our clothes home, we would come up to a house down there that was on the end of Ann Street, and we would change clothes down by the bushes and hang our clothes on the back line.

And that next night, put those same clothes back on.

Boy, that was tough if they were damp and they would almost stand up by themselves, it would stink so bad.

- We worked on loading those fish boats.

The fish boats would come in here right after Thanksgiving and stay till Christmas.

That was big money for this town.

Big money for this town.

And we'd load those fish boats on Saturday nights and they'd tie up maybe five or six side by side out in The Cut, and we'd have to haul those groceries across one over the other and over the other.

But that was big business.

That was big business and there was a lot of competition between the grocery stores down there for that.

- Menhaden boats would be there tied up at the docks on Front Street, sometimes three and four deep, their boats tied up against each other.

But as kids, you made the journey into manhood by going up in that crow's nest outside the outmost boat, going up in that crow's nest and diving from the crow's nest overboard.

I am not yet a man because I would not dive out of that crow's nest.

Now I jumped out of 'em, but I would not dive out of the crow's nest.

So I never did reach manhood.

- [Narrator] Once the catch was brought into port, the fishermen had just enough time to refuel and rest before going back out to sea.

Days and nights drifted into weeks and months and the menhaden fleets made good while the fishing was plentiful.

- Back in the day, the cookers, he's ringing the bell four o'clock in the morning or three o'clock in the morning to get you ready to get up and eat because as soon as day break, you out trying to catch fish.

- The school of fish is showing color and sometimes it's real red and sometimes it's real dark.

But most of the menhaden fish show a bright color.

- [Narrator] The elements took their toll on the men.

Long hours pulling in nets left fingers curled and the skin cracked and sore.

Nets broke, weather was unpredictable, and pay was not guaranteed unless the boat was full of fish.

- You could tell a fisherman just by the way they were bent and crooked a little bit because that weather out there, along with the currents, took away a lot of these men's abilities.

And it took 'em very young too as well.

That's why we have to honor them.

- Now they have a guarantee, you know, every two weeks they give you a certain amount of money where you catch fish or not.

But in the forties, you go out, you work hard, your finger bust down to the bone till you had to hold your hand like that.

You can't put 'em in your pocket a lot of times.

You had to take salt, pickle the net with 'em while they busted.

- You don't know what's in the net.

Whole school of red fish.

You can't bail them, so you have to dump those fish.

Well, then you look off, you cannot see the wind, but you see the waves where the wind is pushing the water.

And before you can get that net down, seas are jumping almost as tall as the big boat.

Jumping up, jumping up.

And then you have to, what made it so bad, you have to try to get those small boats up on the big boat.

So I've experienced some things.

- We go out there, bust the net, get a load of fish, the net bust, all the fish is gone.

You gotta spend all night and day fixing the net, come back in, change your net, you ain't caught no fish.

The whole week is gone, you ain't got no money.

Now you think about home.

Now you think about singing this song, Lord in my way do seem so hard.

They are hard.

They was hard during those times.

I'm a witness of that.

- [Narrator] Side by side each man pulled his weight, often forming bonds of respect that crossed racial lines.

To help pass the long hours on the water, work through the pain, and to keep in sync when pulling the nets, many of the fishermen sang or chanted.

They were called chanting men.

♪ Swing low, sweet chariot ♪ ♪ Coming for to carry me home ♪ ♪ Swing low, sweet chariot ♪ ♪ Coming for to carry me home ♪ - [Narrator] Despite the difficulties of the profession, menhaden fishermen found peace in their natural surroundings and the rhythms of their work.

- It's just like on land.

You see a beautiful sunset or something, you're out there and you see the sun just settling down over the water.

Most beautiful sight you wanna see.

Then you're out there, you catch a load of fish.

And it's real deep water, the water is clear.

And the scales off the fish, they're dropping down on the side of the boat, it looks like jewels on the side of the boat.

