By Catherine M. Welch
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/whqr/local-whqr-506722.mp3
Wilmington, NC – Our series Mondays with Claude pulls out of the archive some of Claude Howell's most beloved commentaries along with reflections from the people who knew him best.
Born in 1915, Claude Howell was a Wilmington resident who lived most of his life in room #44 of the historic Carolina Apartments.
A painter who captured on canvas the light and life of North Carolina,Claude Howell was widely considered the Dean of North Carolina painting.
But Claude was also a compulsive writer,a man who starting at the age of 10 meticulously wrote journals filled with everything he did and said. More than 300 of those journal entries were turned into commentaries recorded for this station.
Claude loved to paint the fishermen of Okracoke at work pulling in or mending their nets. Curator of the Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum, Anne Brennan, was researching a piece of Claude's art done in 1940, when she stumbled across a journal entry about Claude's first trip to Okrakoke.
Claude piled his mother, his friend and his friend's mother into an old Ford and traveled up the dusty roads of North Carolina until the car broke down.