Carol's Tea Room

I may write a longer post about this one day, or actually prepare something to submit for publication, but for now I want to get to the essence of last weekend’s trip to Virginia to see my parents. It was a weekend filled with basketball, it being sort of a holy week in local college sport, the ACC men’s basketball tournament. The tournament is always a hard-fought battle with usually a great deal of upsets, under-dogs, and lead-changes. Tyler Hansbrough, North Carolina’s center, was required to wear a plexi-glass face mask due to a broken nose he had suffered in the last game of the regular season with Duke, and Carolina’s games were overshadowed by the discomfort Hansbrough was enduring, made worse by opposing players trying to “innocently” jar the mask. I spent much of the weekend saying things like, “c’mon, play some D for once,” “Okay, take your time, find a good shot,” and “O my God, you left him WIDE OPEN.” There must be something in human nature that craves tension and release, because at the time there was a great deal of mental agony, but now, looking back it was great fun. Plus my team took the tournament.

Note: before I get into the main point of this post I want to say something about the teams I root for in the ACC. Since I have not attended a school that is in the ACC I have to go with family tradition. My father graduated from the University of Virginia, and while my mother probably taught me how to say useful words like momma and dada during my infancy, it is equally possible that my dad taught me how say the UVA nonsense phrase, “wahoo wah.” So, as tradition goes, Virginia ranks high because of early nurturing. BUT, in the eighties my sister attended UNC, and was a senior when the great Michael Jordon, (anybody heard of him?) was a freshman and the team won the national title. This was so exciting that team loyalty shifted, reinforced by the fact that my sister would allow me to visit her at college and get drunk on three cheap beers and pass out. BUT, soon it was time for my other sister to go to college, and where did she choose? Virginia. She also endured visits from me, and my loyalty again was jeopardized. So here’s how it stands today. I am a Carolina fan until they play Virginia, but because Carolina has had so much success, I usually find myself rooting for UVA. The equation works in complete reverse come football season.

Note #2: When I am in a particularly foul mood I will write about what I think of Duke. I’ll just take this moment to reiterate that they lost in the first round of the national tournament last night. Heh, heh, heh. (to any admissions faculty at this outstanding institution of higher learning who may happen upon this post, my sentiment is solely segregated to Duke basketball.)

So I’ve already written a page and I’m nowhere close to getting to the point. But maybe that last bit will set up the next. On Sunday, before the final game, my father took me out to brunch at a restaurant in Charlottesville. It was warm enough to sit outside, and we had a good meal. My father got to talking about what Charlottesville was like when he was in school, and a name came up that I had heard a few times but could not remember the story behind. It was actually the name of an establishment known as Carol’s Tea Room. Daddy claimed it was a popular watering-hole for students at the University, and there was a well-worn saying on campus that went (paraphrase) “Carol’s Tea Room: where there’s no Carol, no tea, and no room.” He claimed that there was a fetid little creek behind the bar where the students would hold rubber duck races.

The liquor laws at the time required that an establishment that served alcohol must serve food as well, and as Carol’s Tea Room wasn’t in business to be a restaurant they came up with an ingenious plan. Everyday they cooked a hard-boiled egg, and whoever they were serving alcohol to, they would present with the single egg, thus adhering to the law. The plan worked famously until a patron, unfamiliar with the tradition, unknowingly ate the egg.

During the time my father was an undergraduate, Carol’s Tea Room threw a party for the graduate students who had just finished their term. The party was rowdy, and at the required closing time of 2:00am the celebration kept right on rolling, not ending until around 4:00 when it was raided by the police. The proprietor of Carol’s was in danger of having his establishment shut down due to this gross violation of the liquor laws, so he called the man who could best argue to keep a bar open, my grandfather. The judge knew that closing Carol’s for good would cause a riot, so at my grandfather’s suggestion, he suspended Carol’s right to sell alcohol during the three months that the University was out for the summer. In the fall Carol’s resumed business as usual.

After brunch, my father took me on a drive that was my grandfather’s favorite drive around Charlottesville. We first stopped by the house Daddy grew up in, a slightly rambling white clapboard bungalow on Dairy Road with a large front yard and a gigantic magnolia tree. The road was filled with houses, but my father said that when he was a child the surrounding area was an expansive dairy farm. As we drove out of town I tried to imagine the countryside of my father’s youth. Even with the dreaded McMansions dotting the landscape, I could get an idea of why my grandfather loved this drive. The rolling hillside put in relief by a backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a clear late winter day combined with effortless stories of childhood from my Dad was such a welcome diversion.

We passed a large horse stable with a track and exercise areas and a large green hanger-like structure. My father claimed that this was an airfield when he was a kid, and that he and his sister would come out on a Sunday and watch the airplanes take off. During the war, the children were required to be able to identify enemy aircraft in the sky, and this is how, when I was a child, my father could glance at an airplane picture book and casually name every aircraft from the WWII era. He told me how the home defense people had flown a Japanese Zero across the country to see if anyone would spot it. No one did.

As we drove by other horse farms, Daddy told of his experience with horse riding as a child. He was given a horse named Arizona to ride. He said that even though Arizona was the broadest-butt, gentlest old horse that the stable owned he still managed to fall off and get a concussion.

We turned around in the Olivet Presbyterian Church. It was here, at a church picnic, that my father found out that the Japanese had surrendered. The fact that the U.S. had won the war in the Pacific was compounded with the fact that my father had won that day “the only thing he’d ever won in his life,” a chocolate cake. He claimed he was at the picnic because of two sisters that drew his attention. This congenial image was marred somewhat when he told me that both sisters committed suicide.

We arrived home for tip-off of the final game of the tournament. I spent the rest of my visit rocking back and forth with my hands in a position of prayer muttering things like, “make this shot, please make this shot.” Carolina won the game after an exciting back and forth contest, and I readied myself to go home after the final buzzer.

I drove my truck down 29 and tried to remember some of the stories my father had told me. I think I’ve captured some of them here, but I’m sure more will come to me later. My father is an historian, and this occupation lends itself well to personal remembrances. When he and my aunt get together their meeting is usually filled with such recall of what life was like as children. If you can get past the hundreds of cousins with strange names that enter their stories, sometimes, with the help of that beautiful accent inherent to Northern Virginia, you can feel what it was like then; hear the noise of a prop-plane taking off, the voice of an announcer excitedly proclaiming that the war is over, or the revelry, the loud joyous shouts and clinking beer glasses, the triumph, of Carol’s Tea Room.