ChadSang
11-12-2006, 11:46 AM
I hope no one gets upset at this first chapter since it gives the reader an idea of where I came from and a lot of history of my ancestors. Don't worry, I'll be getting to the vampire stuff before long.
Monday, March 26, 1945:
Macarthur’s bombers destroyed a hydroelectric plant on Formosa, and in the process, sank 10 Japanese ships.
In baseball, the Boston Braves defeated the Washington Senators 2 to 1.
Popular comic strips of the day included: Boots and Her Buddies, Wash Tubs, Gasoline Alley, Dr. Bobbs, The Gumps, Little Orphan Annie, Out Our Way and Our Boarding House.
The morning’s headline read “Seventh Army Crosses Rhine, Patton’s Men Reported 80 Miles East of River, Frankfort Entered by Third, First Drives to Limburg.”
Sears was having a sale and you could buy 30 four-inch clothespins for nine cents, a self-wringing mop for $1.29 and a galvanized boiler with a wire rack for canning for $4.98
A newspaper advertisement offered “a new sickness - accident - hospital policy that paid up to $100 a month for disability from sickness or accident,” at a cost of 3 cents per day.
Your War -- with Ernie Pyle was one of the most popular syndicated newspaper columns in the country.
Movies playing that day included: Hollywood Canteen “with 42 stars and two bands, ” Bowery to Broadway staring Jack Oakie and Maria Montez, Irish Eyes are Smiling staring Monty Woolldy and June Havery, Rosie the Riveter staring Jane Frazie and Frank Albertson and Panama Hattie staring Red Skelton and Ann Southern.
You could purchase a five-room house with bath and “with electric refrigerator, heating stove and oil cooking range,” for $1,411 cash and the balance paid $24.42 a month, or, you could purchase a large two-story home with eight rooms and two baths for $6,000.
Easter was just around the corner, and you could buy “Easter Chicks -- green, blue, red, purple, pink and yellow,” for 20 cents each or six for $1.00
The day before, you could have eaten Sunday lunch at a local restaurant for just $1.25.
“Pretty and Gay Spring Bags” could have been had for $5.00, and the ladies could go to the beauty shop and get cold waves for $15, $20 and $25. Other permanents could be had for $5.50 and up.
The Office of Price Administration announced a priority list of occupations governing distribution of the limited supply of new passenger tires to eligible motorist.
The Agriculture Department in Washington announced the invention of an onion-peeling machine.
Playing on the radio that night were programs such as Ethel and Albert, Terry and the Pirates and Dick Tracy
Another event occurred March 26, 1945 that went unnoticed in the media that day. At Penn Memorial Hospital in Reidsville, North Carolina, at 7:30 AM, Dennis and Iva became the proud parents of a baby boy they named Chad. Dennis, a 44-year-old Southern Baptist Minister was pastor of Baptist Temple in Reidsville. His 36-year-old wife, Iva, was a meticulous homemaker, and kept busy being a mother to her 10-year-old daughter Ruth and her new baby, as well as making sure their home at 281 Wentworth Street was spotless.
From the rolling countryside to the quaint little shops located downtown, Reidsville is as historically diverse as it is visually. The name Reidsville comes from Reuben Reid, who settled a 700-acre plot of land with his wife, Elizabeth, and son, David, in 1814.
In 1829, a post office was established at the location. At age 16, David became postmaster for what would be called Reidsville. The position of postmaster was only the first public role for Reid, who would later become State Senator, U.S. Congressman, governor of North Carolina and U.S. Senator.
Although the town had grown little by the end of the Civil War, the arrival of the railroad during those years would be a beacon of future growth. Completed in 1863, the Reidsville section of the Piedmont Railroad became its main station between Danville and Greensboro. Major Mortimer Oaks, a railroad official and Reidsville resident, took advantage of the situation by building what later became known as the Piedmont Hotel near the station.
It wouldn’t be the last time Oaks contributed to Reidsville’s growth. The railroad, combined with the city’s prosperous tobacco business, led Oaks to build the city’s first tobacco warehouse in 1872, which did so much business in its first year that a larger structure had to be built the following year. Other tobacco warehouses soon followed. By 1885, there were 15 tobacco factories and 10 tobacco leaf houses in Reidsville.
Tobacco got another big boost in the beginning of the 20th century, with the establishment of the F.R. Penn Branch of the American Tobacco Company. Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, Tareyton and other cigarettes would be produced here, driving out many of the smaller companies. While tobacco was profitable, townspeople saw fit to diversify, turning their hopes toward the textile industry. After much encouragement from The Reidsville Times, the Reidsville Cotton Mill was built in 1889. It was off to a shaky start and went through much reorganization, but by the turn of the century the Edna Cotton Mill was fairly stable.
