http://www.thecharlottepost.com
tKfje Cljarlotte
LIFE
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2005
Religion 8B
Section
Neighbors
share their
histone
story
77/£ ASSOCIATED PRESS
RALEIGH—Except for the
piano lessons she has taught for
56 years, Frances Olivette
Mass^iburg McGill spends most
days at home, relaxing. She has
earned it. McGill, 75, has held
more than 30 different jobs,
sometimes two or three at one
time.
She raised six children, “five
good-looking boys and one beau
tiful girl.” She is a college gradu
ate, a semi-retired neighborhood
den mother, a former crossing
guard and a local television per
sonality
McGill, bom to an Anguillan
mother and adopted by a promi
nent Afiican-American barber
and his wife, has done things
most people don’t associate with
a black woman bom in 1930.
She worketi ^e married and
divorced, married, divorced and
did it again. She managed her
own finances and bought her
own home.
“In this life, I tried to do things
that would challenge my mind,”
McGfil said. “I did everything I
could that was decent.”
McGill’s story is just one of 20
that St. Augustine’s College soci
ology students collected this
summer when they interviewed
some of the College Park
Idlewild community’s oldest res
idents.
The int«^ews are part of a
broader effort to gather the sto
ries, pictures and records that
tell the story of a once-stable but
now troubled East Raleigh com
munity founded by fi*eed slaves.
In 1867, St. Augustine’s
College, an institution for black
teachers, was built. Around it,
the communities known at times
as Lincoln Park, College Park
and Idlewild grew. By the early
part of the 2C)th century, the
neighborhood was home to black
teachers, carpenters, doctors,
maids, gardeners, shopkeepers,
morticians and porters.
These communities had their
own bakery several full-fledged
grocery stores and garden and
social dubs. They were among
the places for working and
upper-dass blacks to live inside
the dty
. Txiay community meetings
are usually punctuated with
talk about problems with prosti
tution and drugs.
“This area, it has a rich, rich
history” said Octavia Rainey a
community gadfly and chair
woman of the North East
Citizens’ Advisory Council.
“Really people think Fm crazy
when they hear me say I have a
gold mine. We do have our prob
lems. But this neighborhood has
a gold mine. We have our story”
An effort to have the commu
nity dedared an historic area
went nowhere. When the com
munity's unofficial historian,
Ella Clarke, died, Rainey inher
ited her effort to collect College
Park Idlewild’s story
Then, Rainey got a call fixan
Derek Greenfield.
Greenfield is a sodology pro
fessor at St. Aug’s. He thou^t
gathering oral histories would
give students an opportunity to
explore the “symbiotic rdation-
ship” between the college and
the community And he wanted
his students to learn something
about themselves.
“I want them to see that learn
ing is not just something that
happens within four walls,”
Greenfield said. ‘1 want (stu
dents ) to realize that they can be
producers and contributors to
knowledge.”
So Greenfield sent his stu
dents out into the nei^iboihood
to talk with women such as
McGill and Sadie Harris, 81.
Rease see RESIDENTS/2B
O ® O
Shoe ya’ right
Big feet no longer a barrier in women’s footwear
By Chens F. Hodg(
cherisJwdges@thecharloi
Please see BIG FEET/2B
' PHOTO/TAMARA RICHARDSON
Tamara Richard son-Williams’ frustration In finding dress shoes for her size
12 feet led her to launch the Tacerl line of women’s footwear.
Fla. ‘Beach Lady’ dies at age 70
TflE ASSOCIATED PRESS
AMERICAN BEACH, Fla-
MaVynee Betsch, known as the
“Beach Lady” who worked to pre
serve the black conmnmity of
American Beach, died Sept. 5 at
her home. ^
She was 70.
Betsch, known for her distinctive
yards-long hair and her foot-long
fingernails, had cancer, according
to her sister, Johnetta Betsch Cole,
president of Bennett College in
Greensboro.
There will be a gathering to cele
brate her life in about a montli at
American Beach, her sister said.
At Betsch’s request, she will be cre
mated.
According to “An American
Beach for Afiican Americans,” a
book by Marsha Dean Phelts,
Betsch was the great-granddaugh
ter of A.L. Lewis, one of the
founders of Afix)-American Life
Insurance Co., and one of the
founders of American Beach, a his
torically black beach She is also a
descendant of Zephaniah Kingsley,
a plantation owner on Amefia
Island, and his wife, Anna
Kingsley
Betsch graduated from the
Oberhn Conservatory of Mi^ic
and went on to sing opera in
Germany Phelts’book said.
Betsch am^ded h^ first name
of Marvyne, to remove the as a
protest to Ronald Reagan’s election
as president, said Russ Rymer, in
his book, “American Beach: A Saga
of Race Wealth and Memory”
But her name was still pro
nounced as “Mar-veen.”
Research key to cardiovascular advances
By David D. Dawson
THE CHARLOTTE POST
David Banks of Shelby has a new
appreciation for his life and heart.
He can’t stop saying how blessed
he is to stiH be on this earth, able
to breathe and to have a beating
heart.