It was such a beautiful sight.

I mean, that's something that you would never forget as long as you live.

And the thing too you said about being dangerous and you never forget that either.

- [Narrator] Like a seed to a tree, a city doesn't happen overnight.

There is some reason for the growth, whether it be a transportation network, fertile location for food, or in the case of Beaufort, growth of an industry such as menhaden fishing.

Through the years, this city has changed greatly in scale.

Downtown saw great prosperity with the menhaden industry, a slow decline as the fishing diminished, and then a rebirth as a tourist attraction and port for pleasure boats.

But many still remember downtown's glory days of their youth and the adventure of a trip downtown.

- Downtown.

Downtown was the most fabulous place that I've ever been, that I ever recall.

It was crowded like it is now, but it wasn't crowded with tourists, it was crowded with the people of Beaufort and the surrounding areas, the surrounding county.

It was the commercial district of this entire area.

All the people from Down East came and shopped in Beaufort.

- Pine Street and Cedar Street was actually the two Black main business streets in Beaufort, a lot of different businesses.

We had Mr. William and Jack Van Barbershop.

We had Ms. Carrie Beauty Shop, we had Ms. Carrie Johnson store.

She sold candy and cookies and Mr. J.C. Stanley also, when we was in kindergarten, they also would send us to his store and we'd get little a gingerbread called Rock 'n Roll and pickles and cookies and candy and we used to go again to his store.

There was another gentleman named Mr. George Stanley.

His store there on Cedar Street.

And we was kind of scared to go in his store.

He had long, long fingernails and it was kind of like he was haunted and very few people wanted to go in the store 'cause they was afraid of him.

[bright music] - My mother made sandwiches for daddy's drugstore.

Homemade pimento cheese, homemade chicken salad, homemade egg salad, and sliced boiled hams.

And she also fried peanuts.

We would get peanuts from Virginia, we would soak them in hot water till we got the skins off them and then she would fry them.

And the secret to little blisters on peanuts is to be sure they're wet when you put them in.

Shh, don't tell anybody.

- Saturday afternoon, the big deal would be that we would all get cleaned up and come to town and go have what we called a drugstore dinner, chicken salad sandwich and a milkshake or Coke or something and then go to the movies.

The movie theater was called The Sea Breeze and it used to be right where the Maritime Museum is now.

- Mother shopped at C. D. Jones Grocery on Front Street, which was one of several grocery stores and I can remember going in with her.

There was a clerk who took your order.

It was not a supermarket store, and then filled your order.

You didn't choose your things off the shelf.

- Then I remember there was Mr. Rumbly's feed store and he had all kinds of things in there, but the best thing he had was little biddies for Easter.

And they were all different colors, little chickens.

And you could pick out the color little chickens, everybody had their little chickens to take home for Easter.

I don't remember what happened to 'em though, but we always had to get our little, and I call them biddies.

- They delivered groceries in, they took your order, they got the order together.

So the bicycles would come in and they would do Jones until they closed, delivered on bicycles.

And that's how the boys you dated would make enough money to buy you a Coke every now and then, you know.

- One thing I'd like to mention to you.

The first day I went to work down at Paul Jones', I'd been working there a couple of hours and somebody came up and said, "Gentlemen, go over there."

Ikey Moore had the store right next to us and said, "Go over and ask Ikey if we can borrow his box stretcher."

So I went over there, I said, "Mr. Moore," I said, "Mr. Moore wants to know if we could borrow your box stretcher."

[laughs] "Oh, you go back and you tell him that we will certainly lend him our box stretcher if he'll let us use his sky hooks."

[laughs] So back over to Mr. Paul and they were all standing around laughing.

I think every new person had to go through that initiation.

- You were set up.

- Yeah, set up.

- Mr. Henderson, they called him Man Escadia and Miss Lucy Gray, they had a hotel right here on Cedar Street and on the bottom they had a grill.

