[mellow music] - Coming up on "Best of Our State", a hauntingly beautiful art installation takes center stage and we'll head to Eastern North Carolina to discover how our state helped high in the sky for World War II.

Join us for "Best of Our State".

We dip into treasured stories for a look at all the beauty and character of North Carolina.

I'm Elizabeth Hudson, editor in chief of "Our State" magazine.

From a childhood of backwoods romping and fort building to world renowned environmental artist, we followed Patrick Doherty's creative process as his hauntingly beautiful art installation grows from the grounds of Gilford College.

[mellow music] - When I look for saplings, I look for something that's flexible and has good color.

- This is sweet gum.

- I need different kinds of saplings.

I need little saplings that I can use to kind of bind things together.

- We, we'd probably be able to use them.

The maples like this one are are favored.

- Okay.

- The poplars are just too brittle.

- I need some really larger ones that I can use as structural pieces.

And then I need lots of medium size ones.

We're gonna cut these gums and then by spring, they'll start back up again.

So we're not really rooting them out, we're more like doing a massive pruning.

If we don't go ahead and gather a certain amount then there's this kind of false sense of security.

Like, Oh, we must have enough.

Well, we need about a tractor trailer load of stick.

- It's kind of the golden opportunity.

It's nice to come out here and work with a contemporary artist and get a little bit closer, look at their process.

- It's inspiring.

It's like I, it makes me want to go out and be creative.

- I think that's what's really interesting about what he does.

No two that he does are the same.

- Well, I'm trying to forget my last one that I just finished four days ago in Palo Alto.

[laughs] - Yeah, I was astounded.

I said, How can you do this?

It's like art on demand.

- Adds to the drama and also to the pressure that I have to come up with something great.

And as at this moment, I'm not really clear what that is.

- We know the area on campus where it's going to go.

As far as the shape or configuration, we don't know.

- Everybody looked askance as we kept running over the lawn with the truck and dumped the sticks on the ground and they thought, well the school's up to something, up to no good.

You know, that's the art department, isn't it?

You know how they are.

But our job is to transform a backyard material into something that has credibility.

After an early career in hospital administration, I decided that I really wanted to be a sculptor.

So I ended up down at the University of North Carolina.

I started hauling sticks down to the art lab.

At one moment I made this kind of body wrap out of really small sticks and I took it down to a student show.

That kind of set me on a new mark of thinking, well maybe I could use sticks to build things.

[melancholy music] Because this is the very center of campus, I thought about building some kind of core.

Our middle needs to be back, maybe right in here, something.

But yesterday someone found a little yellowjacket hive.

It's gonna be the number of circles that makes it, so we just want to pin that line, and had all these little individual cells.

This is the outer edge right here at two and a half feet that you could find a center and draw a circle.

And so that gave rise to trying to build something.

Our core is these little individual cells that are acting as kind of a big unit 'cause it's a little tower-like affair.

Then they'll all conglomerate as this kind of central core thing.

- All right.

- At the beginning there's always this drama of building.

And the first bit of it is that you don't know what you're doing.

I'm, I'll get a a feel for this in a minute.

This has just gotta go in one of the hulls and your sponsors are a little edgy and wondering if they've made a terrible error.

Yeah, maybe it could go in there.

We'll see.

But I'm used to working much more intuitively.

- Is that the way you want it put in there?

- I could make a little drawing.

But after we get started, just throw the drawing away.

- So let's straighten this up a little bit.

- 'Cause what I really want is this interplay between what you see and what it makes you feel and how to react to that.

- You can see it takes a bunch of sticks to do this.

Generally all my work is built within a three-week time period.

I have to plan my life and I want to do one sculpture right after another.

So I need a definite starting point and a definite finishing point.

I'm at a new place each month and then I take one weekend off and one week a month.

[sticks clattering] It's really great to have volunteers help you.

- Better watch your feet.

- At first they might be a little uncertain but my theory is they need permission.

- What do you like?

Do you like those little ones you've been working with?

