Norfolk: A Tale of Two Cities
Norfolk, in the years after World War II, was two cities at once. What mattered wasn’t geography, but how a man arrived there — by choice or by birth, with momentum or with damage. To understand what happened on a quiet road in December 1949, it helps to see how differently Norfolk worked on the two men who met there that night.
To Buddy Green, it was the familiar hum of Tidewater life — the rattling streetcars, the cotton-candy blur of Ocean View Amusement Park, the long blocks of houses where both sides of his family had lived for generations. He hadn’t chosen Norfolk; Norfolk had simply been handed to him at birth.
But to Lt. Bill Allman, Norfolk wasn’t home. It was an assignment and opportunity.
Naval Station Norfolk, decades after World War II.
The scale of the base reflects the institutional world that shaped Bill Allman’s postwar life — a world defined by order, hierarchy, and momentum.
Bill had grown up in rural Dickson County, Tennessee — in Van Leer, not far from Nashville but still country enough that roads were often rutted and dusty, and a trip to the city was a half-day commitment. He came of age in a place where time moved slowly, neighbors were known by name, and music was as common as mealtime.
Nashville was already a music town when Bill was young, with barn dances and the Grand Ole Opry filling the airwaves, and that spirit of fellowship and rhythm would have been part of the world he carried with him.
By the late 1940s, he’d married Jerry and had two small sons whose lives depended on him. Their squeals around their Nashville living-room radio, their fists tugging at his uniform — they were the gravity holding him steady.
The Navy then stationed Bill in Norfolk. For him and Jerry, Norfolk wasn’t home — it was a posting, a place to work.
Bill’s Norfolk was the naval base, the clang of shipyard metal and the camaraderie of other servicemen who had also survived a war and were now learning how to live with the quiet after. The world was full of veterans trying to turn down the volume of memory — not through forgetting, but through building something new.
Norfolk meant advancement for Bill, a path upward in the Navy’s postwar surge. He had been promoted to Captain but had not yet received the formal designation; the title was coming, the future widening.
He recruited young men into the service, welcoming them into this structured world of ranks and routine. He believed in the Navy — in its order, its ladder, its certainty. For a boy from Van Leer, the military was a life he sought and had climbed toward, rung by rung.
And yet, just a few miles away, Buddy was living a different version of the same city.
Buddy had also served but he hadn’t chosen the Navy — he’d been drafted, carried into uniform the way a leaf is carried into a creek. And when he came home, Norfolk did not widen for him; it closed. Jobs were scarce, or maybe his own roughness made them seem so. He had a wife, and a daughter born in 1947, the same age as Gregg Allman.
Some men returned from the war and rebuilt. Some men returned hollowed, with the world suddenly too sharp, too demanding.
While Buddy drifted, Bill ascended.
Buddy must have felt pressed in by expectation and even futility. Bill must have felt propelled by duty and ambition.
It is impossible to understand that awful December night without understanding this: two men can breathe the same air and walk the same streets but still live in different worlds. Their choices — or the choices life made for them — spin them toward each other like magnets set at dangerous angles.
By 1949, Bill was steady, respected, and moving upward. Buddy was restless, frustrated, stealing to keep afloat, and slipping toward the edges of legality.
Both were young Southern men, both shaped by families that had taught them stoicism and survival. But trauma does not distribute itself evenly and on that cold December night in Norfolk, two trajectories — one rising, one falling — crossed on a quiet road.
Bill was doing what he always did: agreeing with a friend to give a fellow veteran a ride home, stepping up, being kind. Buddy was doing what he often did: scheming, reacting, escalating, striking out.
Two Norfolks met in the darkness; two men from the same generation, shaped by different versions of duty and deprivation.
Only one would go home.
The murder didn’t stop with Bill’s death. Its shockwave moved forward, through bloodlines and generations and into music that would give the hurt a voice — shaping lives that had not yet begun.
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths — even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, stray cats, places she loves, and the wild gospel that hums in red clay soil, you’ll find her out listening for the next thing worth saying.
