Mrs. Eleanor Hunt was born and spent most of her early years in Berea , Kentucky . She said that World War II had a huge impact on her life. She married at 19 in 1944. This made it inevitable that World War II would play a role in her early married life. Her husband was in the Navy stationed on the West Coast, and Mrs. Hunt took a troop train from Kentucky to San Diego to meet up with her husband. The day she took the train she said she was a little apprehensive since it was full of soldiers going to war, but she said the troops could not have been kinder. While her husband was in the Pacific Area during the war, Mrs. Hunt completed her college at Berea . She said several times that “all the young men were gone during the war.” She replied that the bombing of the Japanese cities with the atom bomb saved millions of American lives. At the end of the war Mr. Hunt returned home and completed medical school.

       In 1969, Dr. and Mrs. Hunt chose to move to Wilmington to set up his practice and raise their family of four children. Being able to sail their sailboat was a prime motivation for the move. Mrs. Hunt implied it was hard to get the Navy out of a sailor.

Eleanor said when she moved to Wilmington that she knew no one. Her next door neighbor Oma Cavanaugh invited her to a Garden Club meeting, and then a year later sponsored her as a member. Mrs. Hunt really enjoyed meeting the women in the club and she became involved as it is obvious in her home that she loved gardening.

        Eleanor served first as secretary of the Cape Fear Garden Club but the year the club celebrated its 60^th anniversary no one would allow themselves to be nominated for president. Mrs. Hunt heard about this at a board meeting at the Cape Fear Country Club which was taking place just before the 60^th celebration with a regional dignitary here for the meeting. Eleanor does not remember why but she spoke up and said she would be president. She said she was the first volunteer president.

          In 1975 she began her term as president of the club. In trying to get committee chairs she had difficulty when she called the ladies because at the time first names of the women were not listed in the yearbook as they were listed only as 'Mrs. So-in-So". Eleanor thought it was embarrassing to call the potential committee members 'Mrs. So-in-So'. As one of her first acts as president she had the first names of the members in the yearbook along with their married names. She said when she went into office that meetings were not very well attended, and she decided that the programs needed more variation. So she contacted a lady she knew in South Carolina who was a well known flower arranger to do a program. The lady said she would be glad to come but that her fee was $250. Since the Garden Club did not have a budget for the programs, Mrs. Hunt offered the lady a week at her beach cottage. With that the lady came and did the program and 125 members attended the meeting. Mrs. Hunt also said that she and Joan Pence had a meeting with the Azalea Festival Committee and over some objections managed to talk them out of getting a percentage of the Garden Tour tickets. She said they agreed to give the Azalea Festival Committee a reasonable contribution from the Garden Tour.

            Mrs. Hunt was also instrumental in getting the Arboretum off the ground. She said at the time people told her there would never be enough volunteers to keep the Arboretum going. But today it is largely kept up by volunteer master gardeners.

         Mrs. George Chadwick, better known as Jo, was born in Ivanhoe , N.C. in June of 1924. When asked if she remembered the Depression, Mrs. Chadwick said she had known that others were having a difficult time, but that because she lived on a farm in Bladen County she did not feel the effects as much. On December 7^th, 1941 Mrs. Chadwick was a student at Peace College in Raleigh . On that awful day in American History, Jo remarked that she had walked with Peace College students to the Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh for a concert of the NC Symphony. The Peace students thought something had happened on their walk back to campus as they saw groups of people standing together and talking, but when they got back to the campus and heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed the girls were distraught and emotional wondering if their brothers and boyfriends might be sent to war. The rules at Peace were very strict then compared to what happens today, said Mrs. Chadwick. She remarked that to go to a football game at N.C. State even in the afternoon, the girls had to be chaperoned. They could not go off campus alone.

           Jo joined the Cape Fear Garden Club in 1963. She said that people joined more for social reasons than for gardening reasons. The club had a great many members then as it does now, but the members then were not as active in doing things as the club is today. Jo said she had been vice-president, recording secretary, and treasurer, but never the president. Twice she was slated to be president but both times events occurred in her personal life which prevented her from serving. She revealed that when she joined the club that the ladies wore hats and gloves at the meetings. Once she was the chairman of the Hospitality Committee and she only had three members on the committee, but the refreshment table then was not as elaborate as it is now. She said that one time when the Garden Party to open the Garden Tour was held at J. D. Causey’s, that it looked very threatening weather-wise. Her daughter Beth and friends were working on the frozen juices for the punch in the kitchen preparing to set it out, and she told them to forget it - that it was raining. To her surprise the crowds of people stood in the rain to get their punch and cookies! She also mentioned that most of the time she has been in the Garden Club that the meetings have taken place in churches-St. John’s Episcopal, Grace United Methodist, and First Christian Church. She told the story that one time at First Christian, the Garden Club ladies had to get their husbands to put paper up on the windows there so that the club program could be seen as they were having a slide show that day. One last story that Mrs. Chadwick told had to do with the 50^th Anniversary of the Azalea Garden Tour. Besides the club president Diane Lynch, the State President, the District Chairman, and three Azalea Belles, the most senior members of the Cape Fear Garden Club were asked to be on the float sponsored by the Garden Club with the financial help of local merchants. Those senior members were Dot Bryant, Mrs. Lamar McIver, and Mrs. Jo Chadwick. Mrs. Chadwick said it was a highlight in her tenure in the Garden Club because she had the opportunity to wave at the crowds watching the parade. She giggled about being an older lady on a float with all those young girls!