And that was a very popular store.

They had pool tables and people would go to play pool tables along with Ms. Carey Smith on the corner of Pollard and Pine.

- But Clyde Owens store was the original convenience store.

If it was daylight, Clyde Owens was open.

They opened Christmas Day, they never closed.

And that's where everybody in town learned to count change because Mr. Clyde, if you go buy something, he would have a broom laying against the wall or a piece of cheese and that went in with your groceries and you would be charged for it.

So you'd have to say, "Well, Mr. Clyde, I didn't get that."

And so he would back it, buy it out.

But I mean, from sun up to sunset every day.

And anybody you talk to will tell you the same.

Wonderful man.

But it's amazing how many people bought that broom or that piece of cheese in their lifetime.

[lilting music] - Back in those days, in the thirties and forties and fifties, they would come to Beaufort from anywhere from Cedar Island to Marshallberg, they would come to Beaufort, particularly on Saturdays.

Saturday was a big shopping day, it was also a social day.

The people would come in and it was not a matter of buying my groceries and go home, they would spend part of the day in Beaufort socializing.

- As a teenager, I worked in House's Drugstore.

My sister worked at the Roses store.

And it was fun on Saturday when all the Harper's Island people would come to town and back then they still had the very distinctive brogue that you can hear occasionally now.

But it was so, so distinctive.

It it's like old English really.

And they'd come in and I couldn't understand them half the time.

They'd want a soda, only I didn't know what they were saying.

So I'm trying to figure out what kind, you know, what do you want?

But it was fun to have 'em come in 'cause this was their big trip to town.

- Well, they've made some videos about it, about how the people down at Ocracoke talk, but they have all different sayings like "the piazza," that's the front porch and "it's a slick cam."

They say, "Boys, there's a slick cam out there today.

There's a stink, nothing moving."

And that would be just like it's no wind at all.

Kind of slick out there now.

And then they talk about the tide, say it's high tide.

And the people would say, "Well, you are high tiders."

I said, "Well, I guess so."

I've tried all my life not to talk that way but it just slips out every now and then.

[laughs] - We didn't have a car.

We went everywhere by boat.

Even when I was in high school, we went everywhere by boat.

And we'd jump in that boat and you would go downtown.

My 21 footer was the one we used mostly for this.

But we'd go downtown and we'd park at a dock and go into the grocery store and pick up what we needed and then go to the hardware store, whatever, load up our boat and then come home.

- [Narrator] Even though the great battles of World War II were being fought in what seemed like another world to most Americans, to those living in Beaufort, the battle was just off their docks.

[pensive music] - Many a time I'd walk down and on a pier and look out over the ocean and imagine, because you just heard it on the radio, you didn't see any pictures, that we knew that some ships had been sunk.

In fact, we saw the plumes of smoke and they'd be bringing people with real bad burns over to the hospital in Morehead.

And a lot of the nurses worked over here so we'd hear all kind of stories about that.

- And we lived in absolute terror of the Nazi subs.

And to underscore your terror, the sky was full of planes at all times, night and day.

And at night especially, you could hear noises offshore, big explosions.

Thump, thump, ka-rump, ka-rump, you know, that you knew what that was going on offshore.

- I can remember vividly, my bedroom was the one right above us.

I can remember being awakened, I don't know how many nights, well, several, by the house shaking all over because of the submarines firing torpedoes and because of the Coast Guard and Navy dropping depth charges out there.

Well, that made the ground shake.

That made the house shake.

- I didn't know what it was.

I knew it was a bright light.

You didn't see it in the daytime, but at night the sky was all lit up.

You knew it was something, fire.

- [Michael] My father would work at Cherry Point and he was building a base at Ocracoke for the Navy also.

And he left Atlantic, they'd go on a boat over the Atlantic at Ocracoke.

And at least one night between Atlantic and Ocracoke, there were seven tankers burning off shore struck by U-boats.

