The Battle of Waynesboro

Talk about yer serendipity! In an earlier post I made mention of artist Norman Saunders whom, among many, many other things, I just discovered did most of the illustrations for the 1962 Civil War News series of trading cards, including this one:



Yep, that's my hometown and, yep, once upon a time I had a complete set of those cards; unfortunately, I made the mistake of taking them to school for Show and Tell and on the bus ride home one of the older kids decided to relieve me of my entire collection. Just reached into my book bag and took 'em.

I. Was. Devastated.

Not just because of the loss of my cards, though that was bad enough, but no one, NO ONE, would do a thing to help me get them back. Not my classmates (well, no surprise there), not the bus driver, not my parents, not the mother of the boy who took them (okay, yeah, I was dumb and naive enough to go to this kid's house and tattle to his mom. She yelled at me).*

Uh... that got a little off-topic there, didn't it?

Anyway, it was because of this card that I discovered there had been a realio, trulio Civil War battle in my hometown** and not only that, but part of it occurred in the field separating my elementary school from the local high school where my Mom taught! I gave up on the bus (for obvious reasons) and began hitching rides home with Mom, which, since she didn't leave until a couple of hours after I got out of school, gave me ample time to scour the field for the Minie balls and other artifacts I just knew had to be there. Never found anything, but it was fun looking.

As for the Battle of Waynesboro itself, well, here are some points of interest:

"Any considered judgment of (George Armstrong) Custer's military abilities, however, should include an analysis of his performance in a relatively small action on March 2, 1865 at Waynesboro, Virginia. In this battle the 25 year old Brevet Major General Custer demonstrated the bravery and initiative that had made him famous. In a brilliant action he attacked and completely destroyed the last remaining organized Confederate force in the Shenandoah Valley."
--"Custer and the Battle of Waynesboro"

"It was a battle where the Eighth New York Cavalry, under the gallant leadership of Major Hartwell B. Compson, earned undying fame. The major himself performed wonderful feats of bravery and set an example which electrified his men and inspired them to deeds of splendid heroism."
--"Custer's Heroes"

"The Battle of Waynesboro occurred in my hometown on 2 March, 1865. In an area today known as the "Tree Streets", (Upper left of this image) Confederate forces were defeated in what is considered the last Civil War battle in the Shenandoah Valley."
--Old Virginia Blog


*You want to know how traumatic this was for me (or to what extent I'm capable of harboring a resentment)? Forty-plus years later I still remember the boy's name, where he lived, the color of his house, the dress his mom was wearing, etc. In fact, just writing about it works up a certain amount of righteous indignation, which is ironic since I was (am) no angel myself.

**Which, really, isn't saying much. You live anywhere in Virginia and chances are there was a Civil War battle in your backyard.

The Wayback Machine is on Overdrive

So the other day my friend Sam shot me an e-mail containing this little piece of history:


Jeebus help me, that's Mrs. Wheeler's 1961-1962 1st Grade class--MY class--arrayed on the steps of Jackson-Wilson Elementary School in Waynesboro, VA. Sam is in the front row, third from your left, and I'm... well, see if you can spot me.

A couple of things:

--notice the distinct lack of... diversity... in the student population; Waynesboro schools weren't integrated/desegregated until the fall of 1965.

--Jackson-Wilson was originally Wilson High School and, at least as far as I could tell, had had no significant maintenance since it opened in 1922. During fire drills students on the upper floors exited via rickety fire escapes which under load tended to sway and pull away a bit from the brick walls. Didn't matter; the place was a firetrap anyway, what with all the tinder-dry wooden floors and walls, the latter being slathered with asbestos-laden-but-still-highly-flammable plaster guaranteed to save our parents the expense of having our little bodies buried after we asphyxiated from smoke inhalation. Oh, and our Civil Defense drills (the infamous "duck and cover" technique detailed in this masterfully understated 1951 film) were a hoot! The teachers would march us out of our classrooms and into the hallway where we assumed the ("kiss your ass goodbye!") position and waited patiently for the coming Nuclear Holocaust. Yeah, we were all going to die horrible radioactive deaths, but at least we were arrayed alphabetically!

