The Era of Roads and Bridges

Post-World War II Private Tourism Development

The end of World War II brought a dramatic increase in travel and tourism virtually everywhere. Reunited families, the arrival of small children, the availability of new automobiles, the growth of roadside motels, the building of new highways and bridges, the opening of theme parks and other attractions, and (especially in Florida) the use of DDT to control mosquitoes and air conditioning to make the heat bearable were some of the most important factors spurring tourism.⁶³

On the North Carolina coast, four developments were central to the expansion of tourism after the war: publicist Aycock Brown’s efforts in Dare County (and those of towns and counties that quickly copied his), sport hunting and fishing, and the coming of two national seashores at Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout.

There is nearly complete consensus that Aycock Brown was a publicity wizard who virtually singlehandedly generated a tourist boom in Dare County. The northern Banks were in a crisis at the close of the war. ⁶⁴ Commercial hunting had decreased, shad production was down, military bases had closed, and even the Coast Guard was boarding up its stations. Returning servicemen were looking vainly for work. Tourism seemed like a promising direction for development, but long-established resort areas to the south offered stiff competition.

Brown turned out to be more than equal to the challenge. He had done public relations work for the old Pamlico Inn, and worked as a reporter for the Beaufort News. He had even had an unsuccessful term as a police reporter for the Durham Herald. His duty station on the coast during the World War II had broadened his knowledge of the Outer Banks. After the war he had worked in publicity for the outdoor drama The Lost Colony, and was freelancing for the Sanitary Fish Market and even a dog track at Moyock. Then in 1952 he began a twenty-six year stint as director of the Dare County Tourist Bureau, a position from which he planned, pushed, cajoled, beguiled, and finagled the county’s explosive tourism growth into being.⁶⁵

Many Outer Banks counties and towns were forming Chambers of Commerce at the time Brown came to Dare County, but most of them amounted to little more than a post office box, and were accomplishing little. But the garrulous and indefatigable Brown knew how to get the job done. Neither a swimmer nor a fisherman himself, he took countless photographs of (preferably female) swimmers, fishermen and anything else he thought he could place somewhere – anywhere. [ILLUSTRATION: Aycock Brown photo bathing beauty and Hatteras lighthouse p41. CAPTION: Fig. 9-25: Aycock Brown photograph of a bathing beauty and Cape Hatteras lighthouse. Brown and Stick (eds.), Aycock Brown’s Outer Banks, 41.] Lawrence Madry of the Virginian Pilot recalled that Brown

will get a story printed in your newspaper or magazine --the New York Times or the National Geographic, it doesn't matter -- by inundating you with his own stories or photographs, or completely knocking you off guard with the depth of his kindness, or spilling you into some deep well of laughter, pushed by the overwhelming force of his zany personality.

Jim Mays, an editor for Norfolk’s WTAR, said Brown knew

how to conjure up via long-distance telephone a compelling conviction in the minds of faraway journalists that a dead whale washed up on the beach at Rodanthe is a story of major international significance.⁶⁶

Whatever Brown’s strategies and tactics, tourism quickly became – and has remained – Dare County’s main industry. The new Southern Shores development opened in 1947, and Dare County s Atlantic Township (including Kill Devil Bills, Kitty Hawk, and Southern Shores), which in 1926 had had a tax value of slightly over $100,000, increased to more than $6 million in 1957.⁶⁷

Fortuitously, Brown’s assertive and imaginative promotional activities came on the very eve of major state and Federal involvement in tourism development on the Outer Banks.