James Bryan Creech: A Part of Four Oaks History
I knew Mr. James Bryan Creech as a good friend of my dad’s. I grew up around some of his stories, told with his characteristically dry humor, and can remember how he often made people laugh. I didn’t appreciate such subtle humor back then, preferring falling anvils and cartoon animals with speech impediments, but I have laughed out loud recently reading that humor in a collection of letters he wrote home to his family during his service in WWII. Reading his letters and articles served as a kind of introduction to a man I wanted to know more about. He was a historian, teacher, writer, carpenter, and journalist whose family roots went deep into Four Oaks history.
James Bryan Creech was born in 1925 to Barham Bryan Creech and Bertha Langdon Creech, whose father, James William “Billy” Langdon, moved to Four Oaks in 1888. Billy was a carpenter, making furniture and coffins for the people of the then-brand-new town. In 1890, he opened a photography studio, photographing the people of Four Oaks until about 1930. James Bryan inherited a lot of these photos and enjoyed looking through them.
His curiosity about the people in the photographs and their stories led him to write the column “Yesterday in Four Oaks” for the Four Oaks News, in which he’d print a picture he’d chosen, along with any information he’d come across about it. Readers responded with additional information and with pictures and stories of their own family history in Four Oaks. His column, “Four Oaks History”, grew out of this in 1977 and continued for the rest of his life. You can still read these articles, as they’re printed weekly in the Four Oaks/Benson News and Review.
As my childhood memories of him were vague and admittedly unreliable, I headed over to the town library, which bears his name. It’s a dignified-looking brick building off Hatcher Street with white columns across the front porch mirrored by columns of tall pine trees across the front yard. I walked in the front door and was greeted with the near-forgotten but distinctly familiar smell of the interior: books, carpet, and about 20 years past. Tonie Collins, the librarian, returned my smile from her seat at the front desk.
“Can you lead me to any information on Mr. James Bryan Creech?” I asked, after a brief introduction.
“Sure!” she responded, rising cheerfully and heading over to a shelf marked “Johnston County and Four Oaks”. I watched as she found and reached immediately for the books she was looking for: several dark-green and rather intimidating-looking hardcover volumes. These books, as well as the library itself, are Mr. Creech’s legacy. Three volumes contain his articles on Four Oaks from the Four Oaks News and the Smithfield Herald. Three others, titled “Letters Home” Volumes 1-3, in gold letters on the spine, contain the letters he wrote home to his mother and father during his service in the United States Navy from 1944-1946. I started here first, with Volume 1, squinting at his slightly slanting handwriting, the letters as tall and slim as I remembered the man himself to be.
The first letter my eye fell on was written to his mother on his arrival at the bustling United States Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, MD.
“We are plenty crowded here. Some fellow has a harmonica and is playing request numbers,” he wrote. “I shall request him to shut up.”
I was hooked. I spent the next hour and a half at that wooden table, browsing his letters and articles beneath a nearby portrait of him, gazing across from above the fireplace. He attended Campbell University (then Campbell College) in Buies Creek from 1942-1944, working on the school paper Creek Pebbles, and excelling in all his classes before being called up to serve in WWII.
His service in the navy was relatively quiet. After training in Bainbridge, he was assigned to Pacific duty in Papua New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands (“miles away from where the headlines are being made,” as he wrote in one Creek Pebbles column). He remained there for the duration of the war. While there, he wrote approximately twenty articles for a column in the Smithfield Herald about army and navy life, which he titled, “Of Mac and Joe”.
“I believe that you are interested in the man as well as his actions and would like to know how he’s faring, what he talks about, and hopes to find when he comes home,” he wrote in his first article in February of 1945.
After the war ended, the column’s title was changed to “Creech’s Corner”, which was also the name of his column when he served as editor of Creek Pebbles in the 1943-44 school year.
After his return home, he enrolled at Wake Forest College in Wake Forest, NC. He graduated magna cum laude in 1948 with a degree in English, following which he taught science, biology, chemistry, and journalism at Four Oaks High School for eight years. After this, he returned to his family heritage of carpentry, working with his father and building houses. He and his father built the Baptist parsonage on Main Street, diagonally across the street from his parents’ bungalow, which his father had built in 1927.
