On August 7, 1972, Negro League ballplayer and Rocky Mount native Walter Fenner “Buck” Leonard was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Born in 1907, Leonard was forced to quit school at age 14. **To help support his mother and five siblings following his father’s death, young Leonard worked at a local hosiery mill, as a shoeshine and later for a railroad while playing semi-pro baseball for the Rocky Mount Elks and Rocky Mount Black Swans.
On August 7, 1945, country singer and WBT radio personality Fred Kirby of Charlotte wrote the hit song “Atomic Power.” Kirby was so moved by the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima the previous day that he was inspired to write the song comparing God’s power to that of the bomb and warning of the misuse of such power.
Later popular versions of the song would also include reference to Nagasaki, which was bombed on August 9, 1945.
On August 6, 1918, Diamond Shoals Lightship No. 71 was shelled by a German submarine while anchored off Cape Hatteras. The lightship, which had just sent a wireless message about the submarine’s shelling of the USS Merak, served as a beacon at sea to warn mariners of the dangerous shoals that formed off the coast.
On August 6, 1945, Major Thomas Wilson Ferebee, a U.S. Army Air Corps bombardier and Mocksville native, dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.
The 12-man crew aboard the B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, took off for Hiroshima at 2 a.m. from Tinian Island in the western Pacific. Ferebee, then 26 and a veteran of 64 combat missions, was napping and initially did not hear the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr., brief the crew about their top-secret mission.
On August 6, 1944, Greensboro native George E. Preddy Jr., the top P-51 Mustang ace during World War II, downed six planes on a single day, earning a Distinguished Service Cross—the nation’s second highest award—in the process.
On August 5, 1889, Cullowhee Academy, a private school that was the predecessor of Western Carolina University, opened with an enrollment of 18. The school quickly prospered and closed the year with 100 students.