The growth of industry was coupled with a growth in population. Reidsville, which officially became a town in 1873 and got its first mayor in Major Oaks in 1875, had grown to between 3,500 and 4,000 residents in 1885. This growth continued with the establishment of banks, churches and educational facilities.
Williamsburg School, located just outside Reidsville, is considered the first public school in North Carolina, having opened in 1840. As the turn of the century neared, Reidsville added an opera house, an art gallery and even a race track.
No one knew it that Monday in March, but World War II was close to an end. On the afternoon of April 30, when Dennis and Iva’s baby was 35 days old, Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. Germany formally surrendered to the United States on May 7. The first atomic bomb exploded in a test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Two similar bombs were dropped on Japan -- on Hiroshima on August 6, the other on Nagasaki on August 9th. On August 14th Japan surrendered, with the formal signing taking place on September 2nd in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship Missouri, The new baby was now a little over five months old.
According to my mother, I was sick a lot as a small child. I didn’t sleep well and I was “very nervous.” Deep down inside, from my very being, I think I had a powerful urge for something I wasn’t getting.
Not long after World War II ended, in December of 1946, the family packed up their belongings and moved south. My father took a job in Salemburg, working as a public relations person for Edwards Military Institute. He was also pastor of Pleasant Grove Church, a small country church in Vander, NC.
While we lived in Salemburg, my mother spent many sleepless nights walking the floor with me. My parents took me to a child specialist in Wilmington, NC. I improved after that and was able to sleep much better, however, I preferred sleeping in the daytime and staying awake during the night. Prior to the trip to Wilmington, I would wake up a lot during the night screaming. I still, to this day, think I was screaming for something I wasn’t getting.
We lived in Salemburg for six months, and in the summer of 1947, we moved to Vander, in the Sunnyside Community. I don’t have any vivid memories of my earliest childhood years. Memories I have of the period between the time I was born and age 5 are sketchy. I can remember certain events, as you‘ll see farther along in this story, but have difficulty recalling any lengthy time periods before age 5. Age 5 was a milestone in my life, as you’ll see later on.
I always looked forward to the trips back to my dad’s old home place where he was born in 1899. It was situated on the edge of the Green Swamp, in a remote section of Brunswick County. Actually the area was known as Fall Swamp, which was part of Lockwood’s Folly Township. One of my ancestors, Edward, was constable of this area in 1732. As I said, my dad was born in 1899, and was the last of 16 children. My grandfather was born in 1839, and was 60 years old when my dad was born. A number of “cousins” also lived with them. My grandparents would take them in after their folks died of the “fever,” I never knew my dad’s parents; they died before I was born. Life might have been much simpler back then, but you can bet it was a lot harder.
Living on 450 acres, amid the forest and the mosquitoes, these early pioneers fished, raised cattle and hogs, scratched in the sandy soil to grow a few vegetables and ran a turpentine operation. They would use the turpentine to exchange for staples such as flour, coffee, sugar, rice and flour. It was a hard and squalid way to live, but there was a certain honesty about my ancestors, and true caring for each other that nowadays seems to have passed into oblivion. Much like Native Americans, these hardy folks were in tune with nature. They respected the earth and never abused it. Living in this remote section of southeastern North Carolina, they evolved their own micro culture.
My granddaddy was a hillbilly scholar, blue collar of a man…he came from the school of ‘you don’t need nothing’ if you can’t make it with your own two hands.’ He was backwoods, backwards, used words like: no sir, yes ma’am, by God, I’ll be darned, hell yeah I’m American… and all the years he walked this earth, I swear all he did was work. He said the devil dreams on an idle horse, so you listen to me ya’ll.”
The Civil War was the culmination of four decades of intense sectional conflict and reflected deep-seated economic, social and political differences between the North and the South. The South, overwhelmingly agricultural, produced cash crops -- cotton, tobacco and sugarcane -- for export to the North or to Europe, but it depended on the North for manufactures and for financial and commercial services essential to trade.
Underscoring sectional differences, the labor force in the South included nearly 4 million enslaved blacks. Although the slave-holding planter class formed a small minority of the population, it dominated Southern politics and society. Slaves were the largest single investment in the South, and the fear of slave unrest ensured the loyalty of non-slave holders to the economic and social system.
