Season 10 Episode 5 | 53m 11s | Video has closed captioning.
In this episode, was this picture frame was crafted from wood from the Titanic, the Lusitania, or neither? Were these Woolworth signs at the 1960 Winston-Salem lunch-counter sit-ins? And, for 70 years the owner of these toy soldiers has wondered if the father of his childhood friend was a Nazi spy.
Aired: 08/06/12
[ explosion ] EDUARDO: Tonight on History Detectives: I want to know if my great-grandfather's picture frame came from the Titanic.
Let's go see if we have a piece of Jim Crow history.
Nazi spies, childhood friends gone missing, this story has it all.
Find the truth.
ELVIS COSTELLO: ♪ Watchin' the detectives ♪ ♪ I get so angry when the teardrops start ♪ ♪ But he can't be wounded 'cause he's got no heart ♪ ♪ Watchin' the detectives ♪ ♪ It's just like watchin' the detectives ♪ Hi, I'm Elyse Luray.
In 20th-century American history, there are certain words and events that fire the imagination.
The Titanic, Nazi spies, civil rights sit-ins, and the sinking of the Lusitania.
They're pinnacle events and moments that separate before and after.
Tonight, three stories that embody that idea.
Icons of the American imagination next.
[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: When I was about 7 years old, I found a photo picture frame on my grandmother's dresser.
It was thick and dark, it was carved.
It was heavy, it looked very old.
MAN: So I asked my grandmother what this was.
WOMAN: And my grandmother told me it belonged to my great-grandfather, who was on the cabling ships in the early part of the 1900s.
He responded to a distress call in the area.
And he came to the aid of a shipwreck.
And I always had a picture in my mind of my great-grandfather in a rowboat reaching into the water.
WOMAN: And he pulled the wood out of the water... - And he had it fashioned... - Into this picture frame.
into this picture frame.
That ship was called the Lusitania.
This ship was called the Titanic.
BOTH: I want to know if my great-grandfather's picture frame... came from the Lusitania.
came from the Titanic.
ELYSE: This is a first for me.
Usually I'm investigating one mystery, not two, and an artifact from the Titanic or the Lusitania?
That area is full of fakes.
I'm a little bit skeptical, because it's family folklore.
And usually family folklore doesn't pan out.
But I'm interested to see what they can tell me.
Okay, so this is the piece.
- This is the piece.
- ELYSE: Oh, nice.
It's a picture frame with two totally different stories about it.
And it all came from where?
It all came from my grandmother's stories.
Okay, so you're feeling that the family folklore - is that it's from the Titanic.
- Absolutely.
And you totally feel it's from the Lusitania.
So there's definitely some tension going on here, right?
A little bit, just... And you totally feel strongly one way, and you feel the other way?
It's our family feud.
And how long have you felt this way, the two of you?
All my life.
Yep, pretty much from when I was a little kid.
And you're not giving in to him, and you're not giving in to her?
- No.
- Nope.
Okay, tell me a little bit more about your great-grandfather, Francis Tierney.
Cathy and Rob are cousins.
In the early 1900s, their great-grandfather worked on ships out of Halifax, Nova Scotia, laying and repairing cable between Canada and England.
They heard that cable ships were some of the first on the scene after both the Lusitania and Titanic disasters.
He could've been there when the distress call came.
Who's in the pictures?
Here we have, this is Jean Tierney, our great-grandmother, who was Francis Tierney's first wife.
Okay, and who's this?
This is William Tierney, his son.
Okay, so what else do we have to go on?
Well, the one thing that we do have is a World War I medal, also from my great-grandfather.
Cathy suspects that her great-grandfather got this medal for going to the aid of the Lusitania.
It's missing its ribbons, though, right?
It is missing its ribbon.
My Aunt Jean, Robert's mother, during high school decided to make a necklace out of it.
She cut the ribbons off... - Oh, God!
- and put it on a necklace.
Tell me what you're hoping for.
Confirm everything I've always believed.
I would say the same, and then I would be right.
No!
And what about if she is right?
Are you going to be upset if it's from the Lusitania?
Find the truth.
Looks like I'm in the middle of a mystery family feud.
Even 100 years after it sank, it's hard to think of a ship more iconic than the Titanic.
And the Lusitania is almost as famous.
128 Americans were among the nearly 1,200 who died when the British ship was torpedoed in 1915 by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland.
The ship had been carrying large quantities of ammunition.
News of the attack and public anger helped spark America's entry into World War I.
If it did come from either two of these ships, it would be a pretty valuable piece of memorabilia.
Titanic memorabilia today is selling anywhere up from tens of thousands of dollars.
I'm going to try to take out the back of one of the photographs.
The oxidation and browning of the paper suggest this is a period piece.
It's definitely been in there for quite a long time.