- I remember walking on the beach.

It was very moving even back in those days.

You found so many of the little white sailor hats on the beach that washed in.

You knew that some sailor had lost his hat overboard, you know?

- Everybody did something.

I even did something.

That's a story.

They had a observation tower, it wasn't far from my dad's factory and they needed airplane spotters.

I rode my bicycle down to the observation tower and they told me what to do and I did it for, I don't know, three or four hours at a time sitting up and I took something to read 'cause you could hear the planes when they came in, you do your duty and you call Wilmington and told 'em what kind of plane, how many engines.

- It was 1944 September, the last of September, Paula and I were at home with an attendant and a plane flew overhead on fire and crashed on the Bird Shoal.

And the person that was taking care of us rushed his son to the side porch because she thought the world was coming to an end.

- And we were just getting out of school that afternoon.

It was about 3:30.

And the ground shook.

And we knew exactly, I mean, we were tuned into anything to do with the war.

So everybody that was getting out of school ran down the front street and begged to get a ride across Taylors Creek 'cause that's where the plane had fallen.

- That was kind of a terrifying thing.

It burned for a day or two and my dad was wise enough to keep me away from it for about three days until they got all the human remains taken outta there.

- [Narrator] Finally, after four long years, the war was over.

Although the relief of having the war over was wonderful, it was bittersweet because of all who had been lost.

- You were glad it was over, but you didn't feel like celebrating much.

I mean, too much bad had happened.

And I mean, they had neighbors all over you that never came back so it wasn't a good feeling to start living it up and trying to be happy.

You just wanted to get beyond it.

- [Narrator] The war years were very painful for Beaufort and the country.

Even so, there were still many internal issues in our nation that had not been resolved.

Slavery was over, but the Jim Crow policies and backward thinking of racial division were still prominent.

Like other cities, Beaufort was segregated, but things often seemed less tense in Beaufort.

Perhaps it was the fact that Beaufort residents were interdependent, that the fishing industry relied on nearly every person and every business for economic survival.

Perhaps a mutual respect for hard work helped to de-emphasize the racial division found in many cities.

- We didn't have many racial problems in Beaufort.

Our parents, a lot of cases raised a lot of the white kids but we would play together.

They would come to our home, we would go to their home.

There was not a lot of problems even when integration happened.

Although in the north, there was a lot of problems.

In Beaufort, integration went fairly well.

Coming up from East Carter where what we call Down East, a lot of those had not really come in contact with Black kids, but integration went well.

One experience that I do remember is when Dr. King was assassinated, all the Blacks were forced in the gym.

It was probably almost a hundred of us.

And we had a teacher named Miss Milton Fuffle.

She was a native of here coming from Davis Down East and I'll tell you a little about that later.

But she was not allowed to come in the gym with us.

She was trying to establish a Black history club and courses, which was denied.

But our sheriff, Ralph Thomas, who was the sheriff and he was the man in charge, told the principal Walker Gillikin that if you don't get her in this gym, something gonna happen.

So they got her in the gym.

And so that was one of the more tense periods that I remember about integration.

Other than that, I played together football and sports with the other kids and we got along fine.

- The other thing was the Black community and the white community were very comfortable with each other.

Nobody really paid any attention to color.

I know when my mother finally bought a little old tiny house on Ann Street and it was like an old fisherman shack and we were trying to at least make it livable.

And the sons of this old Black man that used tender the furnace at Doe Dye House would come over to help us and we'd all be in there.

All three of us girls and the two boys singing at the top of our lungs and just having a ball.

And nobody gave it any thought.

- [Narrator] Whatever the case, Beaufort seemed to come through the civil rights era a bit more smoothly than other communities.

- Whites and Blacks worked together.

The captains were very, we had three Black captains, Herbert Davis, Dave Davis, and I think it was Sutton Davis.

It was three Davis Brothers and they were Black captains.

