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In the early 1940s, a New York transplant named Carroll O’Connor bummed around Wake Forest as an indifferent college freshman, skipping class to shoot pool at Shorty’s hot dogs.
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Later, of course, that lackluster student would transform into Archie Bunker, a cigar-chomping TV bigot slumped in an easy chair that now sits on display in the Smithsonian.
You can picture the young O’Connor hunched over the table, the only Yankee in a town full of magnolia trees, maybe hustling some gullible farm kid for the price of a red hot, served all-the-way. The lifelong character actor from Queens no doubt learned to speak in Southern drawl on White Street over the clack of a nine ball.
I learned this enchanting bit of trivia from Adam Wright, a town commissioner in Wake Forest who started posting a near-daily history lesson on his Facebook page in October, taking a fabulous deep dive into his adopted hometown that is best known for getting jilted by the university that split for Winston-Salem.
Wright relocated from Roanoke Rapids in 2011 and developed a self-described obsession with Wake Forest’s past, a goldmine that runs two centuries deep.
“It’s an insatiable appetite for the unknown,” he said, “and wanting to tell the masses all the things I’m finding.”
Through his posts, the otherwise ignorant now know that someone tossed a stick of dynamite on White Street in 1967 and blew up a chunk of The Fun Stop — a crime that remains unsolved.
Thanks to his relentless digging, the casual Facebook scroller can appreciate that in 1838, you needed permission from the Baptists at Wake Forest College to perform a magic trick within one mile of campus. Penalty for disobedience: $100.
By virtue of his curiosity, we can puzzle over how an arsonist managed to set 70 fires across town between 1933 and 1934, torching 17 buildings without getting caught.
“I heard a story about a supposedly well-known bootlegger,” Wright said. That’s just so super cool.”
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He added, as an aside, “Town business is only so intriguing. There’s only been so much going on.”
Of all the gems in Wright’s collection, Tommy Byrne might be the shiniest.
He served as Wake Forest mayor from 1973 to 1987, but before that, he pitched for the New York Yankees as a formidable left-hander.
He beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in game two of the 1955 World Series, allowing just five hits but more impressively knocking in the two winning runs — back in the days when pitchers came to bat. At 35 with gray hair, he had been widely considered a washed-up has-been until Casey Stengel put him on the mound.
Even better, as Wright noted in a post, Byrne once loaned his mitt to Babe Ruth so the Bambino could play in an old timer’s game.
“Cool things like that,” said Wright.
And just down White Street from Shorty’s, Byrne rests under a tall grave with his life’s statistics chiseled on the side.
“Big Tommy,” it reads, and, “That good hitting pitcher,” a quote from Yankees play-by-play announcer Mel Allen.
Any city derives its character from the feet that once walked its streets, the way Baltimore comes alive through the haunted footsteps of Edgar Allen Poe or Los Angeles comes alive through the eyes of Raymond Chandler.
In our hurry to widen roads and land a new Ikea we forget that stories truly illuminate where we live, and I think Wright is doing Wake Forest a great municipal service by promoting its past.
Carroll O’Connor dropped out of Wake Forest when World War II started and never came back for any meaningful amount of time, but he left us a tiny piece of his colorful life, which we get to rediscover every few years and tell over drinks, saying, with gusto, “Betcha didn’t know.”
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