The wood appears hand-carved, and it was almost certainly something before it was a picture frame.
There's these grooves here that are part of the original piece.
The cousins said that Francis Tierney sailed out of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Was he anywhere near either shipwreck?
Okay, so here's his obituary, and it says he was born in Halifax.
Ah, this is interesting: "the late Mr. Tierney brought the Lord Kelvin to Halifax from England during World War I."
Well, that's when the Lusitania was torpedoed.
He was an engineer on the cable ship Minia, which was one of the ships sent to pick up the bodies from the Titanic disaster.
But it's not clear if he was on the cable ship during the recovery.
What about the medal Cathy gave me?
I'm able to pull up some information from a naval research website.
The Order of the British Empire was awarded to Tierney for his service on cable ships during the war, but there's nothing about the Lusitania.
Colin Laroque is a dendrologist at the Mount Allison Dendrochronology Lab in New Brunswick.
Okay, so here's the artifact.
Could it have come from the Titanic?
What kind of wood was being used there?
What kind of wood was being used for the Lusitania?
Right off the bat I can look through the magnifying glass and see some of the longer rays that are very characteristic of oaks.
Colin says rays are nutrient lines that cut through the tree rings.
I couldn't see them at first, but under the microscope, the telltale markings are clear.
Now I see it.
Yeah, okay, so that's telling us now we know we have oak.
Colin had done some research and learned that both ships had oak fittings.
If we can establish if this wood was from Ireland or Scotland, that might tell us which shipyard it went to.
Why Ireland or Scotland?
Well, that's where the Lusitania was built, in Scotland.
And the Titanic was built in Belfast, Ireland.
Even though our artifact is small, incredibly, Colin says he might be able to figure out which forest in what country it came from.
If one was growing in Ireland, environments there would be slightly different than the environments growing in Scotland, and so that ring patterns might have a slight difference.
Using image scans of the frame, Colin measures the width of the tree rings.
Each ring reflects the amount of growth in a year, and the series of measurements create a pattern.
In a better growing season, it'll make a wider ring that'll go up higher.
In a poorer growing year, it'll make a narrower ring and be down below.
Colin compares our tree-ring pattern with profiles for the Irish and Scottish forests drawn from the International Tree-Ring Data Bank.
He says with these profiles, or fingerprints, we can find our forest.
Explain to me what I'm looking at.
Well, this is our first image of the Lusitania or the Scotland oak chronology in the blue and the picture frame measurements we have in the red.
And you can see that there is some similarities.
Okay, now what about the Titanic and Ireland?
If we go on to the next part of the puzzle, the Titanic and the Ireland, again, the long chronology is the blue and the red here is the picture frame once again, and now we have a lot more of the peaks and the valleys are starting to match up a lot closer.
Statistically, it's a better match and visually it's a better match.
So you're leaning towards the Titanic now.
Definitely I find stronger evidence for that.
He says it's not a sure thing, but in the battle of cousin versus cousin, it looks like Rob and the Titanic are pulling ahead.
I'm headed to the ghostly shores of Halifax, Canada, which became the final resting ground for so many Titanic victims.
I'm meeting Ken Marschall, a visual historian who was a consultant on James Cameron's movie.
Wow.
This is the piece that the people who own it believe it was either part of the Lusitania or it was from the Titanic.
Well, I've done a lot of work on Lusitania.
I've dived down to the wreck twice.
And as far as Lusitania goes, uh, the appearance of the wood, the contours of the carving don't appear to match the photographs that I have.
So Cathy's story is almost certainly wrong.
But that doesn't mean Rob is right.
Okay, what about the Titanic?
Ken says to figure that out, it's important to know some specific details of how the Titanic sank.
She smashes into a towering iceberg in a very unusual way: not straight on, but slicing along the side, causing the worst possible damage.
She could float with any three of her first four compartments flooded, and she went one compartment beyond that.
As the Titanic filled with water, it put incredible pressure on the center section.
As the ship was sinking, the bow was going deeper and carrying that weight down, the stern was rising higher, and Titanic kept tipping and tipping, and it eventually had to fracture.
The pride of the White Star Line was virtually snapped in two.
This whole section sort of in a V shape is where the fracturing all took place, and pieces came apart.
As Titanic plunged beneath the waves, the guts of the ship, especially wooden items, burst to the surface.
Ken notices something about our fragment which he thinks might be a clue.
Does this look straight and normal to you?
Um, it did.
Because I'm seeing an arc.
I see it now, right here.
Yeah, it is -- Yeah, I never noticed that.
It is distinctly curving, you can see it bowing.
It's not warped; there's thought involved in this.
This is not an accident.
Ken's not sure, but he says we may have a piece of something extraordinary: the Titanic's grand staircase.
