August 31

Garland Eaton was working at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, helping convert oil tankers into mini aircraft carriers when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

“I was working in the shipyard one hot day on those hot steel decks, and we were watching the airplanes just wafting around up in the sky, and I said to my buddy, ‘You know, we need to be up there! We don’t need to be down here.’ So we asked our leading man if we could get off that evening.

“He said, ‘What do you want to do, go fishing?’

“I said, ‘No, we want to go join the Air Corps.’”

This is Garland’s voice, almost 67 years later, from a transcript of a “History Day” gathering at the Senior Resource Center in Creeds. He’s one of dozens of residents who have taken part in an oral history project that aims to capture memories of the past before they’re lost.

Days after making the decision to volunteer, Garland found himself in the Army, headed for pilot training. But the path seemed endless. First, there was training in Miami, then Cleveland and, finally, aviation school in San Antonio. All the schools, all the training, and then a ruptured appendix delayed things more.

“I had just finished pre-flight school when Germany fell,” he says. “They slowed down graduations and the cadet program was stalled.”

One thing led to another, and finally to aircraft mechanic’s school that would lead to being a flight engineer on a B-29 Superfortress. It was a 48-week course, and about 10 weeks before graduation, Japan fell. He never got to be a pilot, navigator or flight engineer. He returned home to Pungo, met Shirley Jones from Great Bridge, married and raised a family. Bought a service station just down Princess Anne Road, sold it and became a firefighter at Oceana Naval Air Station – until he retired 33 years ago.

During their life together, Garland and Shirley traveled the country in a motor home, rambled the beach in one of his numerous beach buggies and amassed hundreds, maybe thousands of photographs and home movies. What do you do with them, especially old slides, a closet full of albums, movies and slides?

Meanwhile, along comes the Senior Resource Center’s history project, and Eaton realizes that he’s not only the keeper of his family’s history, but Pungo’s as well, at least part of it. Just about everybody who knew about the old days there has gone. This fragile thing, the history of a place, rests with him and a few others.

We had coffee at his kitchen counter one morning last week.

“Pungo. A lot of people still don’t know it today,” he says. “When they talk about Pungo, they don’t go back to the businesses that were here. A lot of ‘em will go back to the potato graders and maybe the ice plant, but prior to that we raised tobacco down here. That didn’t work out, so we went to potatoes, and we had a potato grader. We had a barrel factory – potatoes were put in barrels when they dug em instead of bags. We raised cotton at one point. We had a cotton gin, we had an ice plant. We had a barrel factory. All that had been in the history or Pungo and it’s disappeared.”

Eaton, 84, lives in a rambler he built in 1961. He lost his wife last year. For company he has memories.

“My daddy had the route to drive the school bus to the old Charity School,” he remembers. “That’s long gone now, but he got a contact in ‘36, a three-year contract to furnish and drive the bus. Ninety dollars a month plus all expenses. He went over to South Norfolk and bought a ’36 Ford chassis. Took that chassis over to Newport News to the Hackney Body Works. You’ve seen those green Hackney wagons? Well, they built his body on that chassis.”

He got to talking with some friends, who asked if he remembered when President Franklin Roosevelt went by motorcade to one of the early performances of “Lost Colony” at Manteo in August 1937. The route took him through Great Bridge, and hundreds lined it to get a glimpse. His father went one better; he got up a group of people, 25 or 30 of them, and drove them all down in the bus. “I’ll never forget that.”

He pours more coffee. “I wish I had a picture of that bus.”

Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com; http://www.paulclancystories.com/.


Photo: Eaton, far left, and friends at a downtown Norfolk bar ca. 1942. Family photo.

August 24. 2008

Remember, during World War II, before Oceana Naval Air Station, there were airfields at Creeds and Pungo?

And how you could sit on your porch and wave to the pilots as they practiced take-offs and landings?

Did you hear about the time one of the planes came in too low and took half the roof off one of the houses, but all five occupants, including two babies, got out without a scratch? And the pilot climbed out of the wreckage and walked away?

Do you recall that the Charity Red Jackets, a semi-pro baseball team, was once regarded as the most feared club in the Tidewater League? So says a story from The Ledger-Dispatch in May, 1936:

“Eddie Fraim, who once led the Tidewater League in hitting and still a dangerous man at the plate, is back at first base, with Shorty Stallings, of South Norfolk fame, at second; Marvin Lovitt at shortstop and the slugging Paul Hudgins at the hot corner, completing the infield.”

Did you know that Nawny Creek was called Nanny Creek, until someone got it wrong and changed the name? That Creeds was Creed’s, after a local family? That West Neck Creek was West’s Neck, again after a nearby family? Or that, after New York’s most famous bridge opened in 1883, the Eastern Branch of the creek was laughingly called “East River” and a small bridge built over the creek “Brooklyn Bridge.”

For that matter, does anyone have any idea where Pedins, Va., is? There was once a post office by that name, but few references survive.

