Hi There!
I'm going to put together a blog here about my father, Mayor John W. Shultz, and hope that those of you reading these words will appreciate the wonderful impact he had on the community of Martinsville, Virginia in the 1950s.
As you may probably know, my name is Rick Shultz, or rather, technically, John W. Shultz, Jr., although nobody that I can remember ever called me "Junior".
I've been putting together a few blogs over the last couple of years about myself, the cars I've owned (that are now worth astronomical amounts), and most importantly, my grandchildren, the children of my first-born son, John M. Shultz, currently residing in the Dallas, Texas area.
But this blog is going to be about my father, John W. Shultz or "Johnny Shultz" who was Mayor of Martinsville, Virginia in the 1950s. On the right here is a snapshot of my dad that I recently received from my friend, Desmond Kendrick, the curator of the Martinsville-Henry County Heritage Center & Museum.
Desmond says this photo was taken around 1945 when my dad was general manager of Radio Station WMVA in Martinsville. WMVA was the NBC Radio Network affiliate at the time, hence the RCA DX-44 microphone with the NBC logo on it next to him. This mike at the time was an almost universally used commercial ribbon microphone and they are legendary - you'll find them being used in even today in some radio stations around the world.
I pretty much agree with Desmond's guess as to the probable date of the photograph, If it was taken in the summer of 1945, my dad would have been 30 years old (I've colorized the image from the original black & white).
Let me go back to the beginning, so far as I know it. My paternal grandparents were Warwick Henry Shultz and Jessie Davidson Pedigo Shultz. They were living in Martinsville when my dad was born on January 2, 1915. His father, Warwick, was born in most likely the early 1890s in Augusta County, Virginia, probably on the Sugar Loaf Farm property or thereabouts, located some 7 miles south of Staunton. He may not have been born there, but he and my grandmother lived at Sugar Loaf later in their lives and his brother, Fred, and Fred's wife, Lee, lived there until the 1950s. I've found his obituary here from the Danville (Va.) Bee dated 1939.
Warwick went to work for the B&O railway and then got a job with Norfolk & Western which had a station in Martinsville. My grandmother, Jessie, probably was born in Martinsville and that's where they lived for awhile before moving to Winston-Salem, NC, where the headquarters of Norfolk & Western was at the time.
So, I'm almost positive that they would have been living in Martinsville in 1915 when my father was born. Even though I have discovered an article that states my father was born in Augusta County, I am sure that's a mistake and the reference was to my grandfather, not my father. My parents told me when I was growing up that my father was born on Starling Avenue in Martinsville, probably in their house, and that date is probably correct.
Apparently the family moved to Winston-Salem, NC several years after my dad was born, since that is where the main offices of Norfolk & Western were located at the time. Also, I know that they were living in Winston-Salem when my dad went to high school because the records state that he attended R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem and graduated in 1933. Also, he was living in Winston-Salem when he met my mother while she was working at the Carolina Theater in downtown Winston-Salem. They were married in 1937.
The earliest photo I have of my dad as a baby has apparently been lost by my dear son Bill with whom I left countless photos & information from my past to hold onto when I moved to Panama in 2005. But the other day I discovered a website with high school and college yearbooks so I've researched the Reynolds High School photos from the Class of 1933 and found this:
The resolution is pretty bad, sorry, but it's as good as I can get it. Blown up, the photo and information looks like this:
Most of this text you can pretty much figure out and I apologize that it's not any clearer. I also changed the aspect ratio because I think the images on this website aren't accurate and everybody looked too fat. These look right, at least to me.
These pages came from the
e-yearbook.com website. I had already researched trying to find my father on classmates.com but it appears their records totally skip the 1933 yearbook. However, I was delighted to find it on e-yearbook.com.
My story about my dad picked up in earnest when last month I ran across a newspaper article online that mentioned Radio Station WSTP in Salisbury, NC had closed down after 76-plus years on the air. I knew that my father had been manager of the station and left it to take the same position at the new Martinsville radio station, WMVA. I was two years old when we moved. So that news made me awfully curious to find out if my dad had been the Salisbury station's first general manager also. I wrote the author of the article, Mark Wineka at the Salisbury Post, and got a very nice email back from him saying that yes, my dad had been the first manager of WSTP, and he offered to send me some newspaper clippings and photos!
Here's an image taken in December, 1938 of my dad (age 23) when he was getting ready to open the station. The station went on the air on December 31, 1938 (New Year's Eve), and their first major broadcast was the Rose Bowl Parade the next day on January 1, 1939. (The recent article written by Mark was one year off. I'm using the correct dates from the original newspaper article.)
Mark sent a couple of other photos of my dad while he was at the Salisbury station. This one on the left is pretty good (I colorized it) while the other one isn't - Michael (my stepson) says he's too rigid in the other photo and looks like he's in the army, so I won't put that one in here since I agree with him.