We've got these wide routing lines the way the lower part of the oak connected with the top handrail.
To you, it does look like a railing?
It's very much a candidate.
Ken says there were actually two grand staircases on the Titanic.
Unfortunately, no photos of them exist, but he does have an image from the Olympic, the Titanic's sister ship that was almost identical.
The grand staircase simply is the most attractive, appealing, impressive space on Titanic.
Gold-plated highlights and the bronze cherub.
If this were from Titanic, there's a possibility that it would be from this location.
I would be very psyched if this were real.
Was Cathy and Robert's great-grandfather, Francis Tierney, on the Minia when it went to the aftermath of the Titanic disaster?
And did the Minia recover pieces of Titanic wood?
One person who may be able to help is Pat Teasdale.
Her grandfather was a Minia crew member and had arrived at the disaster site 12 days after the sinking.
I remember hearing him saying, "The old Minia, the old Minia, I was on the old Minia."
That sticks in my head from childhood.
Here's the piece.
Have you ever seen anything like this before?
Oh, my goodness.
"Oh, my goodness" why?
- This is amazing.
- Why?
I have something to show you which is very similar to this.
This resurfaced in the family about 1959, when my grandfather moved in with my parents and I.
This little picture frame appeared on his bedroom wall in our home.
He claimed it was from the Titanic.
The frame is smaller and appears to be from different wood, but the circular openings are a similar size and style, and the cardboard backing is virtually identical.
Wow, that's very similar.
That is a picture of my grandfather when he was studying wireless.
As her family story goes, Francis Dyke, a radio operator, had heard communications between the Minia and another recovery ship, the Mackay-Bennett.
But Pat never knew the details of his experience until after Francis died.
Pat discovered a grim letter at the Dartmouth Heritage Museum in Nova Scotia, written by none other than her grandfather.
"April 27, 1912, 2:20 a.m.
I am on watch now in the wireless room.
This is the most remarkable trip the old Minia has ever been on, as we are looking for bodies from the Titanic wreck.
We were up north on a cable repair when we heard she had sunk.
We found that the Mackay-Bennett had picked up over 200 bodies, J.J Astor's body and some other well-known people.
Astor had $10,000 and another man had a bag of diamonds hung around his neck.
We have been looking for bodies for the last four days and have only picked up 17.
The doctor and I are sleeping in the middle of 14 coffins.
The Titanic must've blown up when she sank, as we have picked up pieces of the grand staircase --" Wait, he picked up grand staircase wood?
That's what the letter says.
This is Francis Tierney, and that's his son, John.
Have you ever seen him before?
He looks a little familiar.
I have some photographs that I brought of my grandfather with some of his crew members on the Minia.
Okay, so let's see if we can find Francis.
One photo has an image that looks like Tierney.
Very similar facial features, aren't they?
Look at the nose, the eyes, the ears.
To me, it looks like it's the same person.
Yes, yes.
It appears Francis Dyke and Francis Tierney shared a life-altering experience on the Minia.
But do they both have Titanic relics from that day?
Pat has never authenticated her piece.
My office has learned that the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax has a collection of Titanic artifacts and documents.
Dan Conlin is a maritime historian and wreckwood expert.
He has seen all types of wreckwood from the disaster, real and imagined.
So Pat and I are now on a mission together.
Ah, what can I do for you?
We both have artifacts that we believe may have come from the Titanic.
Well, the background of the men involved is really important.
Dan shows us who exactly had signed onto the Minia for that historic voyage.
This is a crew agreement.
We generally call it a crew list.
You had to sign this or you didn't get paid.
So it lists every man aboard the Minia.
A very precisely dated document, too, so we know this is Minia at the time of Titanic.
- Can you find grandpa?
- Number seven, F.R.
Dyke.
Traditionally the engineers sign on last.
Okay.
So they're usually buried further.
Tierney.
The crucial date, January the 1st when he's signing on and June the 8th when he's signing off, so he was there when Minia did its epic Titanic voyage.
Dan explains what an emotional toll the recovery work took on the crew and the entire community of Halifax.
The fishing and ship-building town was no stranger to loss of life at sea, but the scale of the Titanic disaster left a deep scar.
The Minia and other ships worked over a week on the recovery effort.
These guys had worked really hard hauling these frozen corpses out of the water.
Some of them make their own wreckwood keepsakes.
And they all wanted to keep a little piece that would be their oral history prompt in generations to come to talk about what they did.
Here is my piece.
I'm hoping to prove that it came from the Titanic.
Just flip it over again, please.
The grooves and the markings on both picture frames catch Dan's eye.
Dan says he has something to show us.
- Wow!
- Wow!
I'm meeting Cathy and Rob on the Manhattan waterfront at the Hudson River Park's Pier 54, which was the Lusitania's final launching place and where the Titanic survivors were taken.
