© Copyright 1999 James David Pearce
A BLACK HOLE IN THE WALL
At one time I became associated with a small newspaper publishing business in Murfreesboro NC.
Our office was located on Main Street in a real "hole in the wall." It was 12 feet by 160 feet, windowless, lit by 100-watt incandescent bulbs and quite oppressive to anyone subject to claustrophobia.
Printing shops are dirty, greasy places, and we got the idea that since we were always pushing something against the walls and getting inky handprints on them, it would be smart to paint the walls black.
The effect was brain-bending, something like being in Linville Caverns with a weak-battery flashlight when they turned off the electricity.
Since then, I have never bought any color paint except ice-cream white.
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Jim Pearce at the Linotype
in the black hole c. 1948
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Stanley and Jim Pearce and Joe Dickerson
Murfreesboro c. 1947
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The masthead
c. 1949
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THE "REAL" BOWEAVER
All through the Thirties, those days of kerosene lamps and outhouses in poverty-stricken Donoway Heights outside the village of Ahoskie, one of my best friends was a little fellow called "Boweaver" Snyder.
His father, Floyd Snyder Sr., who spoke English with a thick accent and made less money as a farmhand than my father did as a carpenter, objected strongly to the name "Boweaver" for his son, and wanted us to call him "Floyd" or "Junior," but to no avail.
The nickname, derived from "boll weevil" ~ the little bug that ate most of the cotton before we could pick it at a penny a pound ~ was as sticky as Depression molasses.
Boweaver died in 1982. He had four daughters and two sons.
I have since used his nickname ~ I hope not in vain.
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ISAAC'S Y1.9K PROBLEM
My grandfather Isaac Pierce/Pearce, an early Confederate turned Unionist, developed a Y1.9K Problem. He had a hard time convincing the U.S. government to give him the pension to which he felt entitled because of his Civil War service.
In the still-divided South of the time, he was not all that popular with some of his neighbors, and when he pointed to his loyalty to the Union, some of them sent letters telling the War Department that he also had been in the Rebel military.
When he cited the fact that he broke his left leg while hard at work at U.S. Army duty on the Beaufort NC waterfront, a couple of them filed depositions claiming that the leg was broken while he was drunk and in the act of peeping through a window at dancers at the Atlantic Hotel.
He finally won the Pension War in 1903, and enjoyed the fruits of his victory until his death in 1924.
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After the Union Army ended its occupation of Beaufort in 1870, Isaac built a flatboat and with his wife, Annie Maria, three children and most of their household possessions, negotiated the Pamlico and Albemarle sounds and the Chowan River to his old home in Hertford County on the Wiccacon River.
They didn't do so well on the wide Pamlico, however. They were caught in a storm and their makeshift poultry crates were washed overboard, drowning all their chickens and geese.
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Read all about Isaac and Maria and their family at this web site, at "Petty Shore ~ Letters from James."
Wiccacon River at Harrellsville
Becky Pearce, Mary Ann Pearce