And so they were in charge of the menhaden ship just like white captains, which was the Goodman Brothers.

My father was a menhaden fisherman, he fished north.

He would go up to New Jersey, Delaware, New York, Port Monmouth and they would stay for a season and come back.

And a lot of the captains were white and a lot of the crew were Black.

But they got together, they got along very well.

- [Narrator] There is almost a secret vocabulary with those who live in Beaufort.

If you're not from Beaufort, whether from as far away as London or as close as Morehead City, you are from Off.

If you live on one of the islands or towns east of Beaufort, you are from Down East.

And the narrow stretch of water between downtown and Carrot Island is called The Cut.

- I guess the being on the water and boating was always something that all of us were involved in, one way or another, or swimming.

This Taylors Creek out here, we called it The Cut.

And The Cut, it was not like The Cut today.

All the grocery stores were down on Front Street and all the trash from the grocery stores was thrown in The Cut.

All the sewers in the town emptied into The Cut.

As a result, we always went swimming at high tide because there was a lot more water in The Cut at the time.

But the strange thing was, I don't know of anyone who ever had an ear infection the whole time and we had no supervision.

We'd just say, "Hey mom, I'm going swimming."

"Okay, well, is it high tide?"

"Yeah, it's high tide."

- Oh and we had to get typhoid shots every year at school and they'd line us up in the hall and we'd have to stand there and they would just.

The nurse was Miss Hammer.

And they gave us typhoid shots because we swam in The Cut.

That was not, it was polluted.

But that's why we all have such good immune systems, I guess.

We really, it was, it was.

- Yeah, our cousin was in line next to have a shot and she got ready to vaccinate him and he dropped right on the floor from fright.

They were terrible shots.

I mean, you got really sick.

- You did not.

- My brother actually, and I, named William, down here at the post office, it's a town hall now.

They had a dock and the boys in town, they would go and if you go on the dock, they would push you over and they'd say you either swim or drown.

And actually, that's how my brother learned how to swim.

- The first feat that we had to learn after we learned how to swim was how to get across to Carrot Island to be able to swim The Cut.

And when we could do that, we were okay, we made it.

And over on Carrot Island, we had our own private swimming hole.

And we called it First Deep Creek Swimming Hole because apparently it was a place had been worn out, dug out, and at high tide or during the rain, heavy rain or something, that hole would fill up.

And it was a big area.

I mean, we could get in it and swim around.

It wasn't like, you know, just a little small thing.

- And my friends other places can't believe that you had to learn to swim with tennis shoes when you were little because you didn't know not to come up where there was an oyster bed.

Keep from being cut, you learned to swim with tennis shoes.

- Whichever way the tide was going, you would allow for that on where we were gonna land from across The Cut.

Then you had to walk a certain distance so you could get back to where you started from and you go.

But there were times on low tide we'd go jump overboard and go up near downtown Beaufort, just take the tide and follow it.

Get ready to come home, we just jump in the creek and follow it again.

Traffic in Taylors Creek back in those days was minimal compared to what it is today.

- [Narrator] While Beaufort's children once saw The Cut as a perfect playground, its waters and shoals were also beloved by the distinguished author Rachel Carson, who came to Beaufort in 1938 as an employee of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

She fell in love with this little town by the sea and spent hours roaming the shores of what today is Carrot Island, studying its rhythms, its plants, fish and marine life.

Her Beaufort years are reflected in her first book, "Under the Sea Wind" published in 1941, which she often called her favorite book.

Carson is probably best known for her environmental research in the book "Silent Spring."

[waves crashing] The bounty of the sea helped to create Beaufort.

It is the sea that has brought jobs and income to residents of the city.

But like an evil twin, it has also brought hurricanes which ravaged the coastline, taking lives, ruining businesses, and costing millions of dollars as a result.

- When my dad would hear that a big blow was coming or a hurricane, he would call my mother and say, "We better get ready, we don't know where it's coming from or when it's coming."