We promise at the end of this what?
The truth.
I explain how a dendrologist believed the oak had come from Ireland, not Scotland.
What does that mean?
Not good.
It's not the Lusitania.
Sorry, Cathy, it's not the Lusitania.
It doesn't prove it's the Titanic.
- It just rules out.
- ELYSE: No, not at all.
But I met this incredible woman named Pat.
She had this.
Oh, that's -- This is her grandfather.
- Wow.
- Wow.
And do you recognize the man next to them?
Yes.
- You found -- - That's Francis Tierney.
I just got goose bumps.
That's pretty wild.
How on earth did you find that?
Then Pat shows me this.
Do you know what that is?
It's another frame.
Have you ever seen another one before?
- ROB: No, no.
- CATHY: No.
It's very distinctive.
It's not quite proof enough yet.
So we turned to the Maritime Museum in Halifax.
ELYSE: I see, they look a lot alike.
This belonged to another cable ship crewman.
Similar use of tools, lathe work.
Well, that's exciting.
It's very exciting.
I smell the handiwork of William Parker.
We call him a wreckwood artist aboard the Minia.
Parker had a nice machine and carpentry shop on Minia, so he had the tools and the equipment to do this.
He wasn't making them to sell as souvenirs.
Mariners had done this for generations.
Parker knew this tradition, and he knew his shipmates, who'd done a really hard, difficult job of finding Titanic bodies would want some sort of personal keepsake.
Dan thinks all the evidence points to a conclusion.
It has all the hallmarks of the guy who carved them, and it fits the pieces of wood that we know were aboard Titanic, so I would have no doubt that these are from Titanic.
That's astounding.
I'm pretty blown away.
You were right.
[ laughter ] What part of the Titanic was it?
In my opinion, one can just easily imagine passengers gripping this as they rush up to the lifeboats on that fateful night.
This is a piece of the grand staircase from Titanic.
All the evidence points to it.
ELYSE: So my piece is the railing from the grand staircase.
- It's amazing.
- It's amazing.
It's not a myth.
It's not a myth.
My great-grandfather pulled that out of the ocean, and it was from the Titanic.
To be from the grand staircase is a whole different level.
It's humbling.
- It's amazing.
- CATHY: Yes.
Although Cathy and Rob say they would never sell it, William Parker's wreckwood pieces have sold for close to $20,000 and up.
This piece of the grand staircase could be worth much more.
You know, he got a distress call and he answered.
And that, to me, is what's important, him being heroic.
Yeah, I'm very proud.
I'm very thankful.
And that is a great feeling.
EDUARDO: Coming up, could these cherished toys be connected to a Nazi spy ring?
But first... My name is Matt Flynt.
I'm from Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The man that sold me the signs said these two signs came from the downtown Winston-Salem store, which I knew were the exact location of the 1960 sit-ins that ended segregated lunch counters, restaurants, and spread and helped the whole Civil Rights Movement.
I want to know if these two signs were actually from the Fourth and Liberty Woolworth's that hosted the Winston-Salem sit-in.
Signs are important.
Jim Crow was all about signs.
They burned crosses in front of people's homes as a sign.
"No blacks served here" as a sign.
Those signs gave meaning to some of the most degrading forms of human interaction that we know about.
Let's get busy here.
Tukufu, great to meet you.
Come on in.
Thank you very much.
Here are the signs.
So do you know much about the sit-ins in Winston-Salem?
Well, I know they began a week after the Greensboro Four.
The sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, grabbed headlines across the country.
Matt says the Winston-Salem protests are less well known but were the first in the state to win a victory for desegregated lunch counters.
Just knowing that they also took place in my own community and were successful is -- that's very important to me.
So what do you know about where these signs came from?
Well, the man I purchased them from used to clean all of the local Woolworth's.
And when they closed in the mid-'90s, he was able to retrieve them.
They were in a back room on the floor.
Matt was told his signs came from a Woolworth's on Fourth and Liberty Street.
That's where 22 protesters were arrested on February 23, 1960.
You can see where they would've been framed in something over a doorway.
Now you know this is a really profound historic moment.
1960, North Carolina is a pivotal space.
Things kind of lulled down since the "desegregating the schools" and all this stuff, and now, bam!
All it represents, the good, the bad, it happened here in Winston, and I just want to preserve it.
All right, 6 feet long, about 10 inches and a quarter going up and down.
So you mind if I just take some pictures of these?
Thank you very much.
Imagine, 50 years ago, for me to come in a restaurant like this would've been a revolutionary act.
WOMAN: ♪ I'm gonna sit at the welcome table... ♪ TUKUFU: There was this system called Jim Crow.
