Taking Notes -- Badly (More Memory Keeping)

I found a legal pad like this one -- except the one I found "has some age on it" as we like to say in the South. In it are several pages of notes written in pencil. They're in my handwriting so I know I took them, likely in an interview situation.

My memory of doing this is very vague, however. Well, all right, I don't really remember it at all. Nevertheless, here we go:

The heading is "Remembrances MGF"

1. Bale of cotton in front of every store in Salisbury (Now, I would ask "why." Then, it apparently didn't occur to me.)

2. Christmas
8 -- 2 Boxes stick candy 3 boxes horehound candy (2-25¢) 4¢ cap pistol 1¢ caps

Russell's store
10¢
No oranges

Clothes mother made
Jeans cloth--pants--hand
Mother's machine
came to knee

Cards -- spin own yarn
Knitted all socks, wool clothes, dyed ring (?)

1912/11-10
Farm Rothrock -- mill pond -- killed timber -- pond sourced (?) -- chills
quinine capsules -- above 104 degrees (fever?)
Dr. Choate
Dr. Chalmer

Jacob Fisher --
"Rubbing" doctor --
pains, bowels move (That's what I wrote so somebody must have said it.)
Hands like a woman
six foot
--clean shaven

Uncle "used" for bleeding (This means he could stop blood flow with a verse from the Bible.)
-- Peter Wagner --

Grandmother -- Juliann Plyler Wagner
"Liver growed"
Kid squall for life
Horse collar off (horse?) Hot collar
pass child through
said some things
rub under ribs
People came to get her (I assume this meant when they needed help with an inconsolable child and not when they had tarring and feathering in mind.)

"Granny Woman" Liz Palmer
4 miles Whitley -- never delivered no babies
50¢? Cooked breakfast
Jack Palmer made baskets
Slave

Fort Jackson -- 2 P?
Slept in street
13th Depot Brigade

9AM before --
shots, vaccines, uniforms
Greenville/Gun Springfield Enfield

Long Island New York
Camp Upton

Docks
Boat to Camp
No Holland Tunnel -- Sabotage

Infantry 321 81 Division Company D
Trenches Volga Mountains
Verdun
Argonne
Machine Gun
Plyler

Armistice 13 days --
11 months
90 days

-- Lewis Lyerly --
Maggots (This I do know about. He was wounded on the battlefield, medics couldn't get to him, his wound became infested with maggots -- which saved his life.)

Southern Division
81st
42 Rainbow
1st Btn 6-8-10 boys
muster out

Feed you?
Box White
Stanback
Bunked together
Rowed on river

(During the) Depression:
Worked 3 days/short week
$1.00
Velna stayed
Lived at store


No place sacred

Railroad -- creek
road Rt --
Up hill
Rt
Old German tombstones
("Here Lies My Man") ?


Henry Davis Plyler -- Civil War
Petersburg
Captured
barn -- pick up corn, grain fed to horses to eat
counted in German
made horse collars
Doff (Dolph?) Lentz

Juliann (?)
Matton's Grove Methodist Church -- Below Gold Hill


Alabama:
--Davis Plyler's son
--moved down there -- couple months -- 1914-1915


Work in mines --
--Woodard Mine
--Tennessee Mine (boilers)
--Gallon 20¢ beer
--5¢ qt. pitcher

Cotton Mill -- 11 or 12 years old
babies put in boxes while mothers worked
went home to nurse baby
10 hour shifts
Hardest job -- spinning
Swept -- oil/band/twisters
75¢ a day
$9.00 a payday
didn't get to keep any of the money

School:
cut wood
Ern (Ernest), Murray, Norman, Rob (Robert), Erv (Erving), Loran ("Lorn"), Emma (moved to Michigan), Laila ("Lail")

Julianne Plyler
W/Rockwell
Virginia
Petersburg -- Camp Lee
Battlefield
Gun lock

Ship: Walmer Castle
Sea Sickness advice. Old sailor 50 years old: Don't look at anything for very long. Keep your eyes moving.


-----------------------------------------

That's it. And the moral here? Transcribe your notes while they're still "warm," because 30 years or so later, you won't remember.

