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THORNS IN THE GRAPES

Bob Stallings, whose wife's family owned a big tract of land off Creedmoor Road about where the Outer Loop is crossing it now, was a printer by night and a farmer by day in the early '50s.

He knew a lot about crops and planting and so forth and was a good source of information when I wanted to do a little amateur landscaping and planting around my newly acquired half-acre.

I had a thriving grapevine already and I had several rose bushes I wanted to plant.

I asked Bob if it would be all right to plant the roses right in with the grapevine.

"Well," he said, putting down his pipe, "It'll be all right with the bushes and the vines, Jim.

"It's more of a question whether you'll want to be picking the grapes out of the thorns."

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ON THE PHONE

By today's standards, the telephone service in Ahoskie in the '30s and '40s would have to be graded as "primitive" to say the least.

When you wanted to call someone from the newspaper office where I worked as a printer's devil, you lifted the phone from the cradle and when Central responded, you said: "Five-three, Susie," and Susie down at Central would connect you to No. 53.

Today, there are almost as many telephones on the roads as there are automobiles.

My wife was telling about the time she was having lunch at K&S Cafeteria when a phone rang.

People at three nearby tables began scrambling through big pocketbooks and diaper bags to locate their telephones. As it turned out, the call was for somebody else.

After lunch at a local restaurant one day, I went to the restroom to wash my hands and then became third in line to use the urinal.

A phone rang, and the fellow who was No. 1 in the urinal line used his free hand to bring his phone to his ear, and began chatting away cheerily.

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ONE PAPER AT A TIME

We were very short-handed at the Ahoskie newspaper printing office in the WWII years, and a lot of extra tasks around the place fell to my lot, for me to do in my spare time.

We printed a couple of statewide monthly news journals, the N.C. Farm Bureau News and the N.C.-Va. Peanut Co-op News, that each had a circulation of around 100,000.

Since our press could only turn out 3,000 papers an hour and we had four weeklies of approximately that circulation that had to be printed also, the pressman was constantly putting on and taking off the monthlies' forms so he could print the weeklies on schedule.

This resulted in a huge backlog of unmailed monthlies being added daily to a growing pile around the inside walls of the print shop.

Since I helped the shop foreman clean and repair typewriters on Saturday, that only left Saturday nights, Sundays and Sunday nights for me to be pressed into service with the "wing mailer," to put names and addresses on every one of those monthly papers stacked against the walls.

When I'd come in early on a Sunday morning and look around at that place packed with 100,000 papers that needed mailing labels, the task seemed insurmountable and without a chance of completion in my lifetime.

But I always figured, "What the heck. One paper at a time," and I always finished, usually after 20 to 30 hours of overtime for which I always received time-and-a-half pay.

With the "wing mailer" in your right hand, you stood in front of a stack of 40 or 50 papers, thumbed the mailing list-feed just so, slammed it down on the paper, and then pulled the paper away with your left hand while your right struck the next blow.

After doing this 40 or 50 thousand times, you would begin to develop a rhythm.

It was to this rhythm that I began to recite poetry and sing cowboy and country songs that I would never forget.

Come to think of it, I have never been able to forget that wing mailer either.

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SUPERMEN IN THE DEER PEN

In WWII, a lot of Germans were captured in the North African campaign and brought to the U.S.

A large number wound up in a fenced POW camp on the edge of Ahoskie, at a place we once called the Deer Pen. They were trucked out during the farming season to work in the fields, replacing the local farm boys who were on their way to Germany.

In the afternoons they would be returned to camp, which they ran themselves with only a few U.S. soldiers with machine guns on watch in wooden towers on the perimeter.

There was an old road down one side of the camp, and a lot of us young fellows would gather there to peer through the fence for a glimpse of The Enemy.

They would line up and do calisthenics to their officers' commands.

To us skinny depression kids, these were real Nazi Supermen, every one of them stripped to their shorts with their muscles sporting muscles and broad bronze shoulders shedding sweat in the summer afternoon sun.

It scared the heck out of us.

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HAPPY IN THE USA

After a time, the Germans were moved out of the Deer Pen and Italian POWs captured in Sicily and Italy replaced them.

Captured might not be the right word, because these Italians reportedly were only too glad to surrender and leave the fighting to the Nazis.

They certainly didn't look like supermen and they weren't good farm workers, but they were evermore delighted to be in the USA.

They were guarded by easy-going American servicemen from New York and New Jersey, many of Italian descent.

We used to hang on the fences to watch this group of POWs, too, because they loved to gather around small campfires in the evening and carouse and sing, we thought, for our entertainment.

They were so disorganized that we sometimes felt we might be better off if they were still free of us and hanging around in Italy hindering the Germans.

The townspeople fell in love with the Yankee guards, with whom some of the local girls were beginning to sit under the apple tree, and decided to throw a big banquet-dance for them at the Town Hall.

The USA guards were delighted, but they made the mistake of bringing along a few of the Italian POWs to serve as cooks and waiters, and those unworthies – exuberant fellows that they were – joined right in the festive spirit.

Some relative wrote a letter about it to a soldier fighting in the mud in Italy, and the event was written up in Stars and Stripes, the Army overseas newspaper, as a big party thrown in Ahoskie for Italian prisoners of war.

It caused quite a stir in Washington, with some Congressmen and some FBI men coming down to check on things in Ahoskie, but nothing much else ever came of it.

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