And so she would send me down to the sidewalk and two blocks down, the big flags would be flying and they could be red or they could be different colors, but if it was red with a huge black dot in the middle, that meant get ready, it's going to be a big one.

Then also, one of my jobs if a big blow was coming, was to go down and we had a skiff, a rowboat, and we had several boats, but that was my job, was the rowboat.

And I would go down, it was on a post in front of the house, rope, and I'd pull the rope down, push the boat, sink the boat.

Of course I was little and all.

Everybody would love to sink a boat.

So we'd all get down.

Sometimes there would be five or six of us sloshing in the boat.

But then everybody else knew to go slosh their boats too, 'cause everybody didn't live on Front Street and they didn't get the word as soon.

- We grew up really, actually, we lived on Front Street.

My mother was a single mother and she had three girls.

Heaven help her.

And she moved back to Beaufort.

And we got back here just about the time a hurricane hit.

So right off the bat there's nobody but women and children in the house.

So they're running around trying to find things when these big plate glass windows go crashing out and the water comes in.

Ended up getting things like a car table and nailing them up over the windows.

- And I remember the water came up in the backyard and the row boats are going up and down The Cut, I mean, the street, in Front Street.

- And you could row your boat to the end of the lot.

- The wind was screaming and I mean, it was hellacious and it was one or two o'clock in the morning and you couldn't sleep.

- But the water, Daddy had gone down to the drugstore to take the bottles off the bottom two shelves 'cause he felt like it was gonna be a strong enough storm.

He put the medicines up on the table and the water, at that time we had parking meters downtown that had heads on 'em, and water came all the way up the stem to where the head was.

So when Daddy went back in the drugstore he said, "Should have put 'em up higher."

[laughs] - Mother would start cooking and she would cook things that would hold, you know, beans and cakes and things like that.

And it was just a wonderful time for a kid.

School was out, number one.

And the other thing is that Daddy and I would always have to go down and pump the boats out.

We never pulled boats out of the water, you know, you had to take 'em off and anchor 'em off in The Cut.

And then as the storm increased, you'd have to row out to wherever your boat was and pump it out every now and then, we had the old-timey hand pumps.

And everybody had to put their slickers on, you know, and go out on the water and it was just a, I mean, it's just a really wonderful wild time, you know?

And Daddy was always worried to death that the house was gonna get blown away or destroyed and me, I'm out having fun, you know, so.

[laughs] [no audio] - Life was extraordinarily simple but very rich.

My father had a boat and quite often in the spring when I was old enough, some boys and I would get into the boat at 5:00 AM in the morning and we would go out and go blue fishing and go over to Shackleford Banks and go swimming and then take the boat back, tie it up, and go to school.

- We had a big field out there on between Pine Street and Cedar Street called the Field.

We used to go out there and play Army and we would get big old refrigerator boxes and things like that.

They had great big oak trees.

We would hide up in the trees and those kind of things.

We had swings and like Tarzan and all that, but that was another good time.

- Mr. House, his wife, they were Episcopalians, that's where I went to church, and she played the organ and she was a big influence on me 'cause she played and swayed and swayed.

So when I grew up, I wanted an organ and I finally got my organ and I remembered Miss House.

And I mean, I was 50, 60 years old when I got the organ.

- We lived right beside the highway and we always sat on the porch or to the land or the porch.

And so there were not that many cars.

And the ones that did go by even from Atlanta, you knew who they were.

And you'd always wave and they'd wave back.

There wasn't that many cars.

- We would set out on the porch in the summertime and we did rag smoke to keep the mosquitoes away from us.

We would sit out there until about 10 o'clock at night and then we would go in, go to bed with the windows up because we didn't worry about locking no doors.

We closed the door but you didn't worry about locking them or nothing.

The windows up, going to bed, go to bed.