Here's the original school complex--1st & 2nd grades in the building to your left (site of my class photo), 3rd and 4th grades (plus an auditorium) in the middle (note the aforementioned fire escape), a rarely-used gymnasium and the School Board offices to your right. To your farthest left (and all but invisible) is the "Cafeteria Building" which housed the (duh!) cafeteria, 5th and 6th grade classrooms, and the Main Office, wherein dwelled the Supreme and Exalted Ruler of our little domain, Mr. Wright, the Principal.*


And here it is as it stands today. They tore down the two middle buildings around 1968, soon after they moved the student population to one of the newer elementary schools (Berkeley Glenn, should you be that interested).


Another view. The Waynesboro School Board still occupies "The Hill," the metonymous term used by local teachers to precede the phrase "did something really stupid today." My mother, a 9th grade English teacher for 13 years (and head of the department for many of those years--her tales of Machiavellian manipulations within the school system would stand your hair on end), used that phrase a LOT.


The Cafeteria Building, still standing, still used, only now it's occupied by the (Shenandoah) Valley Program for Aging Services.


So did you figure out which one was me? No? Well, I'm the guy dead center, face partially obscured, standing between the two hot chicks (a feat rarely repeated since):


*Who was a nice enough--looked like someone's grandfather and probably was--but OMIGAWD! He had a spanking machine in his office! A SPANKING MACHINE! And he was allowed to use it whenever he wanted for whatever offense he so chose! I know this is true because the 6th graders told us!

Edit: For those of you too young to catch the Rocky & Bullwinkle reference in the title, here's some information on the Wayback Machine.

The Saturday Night...Uh...Uhhhh...

Oh, hell; as cynical as I am even I can't label this a "Saturday Night Snicker." It's a headstone not far from my father's grave in Riverview Cemetery, Waynesboro, VA and it's one of those things where I really and truly don't know whether to laugh or cry.


Makes me think of the iron dog keeping watch over a little girl's grave in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, VA.

You Really Can't Go Home Again

So I was Googling some addresses in my old hometown of Waynesboro, VA the other night and in one of those bizarre-o moments for which the Intarweb is infamous I ran across an ad for this particular piece of real estate:

119 Robin Road, $214,000*

People, that's where I grew up.

It looks a little different: there was no porch to speak of, only that concrete stoop, the sidewalk was edged with monkey grass, and there was shrubbery all along the front. It also appears that someone got smart and removed those wretched Chinese elms with their tiny, unrakeable leaves and lawnmower-jarring roots from the front yard and I sincerely hope they did the same in the back--no love was lost between me and those rat-bastard, thin-branched, lame-ass pseudo-trees. That's a red maple in the picture, incidently, a tree for which I have a great deal of respect.

There's a virtual tour, which probably won't be online for long, which made me feel... strange... since I never, ever expected to see the inside of that house again. Lots of changes to the interior--the dining room and kitchen were both miniscule and I see subsequent owners knocked out the wall separating the two to make a semi-decent-sized eating area (don't be fooled by the pics; that's one hell of a wide-angle lens they're using). They've repainted everything (except the basement, which the realtors are calling a "family room"--you'll need a family to huddle with to avoid hypothermia during the fall and winter) and ripped out the wall-to-wall carpeting, probably because most people were overwhelmed by my mother's fondness for robin's-egg blue.**

The open door you can see at the top of the staircase leads to what was my room.

Ah, me. Do you suppose the new owners will ever wonder why there's a large patch of discolored concrete flooring in the laundry room**** or discover the small pet cemetery in the back yard? Are there still (much missed) boxes of toy Civil War soldiers and a Playboy centerfold hidden under the floorboards of the attic?

Guess I'll never know.



*My parents had that house built in 1959 for, oh, I dunno, maybe $15,000 and sold it in 1988 for easily ten times that amount.

**Everything was robin's-egg blue***--the walls were blue, the ceilings were blue, the carpeting was blue, the sofa was blue, the painting over the sofa was predominantly blue--hell, for several Christmases the lights on the tree were blue (and blue electric candles in the windows). Maybe this explains my penchant for black.

***Okay, not quite everything. My parents' bathroom was a subdued pink, the bathroom I used (which was also the guest bathroom) had gray tile and off-white walls, the kitchen cabinets were that yellowish knotty pine so popular in the early '60s, some of the living room chairs were pinkish and they had some wood furniture in natural finishes.

****Hint: don't allow your 10-yr. old to mix household bleach with strong acid from his/her chemistry set.