ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601090002
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: GALAX
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
It was back in 1985, when Munsey Webb was riding on the final Norfolk and Western Railway freight out of Galax, that he decided to write a book about the railroad.
"Going down on the last train, I got to thinking," he said. Someone, he decided, should record the history of NW in this region while it was still possible to assemble the information.
The result is the newly published "Norfolk & Western Railroad Company North Carolina Branch," a 114-page volume available both in hardback and large paperback full of photographs, documents and recollections. It took Webb 10 years to produce it.
"In my 24 years of experience up and down the line, it was hard for me. But it would've been much harder for an outsider," he said.
Webb's association with the railroad predates his birth, because his parents courted by train. He was named after a local railroad agent and, by age 12 was catching and selling fish to railroad crews to get spending money. He learned Morse code in the Army, which helped him get his first job as agent and telegrapher in Allisonia. He met his future wife at that station, when she came in "in an irate mood" looking for some furniture that had been delayed in shipment, he said.
He recalled his days at the yard office in Pulaski, where he had to handle four telegraph lines, two railroad telephones and a regular phone, and use a loudspeaker to talk to the train crew. But he thrived on all that.
"I did miss the railroad, the way it used to be, but not how it is today," he said.
Webb joined NW in 1948 as a station agent and telegrapher. Over the years, he also worked at stations in Pulaski, Galax, Ivanhoe, Foster Falls and Salem until he retired in 1972 and started a wholesale furniture company in Galax.
Thirteen years later, he was among those aboard that last freight train out of Galax, a photograph of which is in the book's last pages, over the words, "The End." But it actually marked a beginning for Webb, launching a new literary experience.
His biggest job was gathering the data. "I had a whole lot of it and, knowing everybody up and down the tracks from here to Pulaski, I knew where to go and get it," he said.
He got encouragement from Pulaski County historian Lloyd Mathews and Pulaski Mayor Andy Graham, among others. "Everybody worked with me, everywhere I'd go," he said. "I took it all from annual reports, minutes of meetings, and positively no hearsay."
Webb preferred the written record over personal recollections because he remembers back when he and another station agent started a rumor as a joke "and then we heard it a week later, and you could barely recognize it," he said. "I never laughed so much in my life."
Actually, their rumor - involving NW joining Southern Railway - turned out to be true in the long haul. It was just about 25 years ahead of its time. Norfolk Southern Corp. was formed in 1982.
Webb did all his work on the book at an 80-year-old desk in his home, writing the text with an uncounted number of broad-stroke pens. He enlisted perhaps as many as two dozen volunteers for typing "just wherever I could get it free." He would occasionally slip a typist a bag of candy, courtesy of his son-in-law who owns the Moretz Candy Co. in Bristol.
Linda Compton, a secretary at Regal Properties Ltd. in Galax, typed about a third of it. "She was good at it," Webb said.
His wife, Hazel, a former high school English teacher, was among his proofreaders. Webb said she proofread a third of the total volume before she quit.
He also enlisted his sister-in-law, a teacher in Maine, but not for long. She began slashing the manuscript right and left with her red pencil.
"Betty, just quit!" he told her. "I wasn't writing it for a college professor. ... I just used railroad talk."
He tracked down thousands of photographs of trains, people and related items such as Pulaski's Maple Shade Inn which was built by NW. He has two filing cabinets crammed full of photos, "and, you know, the bad part, when you decide what you're going to use, that's it," he said. "Wouldn't change it, but there's a whole lot of pictures I'd have liked to have gotten in."
He hopes to use more of them as an addendum in future printings of the book.
In a way, Webb misses not working on the project as he has for the past decade, especially since retiring and closing Munsey's Furniture Co. Inc. five years ago. "There's a void, but I'm taking that up in getting it out to the public."
The book is on sale at the Raymond F. Ratcliffe Memorial Museum in Pulaski's restored NW depot, the Terry Bryson Grocery in Draper, Allisonia Trading Post and George Marshall Store in Allisonia, New River Trail Shot Tower State Park, Blue Ridge Books and Durham's Restaurant in Wytheville, Snooper's Antique Mall at Fort Chiswell, Ivanhoe Civic League, Yonce Grocery at Cripple Creek, Glenny's Kitchen at Speedwell, Fries Antiques and Consignments, the Virginia Museum of Transportation in Roanoke, and the Chamber of Commerce, Photo Makers of Virginia, Wolfe Glade Grocery, Long & Short Tales Bookstore and Book Nook, all in Galax.
The hardback costs $39 and the large paperback, $22.50.
"It's going great," Webb said. "I've sold probably 700 or more" since printing was completed in mid-October.
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. One of the photographs in Munsey Webb's book showsby CNBthe last train on the North Carolina Branch preparing to leave
Galax
2. PAUL DELLINGER Munsey Webb displays his book about the old North
Carolina Branch of the Norfolk and Western Railway.