If you were an African American, you could not sit certain places, you could not live certain places.
I'm sitting here because they sat there.
I do know they had a sit-in in Winston-Salem.
I don't know much about the details of it, but that we should easily be able to find out.
My first stop is the local Forsyth County Public Library.
Librarian Molly Rawls offers to help me search their photo collection for images of the Fourth and Liberty Woolworth's store.
The sit-ins were covered extensively.
In fact, the protesters needed the media to highlight their struggle.
Okay, here it is.
"Protest against the practice of not giving Negroes service at sit-down food counters spread yesterday to Winston-Salem and Durham."
Here is the guy who started it all, Carl Matthews.
"The protest was started about noon at the S.H.
Kress Company."
This says Kress.
Matthew's signs are from Woolworth.
All right.
"Both Negro and white were arrested about noon today at the F.W.
Woolworth store at Fourth and Liberty Streets and charged with trespassing at white lunch counters."
Fourth and Liberty, that's the Woolworth's Matt thinks his signs are from.
But no pictures.
It's clear from these articles that the grassroots action led mostly by students and young people is spreading across the country and being heard in Washington, D.C., where Congress is considering civil rights legislation.
Here we go, a sit-in at the Woolworth's, and there's a sign.
Look at these letters, they're big.
These letters are huge.
The font and proportion of the letters are slightly different.
We have a Woolworth sign above their heads, but it looks nothing like our sign.
Maybe Matt's signs were in another part of the store.
Or maybe they weren't even hanging during this time.
"Lunch counters were closed at Kress, Walgreen's, and two downtown Woolworth stores."
Wait, there were two downtown Woolworth?
And both were occupied by sit-ins?
I'm not sure Matt knows this.
Maybe this photo wasn't from the store on Fourth and Liberty, where the arrests were made, but from another Woolworth's instead.
The caption doesn't say.
Molly was only able to locate one photo of the Liberty Street store from 1960, but it's from a parade, not a sit-in.
I'm going to show you what I found.
So most likely the signs would be the same in this image as they were during the sit-ins earlier in the year.
There is a sign there, and the sign is over the door.
Yes.
Molly shows me a photo of the other downtown Woolworth store from 1955.
This must be the second Woolworth's I read about.
So those do look like we've got a pretty good match.
I'd say.
It does look like it could be 6 feet.
- This is 1955.
- Yes.
And this is another store?
Yes.
And it's a possibility that these two signs are my signs.
It could be.
Matt told me the guy who sold these signs to him used to clean floors at all the local Woolworth's.
Maybe he mixed up the stores.
One person who might be able to unravel this is somebody who was there.
My researchers tracked down Carl Matthews, the leader of the Winston-Salem sit-ins.
He says he has personal photos that were never published.
Carl brought fellow protester Bill Stevens, one of the white college students arrested with him at Woolworth's.
We're meeting at the store on Fourth and Liberty, which is currently for sale.
We go in the side entrance.
This is where the black stand-up counter was.
Uh-huh.
Black people would get their food and be able to eat it here.
Around the corner was the whites-only counter that Bill and Carl fought to desegregate, but now there's no trace of it or any signage.
Sensing the importance of the movement and fearing the possibility of violence, Carl hired a photographer to document what he was about to do.
That's a picture of the counters.
Being roped off.
On February 8th, Carl entered the Kress five-and-dime store.
He had been inspired by the four protesters in Greensboro, who had taken their seats a week earlier.
They had done something that I knew was necessary.
I went and took a seat.
It seemed like the whole world came to a standstill.
The waitress says, "We don't serve colored here."
I says, "I know."
I heard a voice say, "There's a nigger sitting down at the counter."
And then everybody began to look and to buzz and to buzz and to buzz.
"What's wrong with this nigger?"
"Let's kill this nigger."
There was one white person, and he did this to me, and I closed my eyes because I wasn't going to hit back.
Why?
Because if I had hit back, I would've set us back as black people.
This form of active nonviolence championed by civil rights pioneers like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks inspired Matthews and the entire sit-in movement.
And I had been praying all the time.
After I finished the 23rd Psalm, I walked to the door, and I felt 10 feet tall, because there had been no violence, no bloodshed, just progress.
Although I don't see any images of our signs, Carl's photographs and story makes the protesters' courage and confrontations very real.
We would go from one store to another store, and we would close them down.
What do you mean, you closed those counters down?
- They stopped serving.
- They stopped serving.
- That's the way they responded.
- TUKUFU: Okay.
And our response said we will close them down every day until they serve us.
For 107 days, Carl and some 500 local blacks took turns sitting in.
And when do you get involved in the movement?
I was a student at Wake Forest, and a couple weeks after Carl first sat down, a couple of us in the class thought, well, maybe we could join them.
Mm-hmm.
