BOOK OF MEMOIRS GIVES INSIGHT TO BOLLINGER COUNTY

To hear Nelda Mayfield Wilkinson talk about her cousin Charlie and his growing-up years in Bollinger County, you'd think they were the best of friends. In a way, they are, even though they have met only through a musty old manuscript and faded photographs.

Wilkinson, of Cape Girardeau, recently edited and published Charlie's -- officially Charles Hamilton Williams -- account of life in the Bollinger County community of Mayfield and visits to "the big city" of Marble Hill in the late 1800s.

Wilkinson learned about the manuscript while she was researching her own genealogy.

"I didn't know Charlie," Wilkinson said. "I just happened to find this manuscript. There had been copies of it floating around Bollinger County, and after he died, for a few years nobody knew anything about it."

When a cousin gave Wilkinson the manuscript, she knew she had a new project. When she finished her own genealogy, she got to work on Charlie's stories. That involved tracking down the descendants of everyone mentioned in the book, which took quite a bit of detective work and interviews with literally hundreds of people.

"I took his manuscript, and I found pictures for as many of these people as I could," Wilkinson said. "I've worked on it for about two years. It was very rough. The chapters really hadn't been put together, but the basic stories were there, and they were just so funny. Nobody will enjoy this as much as I do."

Many of the people Wilkinson met while researching the book remembered hearing the stories Charlie recounts. "Charlie just kept notes and put them into a book form," she said. "I don't doubt the authenticity; there are too many people in Mayfield and Bollinger County who have heard the stories in some way."

The book, "I Remember the Ozarks," recounts Charlie's childhood, including a legendary brawl between a teacher and a student in the one-room school house he attended; his schoolboy crush on "Sweet Ida" Eaves; Dr. Talley's $700 microscope; and the story of Molly, a plain-faced, quick-thinking girl well on her way to becoming an old maid, who strung along two suitors, took out two marriage licenses, set the wedding date and waited to marry whichever sweetheart showed up first.

The book doesn't uncover any family scandals or refute Bollinger County history, Wilkinson said. Instead, it is a series of humorous anecdotes about family, friends and neighbors in a pioneer town.

"These are the kinds of things that just happen every day and nobody really remembers them, but my Charlie did, and now I do," she said. "And I've got to quit calling him Charlie."

Charlie worked for many years with the World Federation of Education Association and traveled widely in Europe. While visiting relatives in Mayfield after many years away, "he thought they'd want to hear about his travels in Europe, but they wanted to hear about the fight at the schoolhouse," Wilkinson said.

Charlie was born in Bollinger County in 1880, and lived near Mayfield. He attended the University of Missouri and Cornell University and worked for many years as an educator and writer. He returned to Marble Hill while in his 70s and began writing the collection of anecdotes he'd collected over the years. He died in 1967 while the manuscript was still in its preliminary stages.

"He describes living in this little community. When his parents got married, they got a wood cooking stove. There were only two of them in the community. Everybody else cooked on the fireplace," Wilkinson said. "There's one story about a friend who came to visit them and ran his foot through on a thorn, and they used a piece of fat meat on it."

She worked with his daughter, Emily Williams Peirce, who now lives in Baltimore, Md. Peirce wrote the introduction to the book, in which she recalls visiting Bollinger County and hearing her father's stories.

Charlie also wrote a chapter on the native dialect of the Ozarks and another on folk songs and ballads he remembered hearing while growing up.

"These are the kinds of stories you would tell your children in the evening if we didn't have television," Wilkinson said.

In the foreword Wilkinson advises readers, "Don't be surprised, if after a few pages, there is a small, soft voice that is not your own reading along with you."

While she was putting the manuscript together, Wilkinson heard that voice herself.

"That was the way I felt. I would sit there at the computer and some of the things he said sounded really strange, and I'd think, is that right? But it was just almost like I could hear him say, `No, leave that where it is and look at page 33 and then look at the next chapter,'" she said.

She describes Charlie as "very intelligent, with a good sense of humor."

"He's a name on my computer in the genealogy, but I feel I do know him. As I went through this book with him, I could see the changes in his personality and how he grew as he wrote all these different stories," Wilkinson said.

Sometimes in life, good friends have to part for a while. When she finally turned the finished manuscript over to Stewart Printing and Publishing Co. in Marble Hill, Wilkinson thought, "Oh, no, it's finished."