Interview of Margaret Rogers
Transcript Number 019

DECEMBER 2, 1998

We're in the Randall Library, UNC Wilmington. Today is December 2, 1998. We're interviewing Margaret Rogers from the Wartime Wilmington Committee.

INTERVIEWER: Margaret, tell us about growing up in Wilmington during World War II.

ROGERS: Growing up in Wilmington during World War II was fascinating, although at times very scary and the memories remain with you forever. It's not something that you think about once in a blue moon. It's something that stays with you.

I grew up as Margaret Sampson and I lived at 513 South 13th Street. Across the street from me was a vacant lot and just past the vacant lot was Community Hospital. In front of Community Hospital was Williston Primary School and that's the school I attended. I was in first grade in 1944 and on 10th Street was a POW Camp, German prisoners were housed there. The camp extended from Castle Street to Ann Street, from 8th Street to 10th Street.

So as we were outside as small children at school, we often saw the prisoners. The teachers devised a game to help us when we were outside and we learned to climb trees and that was a way to protect ourselves when there were prison breaks. There weren't very many prison breaks, but the prisoners did escape and they would run through the schoolyard, through Community Hospital area over onto 13th Street usually, then down Church Street.

So we would see the prison guards as they chased them. So we were very familiar with them. We often were allowed to go across the street and give candy and gum to the prisoners and then sometimes being children, we would go across the street without the teacher's permission.

Even at home when we were not in school and they would have prison breaks, I had a chance to watch them chase them. I was an only child, but I was a tomboy I guess you would call it and I learned to climb easily. I just had a problem getting down. I could always get up. My problem was getting down. But when I would discover the prisoners running through the neighborhood, I would climb the garage door, jump on top of the garage, then hop on top of the house and sit next to the chimney and I could watch the guards chase the prisoners through the neighborhood.

There were military units bivouaced in the park on 13th Street that is used now by New Hanover High School for their practice sessions and so when we had blackouts, these soldiers would patrol the neighborhood. One comical event occurred one night during the blackout. It was comical, it is comical now. It wasn't comical then. Once the sirens went off and we had to make sure the house was completely dark, I could hear the troops marching down the street so I crawled to the window to peep out and we had metal Venetian blinds.

When you popped one of those slats of the Venetian blinds, it will make a sound and it did. So the soldier came up on our porch and banged on the door loudly and my mother went to the door. When she opened it, in a very gruff voice, he said "Do you want that child lady?" and she said "Yes I do". He says "Well she almost got shot by making that noise because we didn't know what it was". And he promised her it would not happen again. 

When he left the porch and she returned to the room where I was, needless to say, she had no problem in the darkness finding my bottom and when she finished with it, you never had to worry about my crawling to a window to look out again.

One of the things we did during that time on weekends was to go across what is now Cape Fear Memorial Bridge. It wasn't there at that time. You went across the northeast Cape Fear River Bridge and we'd go out on Highway 74/76 and park on the side of the highway because you could see those liberty ships. There were so many stockpiled there that they ran from the river, from the highway all the way back to the state port and you could literally step from one ship to the other without touching the water for miles. I guess it would not be a form of entertainment for the children today, but it was fascinating to us.

It was not fascinating to hear the stories that were told about the people that disappeared. I can't say that this is actual fact, but I do know that the nurses at Community Hospital Nursing School used to talk about some of the experiments that were being performed. I can understand now the reasoning behind them, but it was still frightening that blood was drained from people to determine just how little amount of blood they could maintain and still survive and I guess this was to help the war effort.

But you would find maybe a shoe on a street or a purse. You may find a pan where someone who had worked in a home and was going home taking some of the food with them, that you might find their pan and people would disappear. You never found them. These stories I heard at the nursing home because I never really liked math so I always tried to find a way to get around the math homework and going to the nursing home, I made a deal with the student nurses, I would polish their white shoes if they would do my math.

So during that era, children, adults spoke around children because they knew that they were not going to say anything, but we were always listening. So I kept my mouth closed and continued to polish shoes and listen to all of the war stories. But there were three camps here. The largest was the one where Robert Strange Park is now and the location of Martin Luther King Center was the location of the administration building.

Another camp was at Carolina Beach Road and Shipyard Boulevard and a third was at the airport. The barracks buildings, a few of the barracks buildings from the camp at the airport are still there and they're used as storage. There are no signs of the other two. Hopefully one day we will at least have markers because a lot of people still don't know those camps were there and by the end of the war, there were 551 prisoners here.

They worked on a lot of the farms. The only thing they did not have was the freedom to come and go as they would like to so it was hard for us to understand why they wanted to break out of the prison unit. They had their own library. They had an orchestra. They had a garden. They played games outside and as we know the weather here is not very, very harsh normally in the winter so we, as Wilmingtonians and Americans, felt - we just couldn't understand why they wanted to get out, but then we forgot about the one thing they did not have and that was freedom.

INTERVIEWER: What nationality were the prisoners?