- Yeah, those are nice.

Thank you.

- I have this kind of concept that children have to kind of shadow life of our hunting and gathering past.

When they pick up a stick, there's just some kind of information there that they connect with, their weapon, their tool, their piece of a wall.

It's an imaginative object.

I've taken all these kind of traditional ways of dealing with sticks and try to turn 'em to my own artistic end.

I think working something into a site is one of my stronger points.

Sites that would be really provocative, sites that would provide an element of surprise and thought, well, you know, this is an underutilized site.

Nobody ever thought of putting a sculpture, but if you did, how to tag into some subliminal peripheral information that's in the site and tie the sculpture to that.

The idea of building something that really captures people's imagination is where I'm going.

[mellow music] As things get set up in the work and you know what the parameters are, you're working towards it.

People learn to do the work.

- Sorry that ran off.

Sorry.

- You have a good crew that develops as a kind of a fighting force.

- This angle is, this one is just being really stubborn.

All right, I got it.

- At that point, everyone just relaxes and there's a kind of quality that is imparted to the sculpture because of that.

Some of its best parts are being developed during that moment when everyone comes together as a real crew.

- Everybody's doing different things.

Like one person's doing these circles up here.

[indistinct] I'm getting busy up here.

[laughs] - And some people are doing the archways.

It seems a lot like drawing.

Like if you have all the lines going in one way it's not as interesting.

If you have them kind of overlapping and crisscrossing.

- There's gonna be a doorway that people can walk through and you'll see the little windows also.

- Every single time one stick crosses another, that's a decision that somebody's made.

Somehow all those decisions come together in, in the grand scheme.

[mellow music] - In general, people think of the dark in some ways as ways to slip into a kind of anonymity so that you don't really feel like people can get you or that you're vulnerable at all.

Some people have a different set of associations with going outdoors or maybe walking in the woods.

If you're afraid of the dark or when you dream, you dream of forests that are larger than life that might swallow you up.

You might feel a certain amount of threat when you look at my work.

[eerie music] [music continues] There's always the point that you feel like, oh my, will we ever finish, but we are making some pretty good progress.

And today we happen to be up here on the top doing our tower tops.

- Just tie this right over here.

- So like this one is gonna be about this tall, I guess.

- I'm sure glad you were around down for that one.

I was afraid to get out here.

We had all this limbing coming up from these things that were started way down on the ground.

Those would not bend evenly.

So we've gone back in with this red maple and we've put these ribs in there that will bend over equally all the way around.

So that gives us this nice round shape.

Ella's working on this.

When she's getting it, you can feel how strong it is now.

- Might be stuck in here a while.

[little children talking] [weird music] - Well, I would say the mythical quality in these objects that I build really has to do, one with sticks are connected to momentum, they're connected to the deep woods, they're connected to all kinds of little things that have captured our imagination.

These configurations give a sense of momentum.

So when you look at these objects, you imagine that you're seeing something that's not really manmade, that it might have been found somewhere.

It might have been a natural occurrence.

Resonates with the forces of nature like wind and water, kind of sense of flowing motion that we have in our mind that belong to the natural world.

When we were almost finished we were trying to put our last finishing touches on it.

A student stopped, a faculty stopped, people just flooded around it and finally we just said, that's it.

We, that must be good enough.

I love it.

I think it might be one of of my best sculptures.

I always like the one that I've just finished.

Partly it's that we've had the amount of labor and drudge on it to actually get it finished.

So I think that the general person that comes onto the Gilford campus is really gonna be excited by it.

The people that come and see 'em, they often are longing from the very first to have them last forever.

My sculptures last about two years.

You get one great year, one pretty good year and the people say, well can't you treat this work in some way?

Can't you make it last?

And so I think that adds a certain quality to the sculpture itself in that it can't last.

And so you have to enjoy it like you might a dance or a nice garden.

You have to enjoy it during its lifetime.

And that kind of finality that you are anticipating I think adds to the quickness and the desirability ultimately of the work.