My grandfather, William, owned five slaves prior to the Civil War. He wasn’t a wealthy landowner, but it was quite common for men of his statue to have a few slaves to help out around the family farm. This was an acceptable practice in those days, but one I’m certainly not proud of. According to my dad, the slaves owned by his father were treated like family and he never physically abused them.
William enlisted in the army of the Confederate States on May 12, 1862, a month after his younger brother, Thomas, enlisted. He was a member of Company G, 20th Regiment of the North Carolina Troops. Before the war ended, the South had enlisted about 900,000 white males and my grandfather was just another farmer caught up in a war he wanted no part of.
His military career didn’t last long. He was shot in the left hip during a battle at Gaines Mill, Virginia, on June 27, 1862. The bloody sequence of battles around Richmond, Virginia began on June 26th and lasted for a week. General Robert E. Lee, reinforced by General Stonewall Jackson’s men, marched an army of 85,000 against the Union forces massed near Richmond In the Seven Day’s Battle (June 25th-July 1), neither side was capable of delivering a mortal blow to the other, however, the battle did end my grandfather’s participation in the war.
He returned to his home in Brunswick County and worked hard to provide for his family in these troubled times. A joint naval-army operation in January 1865 effectively closed down Wilmington, North Carolina, which had been the South’s principle base for blockade-runners. Wilmington was just 20 miles from my grandfather’s home, near a crossroads known as Supply.
Fort Fisher stood at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, and was the port of entry for Wilmington. When Fort Fisher was captured by Union forces, my great uncle Thomas was taken prisoner. Thomas was accidentally hurt when a piece of timber fell on h is leg. He also suffered a ruptured hernia from “straining work” on the fort. In 1908, William and Thomas were granted a soldier’s pension of $300 per year because of their war injuries.
Long before Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery throughout the United States, was ratified in December 1865, my grandfather gave his five slaves their freedom. With their freedom, he gave each of them a parcel of land (20 acres) and helped them establish their own farms. William died of cancer in the early 1900s.
Photos (left to right)
1. Map of North Carolina with Brunswick County highlighted (where my dad was born)
2. My dad's family members harvesting tobacco in 1919
3. A family reunion at my dad's old home place in 1946 (I think I'm in that crib)
4. My dad holding me up high at our place on the coast (you'll hear more about that place later on)
5. My mom giving me a bath in a wash tub when I was just a little baby
Monday, March 26, 1945:
Macarthur’s bombers destroyed a hydroelectric plant on Formosa, and in the process, sank 10 Japanese ships.
In baseball, the Boston Braves defeated the Washington Senators 2 to 1.
Popular comic strips of the day included: Boots and Her Buddies, Wash Tubs, Gasoline Alley, Dr. Bobbs, The Gumps, Little Orphan Annie, Out Our Way and Our Boarding House.
The morning’s headline read “Seventh Army Crosses Rhine, Patton’s Men Reported 80 Miles East of River, Frankfort Entered by Third, First Drives to Limburg.”
Sears was having a sale and you could buy 30 four-inch clothespins for nine cents, a self-wringing mop for $1.29 and a galvanized boiler with a wire rack for canning for $4.98
A newspaper advertisement offered “a new sickness - accident - hospital policy that paid up to $100 a month for disability from sickness or accident,” at a cost of 3 cents per day.
Your War -- with Ernie Pyle was one of the most popular syndicated newspaper columns in the country.
Movies playing that day included: Hollywood Canteen “with 42 stars and two bands, ” Bowery to Broadway staring Jack Oakie and Maria Montez, Irish Eyes are Smiling staring Monty Woolldy and June Havery, Rosie the Riveter staring Jane Frazie and Frank Albertson and Panama Hattie staring Red Skelton and Ann Southern.
You could purchase a five-room house with bath and “with electric refrigerator, heating stove and oil cooking range,” for $1,411 cash and the balance paid $24.42 a month, or, you could purchase a large two-story home with eight rooms and two baths for $6,000.
Easter was just around the corner, and you could buy “Easter Chicks -- green, blue, red, purple, pink and yellow,” for 20 cents each or six for $1.00
The day before, you could have eaten Sunday lunch at a local restaurant for just $1.25.
“Pretty and Gay Spring Bags” could have been had for $5.00, and the ladies could go to the beauty shop and get cold waves for $15, $20 and $25. Other permanents could be had for $5.50 and up.
The Office of Price Administration announced a priority list of occupations governing distribution of the limited supply of new passenger tires to eligible motorist.
The Agriculture Department in Washington announced the invention of an onion-peeling machine.