I said I do not trust them, because we don't know what their purpose is.
So one of the fellas says, "Well, why don't you talk with them?"
About five of them, we invited them over to my house, and in the five was his lady friend, Margaret Dutton.
Okay.
And she was so convincing, and she said, "We'll march with you."
And I said, "But, you know, somebody likely try to kill us downtown."
She says, "If they try to kill us, we'll all go down together.
Bill explains how white students from Wake Forest joined the sit-in right here on February 23rd.
My fiancée, Margaret, was one of the ones that sat down.
And she ordered pie and something to drink, then slid it over to the Winston-Salem State Teacher's College student who was sitting next to her.
They realized they'd been tricked, because a Negro had been served.
And it seemed like instantly the police were here.
We said, "Well, we're not leaving."
And so we were escorted to the county jail.
In other words, we were arrested.
We were arrested.
"Escorted," that's too soft a word.
Didn't escort us, they arrested us.
Well, they took us over to the county jail, they fingerprinted us.
- So you were arrested.
- We were arrested.
Bill says although the events of that day are seared in his memory, the signage around him is not.
No, I can't say that I have seen it, but it does seem to me to have some symbolic value in that we're looking through that sign and seeing the future.
On May 25, 1960, after 107 days of protest, Carl took his seat one more time and made history.
I think it was the same seat that I had spent those six hours on, and I ordered a drink.
After I finished the drink, she took the glass and threw it in the garbage can.
And I just got up and walked out, and that was the end of that.
But you had effectively desegregated the counters in Winston-Salem.
That's right.
By the fall of 1960, the North Carolina sit-ins had spread widely to some 80 cities across the south.
I'd love to be able to tell Matt that the demonstrators walked under his signs, but Carl's photographer had focused on the human drama.
Before I go, let me just check out the front of the store.
I mean, if we look at the sign up here, everything is -- you know, is as it was.
All the letters are gone, and the only thing remaining is the diamond up there, but you can see where the F.W.
Woolworth Company was.
And you have the awning, the original awning.
Matt believes that his signs came from above the doors.
He thought they were hanging above the doors or they were framed above the doors.
But there's no frame in that window.
And so there's no evidence for us to confirm that our sign was here.
Oh, man, check this out.
Matt, I want to thank you for allowing us to pursue this investigation.
You know, the sit-ins were powerful because they changed, really, a lot about what we think about each other.
You know, part of what segregation was about is so that two individuals, one looking like you and one looking like me, would not occupy the same space.
I tell Matt that the best photograph I'd found of a sign that looked like his came from a different Woolworth's where there had been no arrests.
Those signs look just like yours.
But as I left the Liberty Street store, I remembered that Molly Rawls had shown me a photograph with a barely visible sign on the facade.
Our sign needs a frame, and here we have a frame.
So let's take the measurements here.
Voila, 6 feet.
Let's see here... and 10 and a quarter.
The measurements are right.
It's very clear to me that your signs could've fit in that frame in 1960, could've been in there February 23rd, when they dragged those people off to jail.
Wow.
So what do you think about your -- [ Matt exhales sharply ] Your glass signs now?
I guess I'm kind of speechless right now, but... they are -- obviously serve more than just a piece of glass or a sign that stood over a door.
They are a symbol for civil rights.
So thank you so much for all your work.
- Thank you.
- Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Two months after Carl Matthews sat down and was served at a Winston-Salem Kress five-and-dime, Greensboro desegregated their lunch counters on July 25, 1960.
That same year, some leaders of the sit-in movement met at Shaw University in North Carolina to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
SNCC would be a leading voice in the increasingly powerful and volatile civil rights movement, starting voting drives in the Deep South, participating in the Freedom Rides, and helping to organize the 1963 March on Washington.
EDUARDO: And now our final story.
My name is Jim Wark.
I grew up in Detroit.
I got these soldiers sometime in World War II from a friend named Fritz Thomas.
His dad used to go to Germany every summer before the war, and he would bring back these soldiers.
Fritz would occasionally sell me one or two.
Well, everything changed on a summer day.
This was probably 1943.
The newsboys were yelling, "Extra!
Extra!
Nazi spy ring broken in Detroit."
To my shock, it was Fritz's dad, Fred Thomas.
That very evening, I went over to Fritz's house.
That's the last time I saw Fritz Thomas.
Are these soldiers the only link that is left from a Nazi spy ring?
Wow, Nazi spies, childhood friends gone missing.
This story has it all.
EDUARDO: These are fantastic.
What do you know about these toys?
Fritz had this collection that his dad brought him home from Germany on his trips over there before the war.
He probably had 100, maybe 200.
Oh, my.
You can see on the base they're stamped "Lineol, Germany."
Yeah, I can make that out, Germany.