ROGERS: Germans. Let's see, where shall I go from here. It was fascinating to watch them bring the prisoners into Wilmington. My father, Haywood Sampson, was a fireman for Atlantic Coastline and the prisoners came in on the train. He would notify us when prisoners were coming in and a lot of times my mother would take me over to 10th and Red Cross in front of what was then James Walker Memorial Hospital and you would see people stop on the sidewalks and watch them as they marched them up Red Cross Street to 10th and south on 10th to the POW camp and they were housed there.

Many of them worked at the dairy farms and the flower farms and I have been told and found evidence through my research, after the war, they continued to correspond with many of the families for whom they worked during the wartime. They were taken out as groups for different, I guess we may call them excursions, but they went to different places in the community, but I was never aware of them in any stores or whatever.

Once the blackouts started, this was something, if you were on the street or in the car with your family, then the headlights had to be turned off and you had to pull over to the side of the road and this became very frightening for children. Since so many people disappeared, I was never allowed outside after dark and once it became dark, Wilmington really became more like a ghost town because everybody tried to stay inside.

My father did not have to go to war. Luckily enough his job was so important that he continued to work with the railroad. The railroad was very important during World War II. I did have a cousin, James Sampson, who went away to war and came back and is still alive today and has some wonderful memories I'm sure he would gladly share. As far as rationing was concerned, everybody had ration tickets for gasoline. You had ration tickets for shoes. You had ration tickets for food.

With the job that my father had and there were only three of us, I was an only child, we really didn't feel the brunt of the rationing. There was never a time when we didn't have sugar. There was never a time when we didn't have gasoline for the car so a lot of the rationing stamps that my parents got, if they used the stamps, they would take the stamps to purchase stuff for other people and occasionally there were accidents on the railroad. And I put "accidents" in quotes and box cars were opened and what was in the boxcars was always important so it was shared in the neighborhoods.

Wilmington then was a wonderful place in the respect that it was neighborhoods. Everybody in the neighborhood took care of everybody else. We didn't have homeless people in our neighborhood unless the person decided that was what they wanted to do. We didn't have people who were hungry unless they were just so proud that no one knew they were hungry. But if a house burned, even during World War II in the neighborhood, the family had somewhere to stay and clothes to wear and food to eat, everything that was needed because the neighborhood took care of them.

It wasn't all grim. There were wonderful memories of entertainment and outings, although you had to be careful about going around the beaches. We had the colored USO which is now the Community Boys Club. It was one of the two USOs in Wilmington, larger USOs at 9th and Nixon. You had a nightclub at 11th and Meares known as The Barn and all of the big name entertainers - you had Cab Calloway came. You had Lionel Hampton. 

Big band music for blacks and whites was your choice of music because we didn't have rock and roll at that time and in a way, it was a good thing because you learned to appreciate different types of music. I had a small radio, one of the earlier versions of a portable and my mother would only allow me to listen to that radio at certain times and I used to take it at night and put it under my pillow so she couldn't hear it when I went to bed and listen to a radio station from Nashville called Randy's Record Mart and they played all of this type of music so I began an appreciation for music at an early age.

With the military bases so close to Wilmington, with Camp Davis up at Holly Ridge and Camp LeJeune, Moffet___ Point which is Camp Johnson now. You had a lot of military people who came into town on the weekends so The Barn was very important to them. As a small child, I was not allowed to go to The Barn of course. In fact, I was never allowed to go to The Barn even as a teenager before it finally closed, but children have a way of getting to see what they want to see.

I was allowed to go and visit a classmate who lived at 11th and Dawson whose name was Ruth Mosby and The Barn was a couple of blocks from her house so as we played outside of course, we skipped down the street and go around the back, sneak in the back and we could watch these performers as they were rehearsing and it was a beautiful place. To me it seemed too huge to understand. I just could not imagine a dance hall that large, but it was a wonderful place and it did give the black community some place to go to forget their problems for a little while.

Most of the women who were domestics continued their domestic jobs during that time and that in itself helped a lot of them, a lot of the families to survive because as I mentioned earlier, in a lot of cases, they were allowed to bring home food that was left over when they finished dinner. So this helped to supplement the diet. We think Wilmington is crowded now and it is and it's so much larger than I ever could have imagined it would be because when I was growing up, the city limits stopped at 17th Street.

So to think as much traffic as we have now, imagine what the traffic was like when you had all these convoys coming down the highway. All of the ships coming in, the sailors and they were everywhere. The soldiers were everywhere. So you became so accustomed to seeing a person in uniform, all of the little children when they played their games wanted to play war games because we really had no idea of the severity of it. 

It was as you grew older that you really began to understand what this was all about. But at that time we played games when we saw the planes flying over very low and we ran and hid behind whatever because a child does not think that that plane if it were an enemy plane could have fired a gun and killed you on the spot. 

During World War II and after World War II up into the 1950's, another form of entertainment for the black community was going to Sea Breeze. Sea Breeze was a black resort located just north of Snow's Cut Bridge and it was founded by the Freeman family. At one point, you had buses that were chartered from as far away as California would come to Wilmington during the summer. These people came to Wilmington to go to Sea Breeze. 