Playing on the radio that night were programs such as Ethel and Albert, Terry and the Pirates and Dick Tracy
Another event occurred March 26, 1945 that went unnoticed in the media that day. At Penn Memorial Hospital in Reidsville, North Carolina, at 7:30 AM, Dennis and Iva became the proud parents of a baby boy they named Chad. Dennis, a 44-year-old Southern Baptist Minister was pastor of Baptist Temple in Reidsville. His 36-year-old wife, Iva, was a meticulous homemaker, and kept busy being a mother to her 10-year-old daughter Ruth and her new baby, as well as making sure their home at 281 Wentworth Street was spotless.
From the rolling countryside to the quaint little shops located downtown, Reidsville is as historically diverse as it is visually. The name Reidsville comes from Reuben Reid, who settled a 700-acre plot of land with his wife, Elizabeth, and son, David, in 1814.
In 1829, a post office was established at the location. At age 16, David became postmaster for what would be called Reidsville. The position of postmaster was only the first public role for Reid, who would later become State Senator, U.S. Congressman, governor of North Carolina and U.S. Senator.
Although the town had grown little by the end of the Civil War, the arrival of the railroad during those years would be a beacon of future growth. Completed in 1863, the Reidsville section of the Piedmont Railroad became its main station between Danville and Greensboro. Major Mortimer Oaks, a railroad official and Reidsville resident, took advantage of the situation by building what later became known as the Piedmont Hotel near the station.
It wouldn’t be the last time Oaks contributed to Reidsville’s growth. The railroad, combined with the city’s prosperous tobacco business, led Oaks to build the city’s first tobacco warehouse in 1872, which did so much business in its first year that a larger structure had to be built the following year. Other tobacco warehouses soon followed. By 1885, there were 15 tobacco factories and 10 tobacco leaf houses in Reidsville.
Tobacco got another big boost in the beginning of the 20th century, with the establishment of the F.R. Penn Branch of the American Tobacco Company. Lucky Strike, Pall Mall, Tareyton and other cigarettes would be produced here, driving out many of the smaller companies. While tobacco was profitable, townspeople saw fit to diversify, turning their hopes toward the textile industry. After much encouragement from The Reidsville Times, the Reidsville Cotton Mill was built in 1889. It was off to a shaky start and went through much reorganization, but by the turn of the century the Edna Cotton Mill was fairly stable.
The growth of industry was coupled with a growth in population. Reidsville, which officially became a town in 1873 and got its first mayor in Major Oaks in 1875, had grown to between 3,500 and 4,000 residents in 1885. This growth continued with the establishment of banks, churches and educational facilities.
Williamsburg School, located just outside Reidsville, is considered the first public school in North Carolina, having opened in 1840. As the turn of the century neared, Reidsville added an opera house, an art gallery and even a race track.
No one knew it that Monday in March, but World War II was close to an end. On the afternoon of April 30, when Dennis and Iva’s baby was 35 days old, Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. Germany formally surrendered to the United States on May 7. The first atomic bomb exploded in a test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Two similar bombs were dropped on Japan -- on Hiroshima on August 6, the other on Nagasaki on August 9th. On August 14th Japan surrendered, with the formal signing taking place on September 2nd in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship Missouri, The new baby was now a little over five months old.
According to my mother, I was sick a lot as a small child. I didn’t sleep well and I was “very nervous.” Deep down inside, from my very being, I think I had a powerful urge for something I wasn’t getting.
Not long after World War II ended, in December of 1946, the family packed up their belongings and moved south. My father took a job in Salemburg, working as a public relations person for Edwards Military Institute. He was also pastor of Pleasant Grove Church, a small country church in Vander, NC.
While we lived in Salemburg, my mother spent many sleepless nights walking the floor with me. My parents took me to a child specialist in Wilmington, NC. I improved after that and was able to sleep much better, however, I preferred sleeping in the daytime and staying awake during the night. Prior to the trip to Wilmington, I would wake up a lot during the night screaming. I still, to this day, think I was screaming for something I wasn’t getting.
We lived in Salemburg for six months, and in the summer of 1947, we moved to Vander, in the Sunnyside Community. I don’t have any vivid memories of my earliest childhood years. Memories I have of the period between the time I was born and age 5 are sketchy. I can remember certain events, as you‘ll see farther along in this story, but have difficulty recalling any lengthy time periods before age 5. Age 5 was a milestone in my life, as you’ll see later on.
