By Jeanne Brook
If you are in the village of Ocracoke and up early enough, you may catch a glimpse of a couple of old friends riding their bicycles.
This may not have turned your head except that they are a couple of O’Cockers (natives whose families go back generations) in their 80s, and one is in bare feet.
Ronnie Van O’Neal, born in 1942, and Jimmy Jackson, born in 1945, grew up on Ocracoke. They have been neighbors for over 50 years.
O’Neal is retired from the Coast Guard and Jackson started Jimmy’s Garage, which is now owned by his son, Jamie.
When Jackson was recovering from a hospital stay last winter, they began walking every morning and this eventually led to them trying out their bikes.
Now, they are doing a 45-minute bicycle ride around the village nearly every day.
On a recent morning, they sat in porch chairs together under Jackson’s house and shared some history and memories from growing up on the island.
They were both born in Morehead City, Carteret County.
“That’s where most everybody (from the island) was born,” Jackson said, “down there unless they got caught.” Meaning, if they didn’t make it off the island in time.
Expectant mothers had to pre-plan a ride on the 42-foot mailboat “The Aleta.”
O’Neal and Jackson were three years apart in school initially, and then four years apart, when Jackson’s whole seventh-grade class was held back one year.
“It was told that none of us had failing grades to hold us back, but the teacher claimed we were immature,” Jackson said. “I don’t reckon it hurt us.”
He said there was a lot more for younger people to do on the island in those days. There were dances twice a week, in the same building where the variety store is now. “And we had a miniature golf course,” said O’Neal.
“Yeah, and we had a theater,” said Jackson. “It was on that far side of Blackbeard’s Lodge (which was the Wahab Hotel), and it was a nice theater for its time.”
“It cost a quarter to go to see the movie,” O’Neal said. “When you took your girlfriend to the movie, you bought her a pickled pig’s foot from the blind man’s store, and she carried it to the movie.”
The blind man was “Old” Jake Alligood, and he and his son “Little” Jake ran a Quonset hut known as Old Jake’s Place. “That’s where we hung out,” said Jackson. “And we’d get in there and get dancing to the old jukebox, and the record would skip.”
Alligood took care of that by cutting the floor out where the jukebox sat, pouring concrete and setting the jukebox back on it.
Jackson’s father had a barbershop. “His daddy cut my hair,” says O’Neal. “He only had three fingers. He put his hand and fingers around your ear to turn your head.”
“Daddy had his hand cut when they were building the Navy base here,” said Jackson. “He was operating the cement mixer, and he got his hand caught. The Coast Guard took him out of here by boat.”
“They poured the fingers right in the concrete down there,” said O’Neal. “They didn’t get them out of the cement mixer.”
O’Neal had a few horses as a teenager and was in the Ocracoke Mounted Boy Scouts Troop 290 (the only mounted boy scout troop).
“We didn’t keep them penned up,” he said. “They hung around just like your cat or your dog. Mine would stick his head in the window sometimes in the morning. We had no air conditioners, and you would hear him make that snorting noise when he wanted to eat his breakfast.”
They also worked. Jackson started cutting yards when he was around 10 for $2 or $3 a yard. O’Neal would fish at night down at Quawk’s Hammock and would get three cents a pound. If he made $5 or $10 a week, then he was making a lot of money.
Ocracoke as it was ‘back then’ (part 2)
Text and photo by Jeanne Brook
O’Cockers Ronnie Van O’Neal and Jimmy Jackson were born three years apart during World War II. During this time the Navy turned the island into a military outpost to combat German U-boat attacks.
“We had a two-story hospital down there where the ferry docks are,” O’Neal said. When the Navy left, they abandoned the buildings, and during the night, people would take them apart in sections. “And next thing you know, somebody had a house.”
“And our house was one of them,” Jackson explained. “Daddy took it down, put it up, and made a house out of it.”
The Navy had storage bunkers along what was called Ammunition Dump Road, now Sunset Drive.
“We boys would go up and dig around and find bullets. (It’s) no wonder we hadn’t got blowed up,” Jackson said.
Over the years, they’ve seen many changes, some good; some not so good.
“When somebody passed away, everything closed on the island (during the funeral),” O’Neal said. The stores, the school, and everything. And nobody worked on Sundays. People sat on the porches and visited.”
The women would watch the freight boat come in to see what colors the sacks of feeds were.
“The feed used to come in 100-pound bags, and it was made out of colorful cloth,” Jackson said. “And after the feed was used up, they could take the cloth and make them a dress.”
There were several gas stations and barbershops.
“We had an appliance store, too, where the Harborside is now, that sold all the televisions, the washers, refrigerators and everything,” O’Neal said.
The annual July 4th penning of all the cows and horses was a big event.
They were penned to be treated, castrated or branded. People would try to ride the wild horses, and some were sold.
A lot of people owned cows.
“That’s where you got your beef,” said O’Neal. “They would cut their ears a certain cut. That’s how you knew who they belonged to.”
The road from Hatteras Inlet to the village was completed in 1957, and the Cape Hatteras National Seashore was officially dedicated in 1958.
That led to the end of free-roaming livestock. Some of the horses were able to stay in the pony pens, but the cows were sold and taken away.
“My father hauled all the cows to Washington on his freight boat,” said O’Neal. “He built rails all around it, and folks brought one or two at a time on the back of an old truck.”
O’Neal’s father, Van Henry O’Neal, had the last freight boat, transferring mail, livestock, vehicles, gas and supplies.
The NC Highway Commission subsidized a private ferry service across Oregon Inlet, which led to O’Neal’s father closing his freight service.
O’Neal then joined the Coast Guard at 18.
“It was something you had to do,” said O’Neal. “When boys came of age, they had to leave for work or join the military as there was no work on the island. Girls often did not graduate from high school and got married instead.”
Jackson worked away from the island for a few years in Washington, Beaufort County, at a Ford dealership as a mechanic. That was where he met his wife, Linda, who worked at the hospital. Children Jamie and Melinda came later.
His house had been a laundromat with a dirt floor.
After Hurricane Dorian (September 2019) flooded it with 28 inches of water, it was beyond repair and like many others on Ocracoke, they tore down the old place and rebuilt it.
Jackson helped develop Oyster Creek and then opened a garage behind his house. He later bought the property where Jimmy’s Garage is now.
In the late ’60s, O’Neal wanted to leave the Coast Guard, and he with his wife, Martha, and son, Van, came home to build a house.
Problems pouring cement for the foundation forced them to buy a house, and when he came home after having been at sea, his foundation had been poured.
“Friends and family on the island went and bought the cement and poured the foundation,” O’Neal said about the house he still lives in along Back Road.
Recent toll legislation and potential loss of resident priority access to ferries has them concerned.
“Well, I think the priorities are gonna be a bad thing, if we lose it,” O’Neal said. “If you had to go to the doctor or dentist or something like that, you got to leave the day before and make sure you’re gonna get there.”
As far as the tolls go, “I’m all right; he’s all right; but there’s a lot of people right here that’s on fixed incomes,” O’Neal said. “Paying $150 (for an annual ferry pass) don’t mean a lot to a lot of people. But to them people it does. A lot of people just don’t realize that.”
These octogenarians keep busy.
Jackson likes to restore old cars behind his house. O’Neal shovels sand, finds reasons to climb trees and has many projects. They still find the time to sit a spell under the house and visit with their neighbors and then take a spin on their bicycles.