Okay, do you have any idea what Dr. Thomas was doing in Germany at the time?
He wasn't going to Germany to buy toy soldiers, I'm sure of that.
When you hear that your best friend's father is a Nazi spy, it makes an impression.
I'll bet it does.
We had no indication or suspicion that there was any Nazi connection.
We didn't even think of the family as German.
What happened to Fritz?
I don't know.
After that, I never saw Fritz again.
So these are the only connection you still have with your childhood friend.
Yes.
Eduardo, if you could find out what Dr. Thomas was doing in Germany on these trips.
Was he meeting with Nazi officials, Nazi co-conspirators?
I've heard stories about German efforts to spy on the United States.
Some of them are really quite celebrated.
If this story really happened the way that Jim remembers, that information has got to be out there.
All right, let's see.
I could clearly make out the imprint of Germany at the bottom, Lineol, the name of the company.
And they're painted in different colors.
One side, of course, would be Germany.
The other side, I'm guessing, represents England.
But I don't think these toys are really going to tell me much.
The real mystery is the story that he told about this spy ring that was operative in this area.
Jim remembers newspaper headlines screaming about a Detroit spy ring busted in the summer of 1943.
I'm guessing this would have been a front page story.
I'm not finding anything, but it is clear why Nazi spies wanted information on Detroit.
Its factories were the industrial muscle of the United States war effort, with Ford, GM, and Westinghouse churning out artillery, chemicals, and aircraft during World War II.
August 28th... Whoa, this is it, this is it.
August 25, 1943.
"Six seized in city as German agents."
Ah, here is a picture of Dr. Fred W. Thomas.
The newspaper account is sensational.
It reports that Dr. Thomas, a Detroit obstetrician, was charged with spying on Westinghouse factories manufacturing war materials.
If convicted, he faced the death sentence.
Online, I come across a second news story.
There's a headline here that says "Beautiful Counter-Spy Aids FBI in Roundup of Ring."
Thomas was accused of passing on information to a glamorous Canadian-born Nazi spy, Grace Buchanan-Dineen.
Unfortunately for Dr. Thomas, she had secretly begun working for the FBI and was now reporting on Thomas's alleged spying.
Counter-spy?
I hate to say it, but the plot thickens.
There's no mention here of Thomas traveling to Germany, but the story does make clear that he was a supporter of an American-based pro-Nazi organization.
Listen to this, it says, "Dr. Thomas, born in Fresno, of German ancestry, was described as, quote, 'an important contact of members of the German-American Bund.'"
The German-American Bund operated openly in the pre-war years.
Thousands attended the rallies and marches.
But being a supporter of the Bund doesn't make you a spy.
Some prominent Americans were known for their sympathetic views towards Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Henry Ford, for example.
Charles Lindbergh.
The Bund had their largest support, it seems, in the Upper Midwest, where there were large German-American communities.
During wartime, concerns about enemies on our shores were both real and imagined.
There were several instances of confirmed German spying.
But fears about sabotage and espionage led to some very questionable government decisions, most notorious being Japanese relocation camps.
Was Dr. Thomas a Nazi spy or a sympathizer caught up in an anti-German paranoia?
I've asked the office to pull FBI or court records of the case.
Meanwhile, I want to show the soldiers to toy expert Norman Joplin and learn exactly when the figures were made.
I'm very eager to hear what you can tell me about these toys here.
Well, I can tell you that these are German manufacture.
Interestingly enough, these are a little frowned upon now in Germany.
They're not allowed to be sold on the open market because of the political connections to them.
Because of the representations of Nazi Germany?
Precisely.
They were definitely used as propaganda material.
They made effigies of the Nazi leaders.
An example of that is... this Hitler.
It has a movable arm.
Oh, my gosh, I had no idea that Nazi German leaders became action figures.
I'm curious about the composition of this.
What are they made of?
It's actually a mixture of sawdust and glue molded around a wire armature.
These are essentially handmade, each one of these?
Yes.
It says here Lineol underneath.
What can you tell me about that?
Lineol started to make figures like this in 1904-1906, right up to the end of World War II.
These examples here were probably made between 1936 and 1944.
This period before the war is when Jim remembers Dr. Thomas traveling to Germany each summer.
These would certainly be for sale in New York, in the Midwest, in Chicago.
Really?
Is there any way to determine whether these toys were purchased in Germany or here in the United States?
None whatsoever.
There's no way of telling by actually looking at these pieces where they were purchased.
They could have been purchased literally anywhere.
It's quite possible, of course, that the toys had nothing to do with Dr. Thomas' alleged spying.
But what was Fritz's father doing in Germany immediately before the war, and how had the spy case played out?
- Come on in.
- Thank you.
