Boardinghouse Guests: A Dear Old Friend
On August 28, 1925, Peter LeRoy Dock of 204 Franklin St. in New York City checked in to the Old Kentucky Home and signed Julia Wolfe’s guest register. He was no stranger to the Wolfe family and had likely promised Wolfe he would stop and check on his mother. He was one of Thomas Wolfe’s classmates at the North State Fitting School. During the winter of 1913–1914, Tom and Roy were briefly roommates while boarding at the school here in Asheville. The school also served as the home of John and Margaret Roberts. The boys stayed on the first floor of the structure which had once been a farmhouse. In O’ Lost, Roy became the model for the character Roy Brock. In Look Homeward, Angel he is both Roy Brock and Guy Doak.
The boys shared much in common. Roy’s mother was a tubercular who spent part of the winter in Florida. Julia Wolfe had also gone to Florida that winter season. Roy’s mother was the owner and proprietor of a boardinghouse or tourist hotel, located at Balsam in Jackson County, NC, just west of Waynesville. Born in Newark, New Jersey in May 1896, Peter LeRoy Dock was almost five years older than Thomas Wolfe. His father had been a wholesale pharmaceutical salesman. He died in 1900. Roy moved to Western North Carolina with his widowed mother and grandmother at about age 14.
In his manuscript O’ Lost, Wolfe dedicates over two pages to a depiction of his friend. The description of his personality was substantially edited down by the staff at Scribner’s for Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe writes of Dock, “his speech was touched with Yankee nasality, his manner with Yankee crispness.” A good head shorter than himself, Wolfe notes “Roy had a trim cocky figure of medium height, black hair, bright dark eyes, a pale very smooth oval face, somewhat suggestive of a fish’s belly . . . he was foppishly neat in his dress. People called him a good-looking boy.” In his autobiographical outline, Wolfe records “Roy Dock — the confident Roy.” Wolfe fondly remembers Roy slipping quietly out the school window at night on to a side porch and escaping down the road into town. He would return in two hours with much appreciated “hot frankfurter sandwiches,” smothered in mustard and onions, five-cent cigars, and gossip of the activities in downtown Asheville.
Roy graduated from North State Fitting School a year before Thomas Wolfe and went to the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts at Raleigh. The college name changed in 1917 (NC State). Wolfe notes, while Eugene Gant was attending UNC Chapel Hill, “he found Roy Brock at the State College of Agriculture and Engineering.” Wolfe alludes to a visit with Roy in Raleigh and a nearby house of ill repute. In May 1918, with the coming of WWI, Dock was among several juniors from the college ordered to Camp Sevier for training. He was sent overseas in November as a second lieutenant. Dock spent time in France with the headquarters troops of the 8th Infantry. In 1919, safely home in Balsam, and Thomas Wolfe also recently home in Asheville after graduating UNC, Wolfe took the train west to visit Roy and his mother in Balsam. He noted the event in his autobiographical outline, and wrote in Look Homeward, Angel “visited Roy Brock in a high mountain village, and lay with a handsome girl in the forest….” Later in 1919, during his first few weeks at Harvard, Wolfe recorded “Roy visited me — the knowing air — Cocky Roy.”
While Thomas Wolfe was attending Harvard, Roy was looking for work in New York. Historian James Clarke documents “Dock, against his hopes, was deployed to an orchard management job in Cleveland, Tennessee, about a hundred miles west of his mother’s Balsam Lodge in North Carolina. The next year he worked in a similar position on the Gulf Coast in Biloxi, Mississippi.” Thomas Wolfe moved to New York City in late 1923 and by 1924, Roy Dock was also living there. Dock had been hired as a marketing representative for the Florida Citrus Exchange. In New York, they met occasionally for lunch or dinner. In 1926 Roy Dock married Sarah Louise Hall in Wake County, NC. In his notebooks in 1929, Wolfe records that Roy was close by working at the fruit markets in New York. They probably met for lunch in Manhattan soon after Look Homeward, Angel was published, but there is no record of how Roy felt about being a character in the book. In 1929, now living in New Jersey, Roy and wife Sara Louise had a first child, a daughter, followed by a son in 1932, also born in New Jersey.
In a letter dated June 29, 1933, Wolfe wrote to Dock saying that he wanted “before you go away to tell you how glad I was to see you again…” They had once more shared lunch together and much of the conversation was about Western North Carolina. It was probably their last visit. Wolfe asked Dock, during his next visit home, to be on the lookout for a cabin that he could rent with electricity and a place to heat his coffee while he wrote. On July 3, 1933, Wolfe wrote his mother “saw Roy Dock the other day…told Roy to go see you if he got a chance.” Wolfe lamented Roy was leaving New York for good to make his home in Balsam and Florida. In the Florida 1935 Census, Roy’s family is living near Orlando, listed still as a salesman for the Florida Citrus Exchange. He died at New Port Ritchey on the Florida west coast in 1978 at age 81.
Clark, James W., Jr. “Thomas Wolfe’s Diagnosis of Leroy Dock” vol. 39 Thomas Wolfe Review (2015).