- My sister and I would go over to the ice plant in the summer and Mr. Lewis Iverson would be sitting out and he worked at the ice plant and he would see us coming and he would chip us off a big chunk of ice about this big, you know, June, July day.

And we would walk around and that was, I mean, that was the biggest treat you could possibly get and just walk around and enjoy your big chunk of ice for a while.

- Ms. Alma was a very sweet woman.

She would fix the kids in the neighborhood, karo and brown sugar sandwiches, and also big slice of onion sandwiches with a lot of mayonnaise.

- We would go in the garden and we would pick a pan of what we call the butter things.

People mostly now call 'em baby limas, you know?

But anyway, and we would shill them beans and put 'em in the pot with fat back meat and they would make biscuit.

It was so good.

- We were a one car, four cylinder, automatic drive, police force who couldn't catch anybody.

And they used to go by and honk the horn.

He'd be right down here in front of the boardwalk.

The western end of the boardwalk where the bathrooms are now was the police station.

And he'd be asleep in the car and they'd honk the horn, wake him up and he'd get in and try to catch him just as fast as he could but it was hilarious.

- But I was going home one night in a car that I bought from Paul Motor Company on Front Street, and it would go pretty good.

And I was headed home and went by Johnson Saunders, looked at the clock and I was running a little late.

So I floor boarded the thing and passed Mr.

Guy Styron.

He was the head of the police department.

He had like Barney Fife the helper.

But I passed Mr.

Guy and never saw the lights come on.

Looked and said, "Well, I made it, I've done well."

He must've been looking at something else.

So I got home and I'd probably been home 15 minutes and the phone rang and it was Mr.

Guy talking to my dad.

And my father came in and he said, "You need to go uptown and see Mr.

Guy."

So the police department then was what is our bathhouse now.

And there was room enough for one kerosene stove and one desk.

And Mr.

Guy sat and talked to me for about two hours on how dangerous it was to speed.

Didn't write me a ticket, but to this day, every time I'm speeding, I think about getting that phone call and getting sent down to the Beaufort police station, which I still think it's interesting that they turned their police station into one bathroom.

[playful music] - Well, you didn't bother Captain Pepper.

One time this tax collector came.

But that tax collector had to come to Captain Pepper's house to see Captain Pepper.

Of course, Captain Pepper was in his fish house down there on Front Street.

And they had a few words, you know.

But if Captain Pepper told you the moon was green, you best believe it.

He told that taxpayer that he had paid his taxes and that he wasn't going to listen to him.

Well, the tax collector kept on and on and on saying that he hadn't paid his taxes.

Well, Captain Pepper got right tired of that and he took his longest flounder gig off the side of the wall and he says, "Now, I've paid my taxes.

What you got to do is go back and find your book that has it in it."

And he kept on walking, got closer and closer to that man with that flounder gig out there.

He walked that tax collector right off the end of the dock into the water.

Now, the tax collector didn't bother Captain Pepper anymore about unpaid taxes.

That's just the way it worked and now, anyway.

- It don't matter which end, even if you weren't in the town, you were raised nearby, everybody knew your daddy, they knew your granddaddy.

They knew your mama so you're kin one way or the other.

- First of all, we didn't have telephones, but I guess you could call 'em corner mothers or what have you.

If you got punished, don't let the principal punish you first.

If the principal punish you, then the teachers know, and then everybody in town gonna know.

But before you get to the next block, that mother will know.

And then before you get home, your mother will know.

And so yeah, in some kind of way they didn't have telephone, but they had a way of communicating and getting the word to you.

- Well, they only had two high schools in the county.

So you know, there's natural competing and it had a trophy and it was actually a bucket, a wooden bucket and it was called The Mullet Bucket.

When they unload the fish out of the buckets, that's what they used, had a hand rope in it and everything to unload the fish.

So this was the trophy that you passed back and forth, and it's still being used today between East Carteret and West Carteret.

- I saw it on Facebook this morning.