That’s because Banks had
suigery to receive a pacemaker for
his weak heart last January at
Carolinas Medical Center’s Sanger
Chnic. He quickly touts the
Heineman Medical Research
Center Inc. in Charlotte for the
successful surgery
“They are first class physicians. I
give them the highest praise.
Charlotte is very lud^ to have
them, instead of going half across
the state for the things they do
there. They are a God s^id to
humanity,” said Banks.
HMR is a nonprofit organization
established in 1940, which is
named after Charlotte native
Dannie Heineman, a world-
renowned industrialist. Hdneman
and Drs. Paul Sanger and Oscar
MUer created HMR to provide a
medical library for Charlotte
physicians. Now, it operates med
ical education and research facili
ties specializing in diseases of the
heart, lungs and pulmonary sys
tems.
For the past 40 years, HMR has
been led by Dr. Francis Robisc^
‘We hope to contribute in a mod
est way to the general knowledge
and prepress of sd^ice, but our
primary goal is to improve the
quality of medicine locally,” he
said “Chariotte demands that we
produce clinical results equal to
that of any academic environment
for fwactical day-by-day clinical
PHOTO/CURHS WILSON
Dr. Francis Robiscek directs Heineman Medicai Research Center,
one of the region’s top cardiovascuiar research faciiities.
work. By doing so, we fill a need
recognized more than 40 years
ago.”
HMR has explored heart preser
vation, heart transplantation and
is currently ' researching
Angiogenesis. Angiogenesis
involves growing new arteries
aroxmd diseased or collapsed ones
in, the body It is a treatment that
could be an alternative to cathert-
erization, bypass and open-heart
surgery
Research on angiogenesis has
been conducted worldwide for sev
eral years. However, HMR’s
research has been encouraging
enough to form a committee to
raise funds to run its laboratory
The staff anticipates it will take
three to five years of study and
research to complete their work.
Their goal is to make angiognesis
available to the medical communi
ty and Charlotte-are patients.
HMR is the only nonprofit heart
research center between "^^nston-
Salem and Ihnnessee. Since the
center is not attached to any uni
versity like Wake Forest’s
Bowman Gray it depends on pri
vate contributions from the
Charlotte community The HMR
plans to raise $100,(X)0 on Oct. 8 to
help fund the e3q)enses for the
angiogenesis laboratory
Banks, 76, was ^dted when
Robiscek asked if he could help
with the fundraiser events. Banks
knows what this research means
for him and other Afiican-
Americans. Heart disease is the
number one Idller of blacks, claim-
See CARDIOVASCULAR/2B
Overweight,
high blood
pressure, at
greater risk
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
MILWAUKEE-If you are
overweight, new research shows
how important it is to control
your blood pressure besides try
ing to lose those extra pounds.
Scientists studying nearly
250,000 people in France found
that only overweight people who
also had hi^ blood pressure
were at significantly greater risk
of dying of heart-related prob
lems than normal-weight people.
Overweight people with normal
blood pressure faced no
increased risk.
This doesn’t mean that extra
pounds aren’t dangerous,
because overweight people are
more hkely to develop blood pres
sure problems.
But it does for-the first time
show that blood pressure may be
an important “mediator” or
mechanism by which excess
weight can cause heart prob
lems, said one expert who
reviewed the work. Dr. Frank
Hu, an associate professor at the
Harvard School of Public Health.
“This novel finding deserves
careful consideration,” he wrote
in an editorial accompanying the
findings of the study, published
Tuesday in Hypertension;
Journal of the American Heart
Association.
Health experts have long
agreed that obesity raises the
risk of dying, but they argue
about how dangerous it is to be
merely overweight. A controver
sial study earlier this year by the
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention concluded that people
who were overweight but not
obese might even be less likely to
die than those who are thinner.
The new study found ihat over
weight people have a greater risk
of dying in general as well as
finm cardiovascular causes. But
when researchers took into
account things that raise heart
risks, like hi^ cholesterol, dia
betes and hi^ blood pressure
(hypertension), only high blood
pressure made a difference in the
risk of dying.
“This study shows that hyper
tension is most important and is
extremely common among peo
ple who are overweight and
obese,” Hu said
The new study was led by Dr.
Frederique Thomas at the
Medical School of Nancy and
involved 139,562 men and
104,236 women who had routine
health checkups at a clinic in
Paris fiom 1972 to 1988. The
average age for men was 43 and
for women, 41.
Forty-two percent of the men
and 21 percent of women were
overweight, but the study includ
ed relatively few people who
were obese, so researdiers made
no conclusions about that group.
During an average of 14 years
of follow-up, 2,949 men and 929
women died firom cardiovascular
disease.
Overweight people with hi^
blood pressure had twice the risk
of dying of a heart attack or
stroke than overweight people
with normal blood pressure.
Those who had hi^ blood pres
sure plus other problems like
diabetes had even greater risk.
In Ihe study, half of ov^^ei^t
people had hi^ blood pressure,
and Hu said many more likely
would develop it in later years.
Extra pounds do this in a num
ber of ways — by raising insulin
production, causing kidney prob-
Please see OBESITY/3B
4 ~