- Just south of Elizabeth City sits a monumental yet little-known piece of our state's history.

Here's the story of how US Navy blimps helped turn the battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats and lifted our nation to victory.

[dramatic music] - Not far from where the Atlantic ocean washes our coast, not far from our marshlands so profuse with wildlife, just inland where stands of pine begin their march steadily west, a huge manmade shape rises from the landscape, appearing through breaks in the loblollies, where the Pasquotank River widens into Albemarle Sound, looming, towering like a cathedral in the pines.

But this building was made to house the tools of war during a time of rising threat in our nation's history.

Even if you're intimately familiar with this place and come here to work every day, when your eyes first perceive the immensity of this vast indoor space, they find it hard to pinpoint reality.

You can't help but be awestruck even when you finally get it and decide that what you're seeing actually exists.

You may still ask why.

By the time the US officially entered World War II in December, 1941, the German undersea menace that had been developed during World War I was well established.

Convoys across the North Atlantic were being attacked by submarines, seemingly at will.

Millions of tons of shipping and many thousands of sailors and merchant seamen, along with desperately needed war material headed for Europe went to the bottom.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had words for the Germans.

He called their U-boats, the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.

Winston Churchill simply referred to them as dastardly villains.

Most North Carolina residents were largely unaware of the threat lurking not far off our state's beaches.

Locals sometimes watched in horror as German subs sank ships within sight of their homes.

To keep news of the German sub successes close to home, an influx of mail from the government warned coastal people about loose lips sinking ships.

- No matter how long it may take us, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.

[audience applauds and cheers] - Something had to be done about the subs lurking off our coast.

In fact, several months prior to the US entering the war, construction already had begun on a behemoth steel hanger southeast of Elizabeth City.

The giant building was designed to house lighter-than-air patrol craft that would be used to buttress the Atlantic fleet's anti-submarine capability around Cape Hatteras.

The giant hangar at Weeksville harbored a secret weapon of sorts, one that eventually would help turn the tide in the Atlantic.

- The local community welcomed the airship base.

It not only meant a buildup in coastal defenses but defense jobs for people in Elizabeth City, Weeksville and surrounding areas.

The sight of the graceful dirigibles lifting into the air and the idea of taking the battle to the Germans were great morale boosters, but there also were plenty of skeptics out there.

It was hard to imagine how these slow ponderous blimps could make a difference.

The Weeksville hanger was the oversized centerpiece of an 822 acre facility, which included barracks for 700 enlisted men and 150 officers at peak operation.

A second slightly larger hanger, also called an air dock was completed on the base in July of 1943.

This one made of wood, because steel was needed elsewhere in the war.

Today, hanger one is as overwhelming as ever.

about as long as three football fields and wider than a football field is long, with steel trusses forming a graceful arch 18 to 20 stories up and a distinctive curved roof line to help the building withstand high winds.

Dimensions like these allowed as many as 12 airships inside at one time with no support columns to get in the way.

Taking in the space is one thing.

Taking to the ladder is another.

Imagine having to climb up to your job in a control tower on the roof, each footstep echoing in the cavernous space.

And then when your shift directing blimps in and out of the base is over, climbing back down.

Courage, especially during wartime, clearly is measured in different ways.

Today the hanger is occupied by TCOM, a company that manufactures and repairs modern, lighter-than-air craft.

A variety of aerostats or tethered balloons, used for everything from fixed surveillance to drug interdiction and airborne broadcasting.

- Today's aerostats and blimps use a laminate, the strength members Dacron polyester as opposed to the blimps that flew from here in the 40s and 50s.

They had a cotton fabric coated with rubber - Both kept aloft by a mixture of helium and air, which is more stable than the hydrogen used by the Germans in their pre-war commercial zeppelins.

Fresh on the minds of many even today, is the dramatic destruction of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, following its first Atlantic crossing of the season in May, 1937.

Fire flashes near the tail and in a half minute or so the craft was enveloped in flames as it sank 300 feet to the ground.