These are a few of hundreds of vanishing memories that long-time residents of southeastern Virginia Beach are doing their best to hang onto. For the past half year or so, dozens of locals have been gathering at the Senior Resource Center near Creeds Elementary School for History Day. They bring scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, boxes of receipts and fading photographs.

And they tell stories.

Begun in December, these twice-a-month sessions have focused on train stations, local sayings, flour sack sheets and clothes, Wash Woods (the former town on False Cape), old wedding photos, 4th of July picnics and, recently, hog killing, lard and soap-making.

The sessions are recorded and transcribed, with the plan to turn them into a series of books. Here’s a sample from March 12. Margaret Moore Malbone was talking about the train that went through Pungo almost every day, hauling coal, gravel and rocks. “The engineer always waved to us as it went through Pungo. We all played around the box cars and the little red caboose. We got pretty dirty, but it was fun and nobody cared.”

The center (http://www.vbsrc.com/) shares space with the Creeds police substation. It offers assistance to seniors in lots of helpful ways, and a full calendar of activities: dominoes, bingo, pot luck lunches, exercise and movies. The local history sessions, held every month on second and fourth Wednesdays, is probably unique in Hampton Roads, and surely Virginia Beach.

“This is the only part of the city where you can still do this because it’s still intact,” said Barbara Henley, the City Councilwoman who got it started.

Added June Klag, a volunteer who runs the program and does the transcribing, “You really got to see what it was like back in those days.”

Next week, a veteran of the Army Air Corps remembers.

Photo:

Six of the eight Moore children outside their home in Pungo. Family photo.

August 17, 2008

Few saw it coming, although the morning paper of August 22, 1933 – 75 years ago this week – hinted of a menace heading this way. The National Weather Bureau issued a warning about a tropical disturbance near Bermuda, moving slowly west-northwest, and “attended by dangerous gales.” That morning, a driving storm dumped six inches of rain on local streets and sunk a tug out on Hampton Roads.

Later in the day, death came to Willoughby Bay. Two men who had gone out fishing attempted to return to shore in a skiff but lost one of their oars. Within 75 feet of land, the little boat began taking on water and one of the two, W. Oscar Dockery of Stockley Gardens, dove overboard and tried to tow them to safety. He was overcome by waves and drowned.

But the full force of the storm had not yet been felt, and few suspected what was coming. Norfolk-bound passenger steamers stuck to their schedules, departing from Baltimore and heading south. Late that afternoon, visitors to the Oceanfront noticed a deathly calm, with an eerie orange glow in the sky. Guests at the Courtney Terrace Hotel on 16th Street laughed, no doubt uneasily, as a dance band played “Stormy Weather.”

No one was laughing the next morning.
The storm made landfall north of Cape Hatteras and
by 9:30 a.m. arrived with all its fury in Hampton Roads.

“The first warning we got was when the wind blew out the window in our room, which faced to the east, shattering glass over the bed in which my brother was asleep,” Tren (cq) Brownley related in “Tales of the ’33 Hurricane,” edited by C. Randolph Hudgins Jr. They quickly dressed and went to the hotel’s living room, only to have a “tremendous wave” break through one wall of the room, setting furniture afloat. Amazingly, they found safety by climbing onto shelves in the hotel’s linen storage room and waiting for the storm to pass.

A mom and dad sleeping in a cottage on 55th Street were jolted awake by a door being torn off its hinges. They ran to the room where their baby boy, W. MacKenzie Jenkins Jr., was sleeping and found him partly submerged in water. Using the door as a raft, the father paddled his family, and later their dog, to high ground and safety.

They were lucky. The “Great Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane,” as it would be called, took the lives of at least eight people locally, including a mother, daughter and bystander who stepped into a puddle where a power line had fallen in Portsmouth.

Two crew members of Norfolk-bound steamer Madison were swept to their deaths by giant waves that crashed into the vessel’s port side. Although part of its superstructure was destroyed and guest cabins wrecked, the ship was able to limp into port, disgorging 37 haggard and traumatized passengers.
There were tales of heroism as police, fire and Coast Guard crews rescued survivors from the upper floors of battered houses. Nurses in Portsmouth reported to work by rowboat.

The hurricane leveled or damaged hundreds of homes, inflicting what this paper called “tremendous damage” to Virginia Beach, Ocean View, Willoughby Spit and Buckroe Beach. Thousands of trees were uprooted and cities were left powerless. The amusement park at Ocean View was heavily damaged, the old wooden boardwalk, completely splintered and trolley tracks covered by mountains of sand.

Last week, I went to see Tom Hall, a lifelong Ocean View resident, who was eight at the time. His father was a plumbing and heating contractor who was called out later in the day to shut off water and power to scores of homes. He took his son along.

“The thing I’ll always remember is the waves that tore away the beach side of a four story brick building,” Hall said. “There was a bathtub, you know, the old style with four legs, three stories up. While I’m standing there, I look up and I see the bathtub fall three stories to the sand. For an eight-year-old, that was an awesome sight.”