Author Margit Liesche obtained a large number of Dr. Thomas' FBI files while researching her novel Lipstick and Lies, based on wartime spying in Detroit.
Oh, wow.
Amazing.
Have you ever seen anything like this?
I have not.
Wow.
Margit explains that her research included hundreds of pages of Justice Department files, which detailed how the FBI turned the Hungarian-trained Nazi spy into a double agent.
The FBI had been working with Grace Buchanan-Dineen for a year and a half.
They were ensconced in an apartment next to hers.
They recorded conversations, including conversations with Dr. Thomas.
By the summer of 1943, the FBI was ready to proceed with their case.
And so in this August 24, 1943 press release, they've provided background on each of the accused spies.
According to the FBI, Dr. Thomas gave Dineen information about factories making war materials.
He also was giving her the chemicals to make secret ink so she would be able to communicate with her handlers back in Germany.
And on one occasion, Dr. Thomas told her "he felt justified in giving information to be relayed to Germany because, even though he were apprehended as a spy, he would 'go to his doom' feeling he had done what was right and proper, for he thought the Nazi cause would predominate and assist in making the world a better place for his children."
The Department of Justice's press release gives credit throughout to Mr. Hoover, the FBI's famously media-hungry director.
This press release appears to be the only source for some newspaper articles, with phrases repeated word for word.
But was the doctor guilty?
A trial was held in 1944.
Neither Margit nor my office were able to obtain the court records.
But during the trial, newspapers reported more detail of Dineen's testimony against Dr. Thomas.
They also discussed the Willow Run bomber plant.
That was a brand-new factory that they built.
They took Ford's ingenuity in building cars and transformed that into making bombers.
Okay.
And they talked about how to infiltrate that plant, perhaps sabotage.
Dr. Thomas claimed innocence, but he was found guilty and sentenced to a 16-year prison term.
The verdict was later reversed on a legal technicality.
But what had the FBI learned about Thomas' trips to Europe?
Had the toys perhaps been bought as part of a cover?
Was Dr. Thomas traveling back and forth to Germany every year?
They had begun compiling a dossier on Dr. Thomas in 1938.
Okay.
He was under surveillance, and they would have made note of that.
Margit suggests Jim may have been mistaken.
Dr. Thomas had been an exchange surgeon in a German hospital in the late 1920s.
But even though the FBI was watching him closely, they never mentioned any suspicious trips to Europe.
And you didn't find anything about that.
Nothing about that, no.
Okay, so we can confirm then that there's no evidence that he went back and forth.
The toys were likely nothing more than harmless playthings.
But I still want to know what happened to Dr. Thomas and Fritz.
This is an office memorandum to the assistant attorney general, and it is the subject United States v. Thomas.
EDUARDO: Do you recognize where we are?
That's the way I remember it looking.
This is where Fritz lived.
It brings back memories of walking up to the front door there and the last time that I saw him.
I tell Jim that the toys may well have been bought in the United States.
We found no proof that Dr. Thomas made suspicious trips to Nazi Germany.
Interesting.
Okay.
But what had happened to the father of his childhood friend?
In the winter of 1947, the Department of Justice made a sudden u-turn.
This is an office memorandum to the assistant attorney general, subject: United States v. Thomas.
"I think this case should be closed.
There's a serious question whether the information obtained by Thomas was not in the public domain."
So the information that Thomas and Dineen were circulating was possibly public information, already in the newspapers, part of public discussion.
Exactly, exactly.
The government questioned if they could win a retrial.
One of their attorneys even doubted that the evidence had justified the original trial.
And now their potential star witness, Grace Buchanan-Dineen, was no longer cooperating.
She was deported.
The government dropped its case against Dr. Thomas.
That is remarkable.
It wasn't the strongest case that the government had.
I don't think his side of the story ever came out in the media.
You've uncovered the whole story.
Dr. Thomas died in 1986.
His son had a long and distinguished career as an environmental reporter.
Fritz passed away, unfortunately, in 1999.
And there's his picture, Fred Thomas, Jr. That makes me sad to think that I never reconnected with Fritz.
I'm sure.
Well, I guess he turned out all right, that's good.
- He did turn out all right.
- Yeah.
Good to hear.
There's one other thing I want to share with you.
The owners of this home moved in in 1970.
This was after the Thomases sold it.
And the homeowner would like you to have this little item that they found in the backyard.
Oh.
Pass that on to you.
Oh, what a surprise.
Now, this is the kind of toy soldiers that we were used to.
I think it's a reasonable assumption that that belonged to Fritz.
The fact that somebody found that in the garden is just -- is overwhelming.
Can I keep that, Eduardo?
You may absolutely keep it, yes.
ELVIS COSTELLO: ♪ Watching' the detectives ♪ ♪ It's just like watchin' the detectives ♪