I always looked forward to the trips back to my dad’s old home place where he was born in 1899. It was situated on the edge of the Green Swamp, in a remote section of Brunswick County. Actually the area was known as Fall Swamp, which was part of Lockwood’s Folly Township. One of my ancestors, Edward, was constable of this area in 1732. As I said, my dad was born in 1899, and was the last of 16 children. My grandfather was born in 1839, and was 60 years old when my dad was born. A number of “cousins” also lived with them. My grandparents would take them in after their folks died of the “fever,” I never knew my dad’s parents; they died before I was born. Life might have been much simpler back then, but you can bet it was a lot harder.
Living on 450 acres, amid the forest and the mosquitoes, these early pioneers fished, raised cattle and hogs, scratched in the sandy soil to grow a few vegetables and ran a turpentine operation. They would use the turpentine to exchange for staples such as flour, coffee, sugar, rice and flour. It was a hard and squalid way to live, but there was a certain honesty about my ancestors, and true caring for each other that nowadays seems to have passed into oblivion. Much like Native Americans, these hardy folks were in tune with nature. They respected the earth and never abused it. Living in this remote section of southeastern North Carolina, they evolved their own micro culture.
My granddaddy was a hillbilly scholar, blue collar of a man…he came from the school of ‘you don’t need nothing’ if you can’t make it with your own two hands.’ He was backwoods, backwards, used words like: no sir, yes ma’am, by God, I’ll be darned, hell yeah I’m American… and all the years he walked this earth, I swear all he did was work. He said the devil dreams on an idle horse, so you listen to me ya’ll.”
The Civil War was the culmination of four decades of intense sectional conflict and reflected deep-seated economic, social and political differences between the North and the South. The South, overwhelmingly agricultural, produced cash crops -- cotton, tobacco and sugarcane -- for export to the North or to Europe, but it depended on the North for manufactures and for financial and commercial services essential to trade.
Underscoring sectional differences, the labor force in the South included nearly 4 million enslaved blacks. Although the slave-holding planter class formed a small minority of the population, it dominated Southern politics and society. Slaves were the largest single investment in the South, and the fear of slave unrest ensured the loyalty of non-slave holders to the economic and social system.
My grandfather, William, owned five slaves prior to the Civil War. He wasn’t a wealthy landowner, but it was quite common for men of his statue to have a few slaves to help out around the family farm. This was an acceptable practice in those days, but one I’m certainly not proud of. According to my dad, the slaves owned by his father were treated like family and he never physically abused them.
William enlisted in the army of the Confederate States on May 12, 1862, a month after his younger brother, Thomas, enlisted. He was a member of Company G, 20th Regiment of the North Carolina Troops. Before the war ended, the South had enlisted about 900,000 white males and my grandfather was just another farmer caught up in a war he wanted no part of.
His military career didn’t last long. He was shot in the left hip during a battle at Gaines Mill, Virginia, on June 27, 1862. The bloody sequence of battles around Richmond, Virginia began on June 26th and lasted for a week. General Robert E. Lee, reinforced by General Stonewall Jackson’s men, marched an army of 85,000 against the Union forces massed near Richmond In the Seven Day’s Battle (June 25th-July 1), neither side was capable of delivering a mortal blow to the other, however, the battle did end my grandfather’s participation in the war.
He returned to his home in Brunswick County and worked hard to provide for his family in these troubled times. A joint naval-army operation in January 1865 effectively closed down Wilmington, North Carolina, which had been the South’s principle base for blockade-runners. Wilmington was just 20 miles from my grandfather’s home, near a crossroads known as Supply.
Fort Fisher stood at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, and was the port of entry for Wilmington. When Fort Fisher was captured by Union forces, my great uncle Thomas was taken prisoner. Thomas was accidentally hurt when a piece of timber fell on h is leg. He also suffered a ruptured hernia from “straining work” on the fort. In 1908, William and Thomas were granted a soldier’s pension of $300 per year because of their war injuries.
Long before Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865, and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery throughout the United States, was ratified in December 1865, my grandfather gave his five slaves their freedom. With their freedom, he gave each of them a parcel of land (20 acres) and helped them establish their own farms. William died of cancer in the early 1900s.
Photos (left to right)
1. Map of North Carolina with Brunswick County highlighted (where my dad was born)
2. My dad's family members harvesting tobacco in 1919
3. A family reunion at my dad's old home place in 1946 (I think I'm in that crib)
4. My dad holding me up high at our place on the coast (you'll hear more about that place later on)
5. My mom giving me a bath in a wash tub when I was just a little baby