35 of the 97 souls aboard perished.

And on that tragic note, the era of lighter-than-air passenger travel ended.

Later, as the war ground on, the US government saw the potential for using lighter-than-air ships to spot subs.

It's more than a bit ironic that a technology for which the Germans were so noted, eventually helped neutralize much of their submarine offensive along the Atlantic coast.

From 1942 to 1945, Weeksville throbbed to the rhythm of war.

The hanger's back hallways and offices buzzed with activity, planning and guiding submarine interdiction flights.

Today they are empty of all but memories.

- These old rooms, these walls could talk, the things they could tell us.

From here, decisions were made to send the blimp crews that waited in them to go to war.

Here they learned about the weather that they were going to face and the ships they were going to protect.

The blimps would fly up the Pasquotank out to the Atlantic Ocean.

- Their primary task was to patrol the sea lanes and escort convoys.

An airship crew had a simple but crucial advantage over a U-boat captain.

They could see his submarine from greater distances, a valuable adjunct to the ship-based radars of the time.

Blimps could hover, stay on station longer than fixed wing aircraft and patiently await the appearance of a sub on or just below the surface.

But when a sub was spotted, things got stirred up quickly.

Surface ships or aircraft could be directed in for the kill.

Sometimes the lighter-than-air ships themselves dropped depth charges.

When aimed right, a trick in itself, they would explode close enough to a submarine that the shockwave opened up seam in the hull, marking the beginning of the end for that boat and its crew.

The blimps became a new kind of natural enemy for You-boats, there was nowhere for them to hide.

And in time many fewer ships were torpedoed along our coast.

[melancholy music] After the war the facility became an auxiliary naval air station.

It supported anti-submarine warfare operations during the Korean conflict, but was decommissioned a few years later in 1957.

The two colossal hangers also were used for a variety of non-airship purposes over the years, including the storage of fixed wing military aircraft between 1945 and 1948.

- In fact, there were over 600 aircraft stored in the two hangers and over 1500 vehicles stored on the base itself.

- Westinghouse bought the property in 1966 and the vast space was used to house a comparatively small scale venture.

- This is basically the layout of the hanger when Westinghouse had it as a cabinet factory for almost 30 years.

- During which they eventually lowered the ceiling to keep heating costs and the noise level down.

Over the next few decades, many of the base's buildings were razed and nature began to reclaim some that remained, like the old power generating station.

TCOM moved into hangar two where it built and serviced blimps and aerostats at least until August the 3rd, 1995 when a welders torch sparked a fire and the hanger built with southern yellow pine, went up like a collection of giant matchsticks.

There was no way to save the building.

And when the smoke cleared, huge concrete support pillars that marked the structure's four corners were left standing and tower over the landscape today.

A year later, the furniture factory moved out of hangar one and TCOM moved in.

If the giant hangar had a heart, it no doubt would've beat contentedly to house lighter-than-air craft like this one.

Once again, taking to the air to begin its career in intelligence gathering, reminiscent perhaps of the silver shape so familiar to post-war kids who used to run out of their houses in the 1950s, shouting and pointing at the sky whenever a blimp flew over.

Today, the aerostats and their hangar are reminders of a time that seems to recede further and further into memory as each year passes.

Drive slowly past this astonishing structure and think for a moment about the time when much of the world's freedom hung in the balance and how the US helped tip that balance in favor of the allies.

Not a single ship was said to have been lost to a U-boat when escorted by North Carolina based blimp squadrons.

The cargos those ships carried were not lost.

Their crews did not die.

Along with their compatriots elsewhere, the Weeksville sailors gave their all, never knowing what they might encounter with each flight, never knowing even if they would return.

And for that, we remain forever in their debt.

[mellow music] - Thank you for joining us for "Best of Our State".

We've enjoyed sharing North Carolina stories with you.

See you next time.

[mellow music] ♪ [music continues] ♪ - More information about "Our State" magazine is available at ourstate.com or 1-800-948-1409.