Sea Breeze had dance halls. It had carnivals. It had many, many restaurants and to me the only restaurant of the numerous numbers that were there was Daily's. When I went to Sea Breeze with my parents, I grew up in an era when there were not a lot of babysitters. Parents took their children with them and I liked that. I didn't say anything, but I learned a lot. And we'd go to Sea Breeze and they may eat at several different places at Sea Breeze, but I would refuse to eat if I could not have clam fritters from Daily's and being an only child and spoiled, normally I got my way.

Sea Breeze has more or less disappeared, but it was a wonderful place to go during that time. You had boat rides, speed boat rides and passengers, boats carried people from Sea Breeze over to the northern end of Carolina Beach to a section that was known as Bop City. Because the beaches and everything else was segregated, this was the section where blacks went and it had one restaurant, dance hall, tackle shop, fishing pier, everything was in this one building and it was called Monte Carlo by the Sea.

Of course after Hurricane Hazel, it was known as Monte Carlo in the Sea because that's what happened to it. But they would take you by boat from Sea Breeze across the inlet, across the inland waterway and then you could walk to the beach. Then once Snow's Cut, the new bridge was installed and some of the segregationist practices were lightened, then you were allowed to drive through Carolina Beach and go out Canal Drive and go to Bop City.

The churches used that area for picnics for their vacation bible schools. Vacation bible schools in the black community were very important and even during World War II, denominations were more or less forgotten and this was another way of having neighborhoods. Once school was out, the children went from church to church. It made no difference if you were Baptist. 

You went to the vacation bible school in the Baptist church and if the Methodist church two blocks down the street had one that started the next week, you went to that one. Then you just continued all over the city. So in a way black children went to school 12 months a year. It was nothing unusual for us. This was a way for the neighborhood elders to keep up with the children. 

It was very interesting trying to document information on the POW camps that were here. I remember them from my childhood. There were lots of people, civilians here who remembered, but once I started to research the material, the federal government told me there was never a POW camp in Wilmington. For the longest time when I mentioned this, I would get very adamant about it because people would tell me there were no POW camps in Wilmington and I do know what I saw.

So after being repeatedly told by our government the camps were not here, I decided to take drastic steps. Knowing that there were German prisoners, I contacted East Berlin because at that time we still had East and West Berlin and I wrote to them asking for information concerning POW's in the camps in Wilmington, North Carolina. I also wrote to Moscow. Well they in turn did exactly what I thought they would do, they sent my letters to the State Department.

Within a very short time comparatively speaking, I was notified by National Archives that after further search and review, information had been found and they would gladly send me the information through the Freedom of Information Act that I was trying to get. So then I received information stating there were 551 prisoners here at the end of the war. I was given records of inspection that were signed by the commanding officers at that time. 

The three POW camps that I had mentioned were now actually identified. So it showed that they were hiding this information and that in turn made me more curious. During my research I found that one of the laws stated a POW camp was not to be located within the city limits. Well the one on 10th Street was within the city limits, but then it was in the poor neighborhood so maybe they didn't really think that would cause a problem and it was stated that careful use of the prisoners was to be made.

They really weren't supposed to work on as many farms as they did and as many prisoners as they did. I was also able to find a copy of a letter written by a former prisoner to the farmer, the dairy farmer, for whom he worked when he was here and I sent a copy of that to Washington and asked them, now tell me they were not here because he mentioned the camp and he mentioned how much he enjoyed being with the family and that at Christmas, the family treated him as though he were a member and he was given gifts just the way every other member of the family was and how well he was fed.

But there was one thing that still bothers me about this camp. Once the camp was dismantled, the administration building that sat where Martin Luther King Center is was dismantled, it was torn down, and parts of that building were buried in different sections of the city. It was not taken to a landfill. It was not used as landfill for further development, I'm curious as to why the building was buried.

This is a supplement from the Star News that was printed in 1992 and it had some wonderful stories about World War II and its survivors and the one section in it was through a child's eyes. It just shows that these memories, we may repress the memories for a while, but they are there. Some of them are good, some of them we really would like to be able to forget, but that's one thing about living through wartime. You may think that you forget it, but you don't. 

One of the hardest things for me to forget about is the fear when I would hear air raid sirens and to this day, I don't like air raid sirens so I remember exactly what that was like. Preserving these memories are very important, not just for our future generations, but for the people who come to Wilmington to make Wilmington their home now. Many of them have never heard of the part Wilmington played in World War II and the one thing that seems to fascinate them is the fact that there were POW camps here. 

Although some people dispute it, we don't know for certain, it has been rumored that the Ethyl Dial plant was bombed during World War II. People who lived in that area say I don't care what they think, I know what I saw or I know what I heard so again they equate that to what I felt about the POW camps. Maybe if we keep looking, we can actually find documented proof of that and other things that happened here during World War II.