It would take months rebuild, to dig out of the sand and rubble, to replace plate glass windows, to restore the amusement park, to recover from injuries. As for the stories about what took place, they’d never be forgotten.

Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com or http://www.paulclancystories.com/.


Photo: the scene on Granby Street after the hurricane. Photo by Charles Borjes, courtesy Norfolk Public Library.

August 10, 2008

I never realized that the most-quoted example of naval derring-do, attributed to the great John Paul Jones, “I have not yet begun to fight,” is probably inaccurate.

It’s worth mentioning this because Jones, or at least someone portraying him, appears in Norfolk this week. Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the Kauffman Theater at the Chrysler Museum, William Young of Virginia Patriots portrays the dauntless commander. The performance, sponsored by the Norfolk Historical Society, is part of the Norfolk History Museum Series.

But back to the quote. The defiant line that every naval captain knows by heart was a distant recollection. Portsmouth’s own Revolutionary War hero, Richard Dale, who served with Jones and led a boarding party against the British warship Serapis, cited the line in an interview with a Jones biographer 46 years after the battle.

The actual quote may have been even better.

This was the situation: Jones, in command of the Bonhomme Richard, a former French merchant ship renamed in honor of Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” engaged the Serapis off Flamborough Head, Yorkshire, on Sept. 23, 1779. Serapis, a faster, better-armed ship, quickly took advantage, punishing the Richard with broadside after broadside. The American ship was in shambles, burning and sinking, apparently hopeless, and the British captain, Richard Pearson sent an inquiry, almost out of sympathy, “Have you struck? Do you call for quarter?”

Most accounts, written immediately after the battle, have Jones replying, “I may sink, but I’m damned if I’ll strike” or something close to that, according to the Naval Historical Center. One eyewitness put the line this way: “Ay, Ay, we’ll do that [haul down our pennant] when we can fight no longer, but we will see yours come down first; for you must know, that Yankees do not haul down their colors till they have been fairly beaten.”

Jones himself, a Scottish American, wrote that what he said was, “I do no dream of surrendering, but I am determined to make you strike!”

With that, to keep from sinking, Jones ordered his ship lashed to the enemy’s and continued the battle. A well-placed hand grenade set off a ferocious explosion, with the result that the British in fact were forced to strike their colors. Jones took charge of the Serapis, allowed the Richard to sink, then sailed home in triumph.

Jones’ story is laced with intrigue and controversy that extends even to his name. Once just a ship’s boy named John Paul, he made his way up the merchant ladder to captain. But on the island of Tobago, he ran a supposedly mutinous crew member through with his sword. Afraid of what local authorities would do, he retreated to Maryland and changed his identity by adding the third name.

After his brilliant Revolutionary War career, Jones was unable to resume command of a warship. He went to Paris to negotiate prize money claims, then hired himself out to the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia as a rear admiral. But even that didn’t earn him much respect.

In “John Paul Jones, Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy,” Evan Thomas quotes Thomas Carlyle in Paris: “In faded naval uniform, John Paul Jones lingers visible here; like a wine skin from which the wine is drawn. Like the ghost of himself.”

Speaking of ghosts, Although the great naval hero never set foot in, or sailed the waters of, Hampton Roads – at least not corporally – his likeness may have put in an appearance. According to naval scholar Alan Flanders, folklore has it that Jones’ apparition sometimes descends the stairway at Building 33, the commander’s quarters, at Norfolk Naval Shipyard.

All I can say is, I have not yet begun to write.


Paul Clancy, paulclancy@msn.com, or http://www.paulclancystories.com/.

Image: Portrait by George Bagby Matthews. Wikimedia.

August 3, 2008

By Paul Clancy

There’s a new book, “Historic Photos of Norfolk,” that offers a century’s worth of images, many of them rare, from roughly the Civil War to the civil rights movement. It was edited and narrated by Norfolk historian Peggy Haile McPhillips and illustrated largely from the exhaustive collection of photos in the city’s Sargeant Memorial Room at the Norfolk Public Library.

The earliest is the shadowy glimpse of Union soldiers marching up Bank Street in 1865. You could study it for hours and only just begin to imagine the clash of cultures and tensions during this uneasy period.

But to me, at least during this increasingly interesting presidential race, the most striking are the photos to presidents – of both parties – who paraded and proclaimed and observed during visits to the city. Regardless of party, the bystanders appear to be paying to each of these national leaders their complete attention and utter deference.

1. Theodore Roosevelt at the opening of the Jamestown Exposition in 1907.

2. William Howard Taft at the Chesapeake and Ohio Rail Station on Brooke Ave, 1919.

3. Woodrow Wilson, who came to observe construction at the Norfolk Naval Base in 1919.

4. Harry S. Truman at the naval base in 1947. All photos, Sargeant Memorial Room.