Veteran's Day (Armistice Day, What Was)

I've been mucking out my office by bits and pieces for months, and I came across this handwritten interview transcript. It was done in 1979 as part of a local writer's club project, a kind of living history we set out to do for posterity. We would talk to as many elderly county residents as were willing to put up with us and compile their recollections -- memory keeping, as it were.

I don't know what happened to the original cassette tape. I don't know what happened to the project itself, except that it must have died on the vine. The Rowan Writer's Club is long gone, but not the need for memory keeping. The transcript is important to me personally because the person I interviewed was my grandfather.

He's listed in the genealogical society's huge reference book of local family histories as "Gene," which is what his contemporaries called him. My grandmother, on the other hand, called him "Bill." Neither of these nicknames, as far as I can tell, has anything to do with his actual name -- Norman Brown Wagner. Unfortunately, there's no one left to ask where the nicknames came from or why, the lesson here being if you wonder about something, follow through.

He was a very complex man, and this is what he looked like. The round disk at the bottom of the photo is his "dog tag." The card is a ticket for the SS Walmer Castle, the troop ship that took him to France. "KEEP THIS CARD" it says. And he did. For all of his life.






















Since the memory keeping project itself has been abandoned, I thought I'd post the transcript of the interview here. For posterity. For World War I researchers. For Veteran's Day. For me.



May 1, 1979

CR: How old were you when you went to France.

NBW: Twenty-three -- I was twenty-three years old. Seven hundred of us left from here. There was a man -- Kruger (?), I think it was. He lived in a big house where St. John's Church is now. He was a businessman -- wholesale business. He fed all seven hundred of us the day we left. And...Red Cross women handed out little sacks -- bags with sewing needles and thread. Some of them had sweaters in them -- you know, without sleeves.

Took ninety days to get from here to the trenches. I was in the Argonne when the armistice was signed. We went over the top that morning about daylight. It was so foggy and misty, rainy, you couldn't see nobody or nothing. You couldn't hear for the artillery. Anybody three feet in front of you, you had to holler at them. You had to go from one shell hole to another -- big shell holes about two could get in.

And barbed wire. We had a devil of a time. The bunch in front of us -- the Germans reenforced on them, and they started running, so we had to go in -- and we got in that barbed wire.

CR: Tell me about "going over the top."

NBW: That was when -- when you "go over the top," they give you orders to take their trenches. And you do it. Everybody crawls out and most of the time it's hand-to-hand fighting. Bayonets -- but we were lucky enough that morning not to have to do that.

And there was the gas. Sneezing gas. Vomiting gas. And mustard. If you got a whiff of that vomiting gas, you couldn't keep your gas mask on. Wasn't nothing to do but swallow it back -- or die from the mustard gas.

Oh, I was in it for hours -- lay in it. It was scattered all around, but it didn't affect me any -- at least not yet. (Laughs) If you got one whiff of it without your mask, you were about through.

And I tell you one of the hardest things that you ever went through with was hearing those boys lay out there -- way out there -- that the medics couldn't get to. And they lay out there and hollered all night. One or two would start up -- then there'd be another and another -- then they'd quieten down for a half hour, a hour, then..."Oh, lordy, come and get me." But you couldn't. You couldn't get them.

CR: Did you ever get a leave?

NBW: Two weeks in Paris! And then a week in Monte Carlo. Except I didn't have the money to go there. I didn't draw but...$6.50 a month, and that won't do you in Monte Carlo. Boy! That was one place I'd have loved to go. Paris? I stayed right where that big tower is, bunked for half a franc about every night I was there. Slept under the tower one night.

CR: You were twenty-three years old when you went to war. Tell me something you learned from it.

NBW: Well, you might not believe this thing, but every boy I knew of -- and I knew of about four in one company -- even here in the States, they had given up. They said, "If I ever get in a battle, I'll get killed." One of them was my corporal -- Doolan. And they did. Every one of them got killed. The ones that doubted themselves.

And Floyd (family member killed in World War II, NBW's nephew, my first cousin, once removed). You know about him. He told me right downtown when he was home on furlough -- in that old building where the dry cleaners used to be. He said, "If I ever get in any action, I'll get killed." And I said, "Why! Whatever gives you that idea!" It worried me, you know? He said, "I will." And...he did. He...never came back.