Full Text of the Excerpt

JAMES LEUTZE:

Now, where did you meet your wife? Your wife is from Baltimore, you're from . . .

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

My sister and my wife and Margaret Carr, Claiborne Carr's daughter, granddaughter of old General Carr, thereby hangs a tale. He was corporal in the Army, the Confederate Army, and he came home and declared himself to be a general. And he was known as General Carr from then on.

JAMES LEUTZE:

I thought people just claimed they were colonels?

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

Don't you put that in the transcript!

JAMES LEUTZE:

No.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

But, you ought to know that. But they all were - Marcia Davenport, the writer - they were all members of the senior class at Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. You've heard of Shipley School?

JAMES LEUTZE:

Oh, yes.

GEORGE WATTS HILL:

And my sister must have had, or some of the girls claimed that she had, trouble getting a beau for the spring dances, so she invited her brother. I went up there. God knows when that was; that was '23, I reckon. And I went there and we had two dances, card dances in those days. Two dances with the gal - Anne McCullouch - who became my wife. I caught the milk train out of Philadelphia down here and went to class the next morning and she was invited home in Durham by my sister immediately after Christmas. So she came down. We were engaged ten days later and I said, I remember vividly, what I said, I asked her to marry me and she was "so and so," and I said, "I'll give 'til tomorrow. I'm going to put you on a train tomorrow night for Baltimore," where her home was, out in the country, "and I want to know by tomorrow." Period. So I found out later that she sat up all that night and talked with my sister's governess and told me the next morning that she would marry me.