He continued to write and devoted a lot of his time to collecting information and artifacts from the history of Four Oaks. The fascination that was sparked when going through his grandfather’s photographs of Four Oaks townspeople never faded. He helped to start the Johnston County Historical Society in 1955 and served as its secretary-treasurer for the rest of his life. He began his “Four Oaks History” column for the Four Oaks News in 1977 and continued it until his death in 1993.
Realizing the time and closing the books, I returned them to Tonie at the front desk and as I prepared to leave, I asked her what she knew about Mr. James Bryan Creech. She had never known him personally but has been librarian in Four Oaks for the past six years.
“He spearheaded the fundraiser to have the library built in 1979,” she answered. “They built this building and any money that was leftover was put into a fund to run the library.” That fund has kept the library operating for almost 35 years.
“He was the one who was really behind the library to begin with,” she continued. “He had this vision.”
“Was there no library in Four Oaks up to that point?” I asked.
She nodded. “There was a library, but it was downtown in this little bitty building where the town hall is now. I think he foresaw that we would need a bigger building.”
Mr. Creech donated the land for the library and spent almost a year helping to build it. He also took apart the cabin that his grandfather was born in, which had fallen into disrepair on the family farm, and reassembled it on his property just behind the library. There, he kept many family artifacts and would reportedly go sit on the porch on Sunday afternoons, talking to whoever happened by. The cabin was originally built around 1845 by his paternal great-great grandfather, Henry Wright Strickland, and housed various members of the Creech family into the 1950s.
My dad, Ron Sloan, met him around 1978, not long after he and my mom bought their house on Maple Avenue across from my grandparents. I asked him to tell me some of his memories of “Mr. James Bryan”, as I’d called him since childhood.
Dad told me that early on in their life in Four Oaks, he’d needed some help installing some crown molding and asked my grandmother whom she would recommend. She pointed him in the direction of Mr. Creech, who came over and helped my father, teaching him how to cut the molding so it would fit neatly and snugly in the corners. Dad found Mr. Creech to be engaging and very interesting and he loved listening to his stories and learning from him as they worked. While hammering up molding one day, dad commented on the fact that Mr. Creech was left-handed.
“We were all born left handed,” Mr. Creech answered matter-of-factly. “When you first sin, you become right-handed.”
Dad laughed as he recounted Mr. Creech’s deadpan delivery.
“That was my first introduction to his humor, much of which I was to learn as I knew him through life. He had so many different stories that he shared with me over the years.” He paused and smiled, looking off to one side as if into memory. “One of my favorite stories was when I went by his house one night to bring him Krispy Kreme doughnuts (a favorite of his). There was always something he wanted to show you or tell you whenever you came by and that night he ushered me into the house. At that point in time he had lost his sight due to glaucoma and he couldn’t read, but he still knew where things were and could show you things he wanted you to see. He had shown me something in particular and told me about it and as I was standing there afterward, I looked down and saw this leather portfolio. I picked it up and said, ‘James Bryan, I just saw this thing here that says “Distinguished Alumni, Campbell College.’ He responded, ‘Yes, I think that just goes to show that if you give someone enough money, they will consider you distinguished’.”
Dad and I both laughed.
There was another portfolio beneath that one. Inside was his presentation certificate from Wake Forest College in Wake Forest, NC, where he was Phi Beta Kappa.
My dad continued, “I picked it up and said, ‘Golly James Bryan, Phi Beta Kappa!’ He said, ‘Well, I’m afraid that doesn’t represent any great accomplishment or effort.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? That’s an honors fraternity! At Wake Forest!’ There was a short pause and James Bryan responded, ‘The reason I say that is because schooling came rather easily to me. Learning was easy for me. Like drawing is for you.’”
I remember visiting Mr. James Bryan’s bungalow on the corner of Main Street and Sanders, sitting in the small parlor as he told stories that made my dad laugh. I could almost hear the deep monotone of his dignified voice.
“Many people would consider my life a great waste,” he continued that night to my dad. “To have had the education that I have and then look at what I did with it. They would consider me a failure. But in my eyes, I was a success. My goal and ambition was to do whatever I had to do in order to live in this little town, surrounded by friends and family and people I loved and who loved me. And I have managed to do just that.”