Two of my friends had posted that The Mullet Bucket came home last night.

First football game of the season.

- [Narrator] Today as a fishing boat leaves the inlet and heads out to the ocean, gulls still clamor overhead.

The smell of salt water still beckons the captain to the sea, to the catch, and to the adventure that will follow.

The same connection to the riches of the sea that has existed here since Beaufort's earliest days as a small, often struggling colonial fishing village.

Although the city has changed dramatically over the past 300 years, its defining spirit has stayed the same.

While the lure of the ocean and the charm of Beaufort's past now brings scores of pleasure boats to these waters and tourists to these shores, there is a pride of place here, a sense of home and identity that is rare in cities and towns across our country.

Maybe it comes from the heritage of a working class community of fishing boats and processing factories where men of all colors worked together in the unforgiving sun and the burning salt water.

Maybe it comes from knowing that everyone was interdependent here and hardworking men and women tried earnestly to work across racial lines.

There is connection here.

People who spent childhoods in Beaufort or live here now know they are truly at home.

No matter where their lives have taken them, their town calls them home much like the beacon of Cape Lookout called wayward ships to safety and comfort from the dark ocean and the hidden shoals.

The light that called so many home over the centuries is still a beacon for those lucky enough to know and love this remarkable coastal village.

Perhaps the light is Beaufort itself.

- To me, Beaufort's always been, I went and worked in the textile industry for years and retired out of that.

And I was always in the middle of the states, whether it was Virginia or North Carolina or whatever.

Beaufort, when you look out, it's a stake in the ground.

It's a hallmark, if you will.

When you look out into the ocean, it's nothing but ocean.

When you turn and look back to the mainland, it's nothing but mainland.

So to me, it establishes me as this is where I am and this is the way the world is.

- It was a feeling of coming home again.

- I was raised here, lived most of my life here.

My first 10 years of law practice were over in Fayetteville.

And then after being there for 10 years and wondered why in the world I was there, the answer was to make enough money to retire to Carteret County.

And I said, "You are a fool.

You can go to Carteret County now."

Went back to the office, that was on April the 15th.

I went back to the office and said, "Folks, June the first, that's going to be an empty office."

And they said, "What are you talking about?"

And I said, "Look, I'm going home.

The webbing between my toes is drying out.

I can't speak well anymore.

I've got to get back to the ocean."

- I had a love of Beaufort and for some reason I was what you call a home boy.

When I was in college, I had a friend named John Boyd from Moorehead City, and he had a car and he loved to come home about every other week.

And Greensboro's about five hours.

And so he said, "I'm getting ready to go home."

I said, "What time?"

So I don't think I stayed away from home more than five weeks.

- We've lived in 29 houses.

We've traveled all over the world.

But Beaufort is special.

- When I went off to college and I'd come back across that causeway and I smell that fish factory, I tell you, man, it bring tears to my eyes.

I was so glad to be coming home.

- I still come back all these years.

Should I say how old I am?

96.

And I've spent every one of those summers in Beaufort.

My husband promised my mother that no matter where he was transferred, he would always see that I got home with the children in the summer.

And we did.

- I had jury duty this past week and I was upstairs in the courthouse and I was looking out and I thought, "How neat is this?

My grandfather broke his arm in one of those oak trees.

My dad broke his arm in one of those oak trees."

You know, you can go back all these generations, they played in those same trees.

But like I said, Beaufort was just a neat place.

I couldn't imagine a better place to grow up than Beaufort.

- Oh, it immediately feels different to me.

You get out of the car and I've got sandals on.

I feel the sand, the grit.

Doesn't bother me.

It feels good.

We arrived tired after a long trip and unpacking the car, I'm out on the porch immediately.

Oh, the Beaufort breeze.

It's like, you smell it, you feel it, and you know you're here.

[triumphant music] [triumphant music swells, fades] [joyful music] ♪ ♪ ♪ [joyful music fades]