So, the story picks up in 1941 when my dad took over as station manager for WMVA, the brand new radio station in Martinsville. Shortly thereafter, in probably around June 1942, my mom and I moved from Salisbury to Martinsville to join him. We moved into a two-unit apartment at 628 Mulberry Road owned by Buck Jones and his wife who lived in the other unit. We stayed there until building a new home about a half mile north of there also on Mulberry Road. Here's the article from Salisbury (Thank's Mark!):
By the mid-1940s, my grandmother, Jessie Pedigo Shultz, and her brother, John H. Pedigo, Jr., had decided to move back to Martinsville from their home at Sugarloaf Farm, about 7 miles south of Staunton, Va. They purchased the former home of Mr. B. L. Fisher located at 611 Mulberry Road. Mr. Fisher was the owner of Lee Telephone Company and had built the home, if I remember correctly from the date scratched in the basement cement floor, in 1934. When he decided to move around 1944 I believe, he constructed an almost exact replica of his home on Mulberry on property that he owned that was located south of Martinsville somewhere off of Route 220, although I don't know the exact location. I was told that he had installed his own electrical generating plant (!) on a stream on the property too, so apparently he must have made quite a lot of money operating the telephone company, plus I'm sure construction prices and materials at that time near the end of the Depression were quite inexpensive.
I also remember being told that the only thing at his Mulberry house that he couldn't duplicate at the new one was the roof tiles. Those things were really thick and heavy - the roof of my grandmother's house actually sagged from their weight, and the beams in the attic were 12-inch rock-hard oak! I used to stumble over a pile of them he had stockpiled in the woods behind my grandmother's house while playing there as a child.
In 1954, our family moved into a new home that we constructed on the vacant part of the north side of my grandmother's property next to her home (the old Fisher house). Our house officially became 607 Mulberry Road and the number 609 disappeared.
That same year, my father and his old friend, Phil Hedrick, the chief engineer at WSJS in Winston-Salem, formed the Patrick-Henry Broadcasting Corporation and started Radio Station WHEE in direct competition to WMVA. We had already opened a station in South Hill a year earlier and would eventually add a third station, WHEO in Stuart, Va. in 1959.
This is the station's ad in my 1958 Martinsville High School yearbook for the station. (A full page I might add!)
My dad died in 1961 at the Duke University hospital in Durham, NC after having a heart seizure in Martinsville. The ambulance took him to Durham and Dr. Philip Sprinkle, our family physician, called me when I was living at the student dormitory at Wake Forest to let me know that he had been taken there and my mom was there waiting for me. I drove to Durham and met my mother in the hospital hallway. My dad had already passed away by the time I got there. Here is the obituary from the front page of the April 20th issue of The Martinsville Bulletin:
The following day's issue of The Bulletin (April 21) had a very nice article which about how much he will be missed in the community:
Elena Margaret Shultz. Please visit her blog located at https://elenashultz.blogspot.com/
Devin Matthew Shultz. Please visit his blog located at https://devinshultz.blogspot.com/
and
Andrew William Shultz. Please visit his blog located at https://andrewshultz.blogspot.com/
My personal blog is here: https://rickshultz.blogspot.com/
My personal email address is panama.rick@ymail.com or you can write me at my Google address of rickinpanama@gmail.com.
A special thanks to Mark Wineka at The Salisbury Post and Desmond Kendrick at the Martinsville-Henry County Heritage Center & Museum for their enormous and most gracious assistance in helping me put this page together. Thanks a lot to you both!!!
I'm going to put together a blog here about my father, Mayor John W. Shultz, and hope that those of you reading these words will appreciate the wonderful impact he had on the community of Martinsville, Virginia in the 1950s.
As you may probably know, my name is Rick Shultz, or rather, technically, John W. Shultz, Jr., although nobody that I can remember ever called me "Junior".
I've been putting together a few blogs over the last couple of years about myself, the cars I've owned (that are now worth astronomical amounts), and most importantly, my grandchildren, the children of my first-born son, John M. Shultz, currently residing in the Dallas, Texas area.But this blog is going to be about my father, John W. Shultz or "Johnny Shultz" who was Mayor of Martinsville, Virginia in the 1950s. On the right here is a snapshot of my dad that I recently received from my friend, Desmond Kendrick, the curator of the Martinsville-Henry County Heritage Center & Museum.
Desmond says this photo was taken around 1945 when my dad was general manager of Radio Station WMVA in Martinsville. WMVA was the NBC Radio Network affiliate at the time, hence the RCA DX-44 microphone with the NBC logo on it next to him. This mike at the time was an almost universally used commercial ribbon microphone and they are legendary - you'll find them being used in even today in some radio stations around the world.
I pretty much agree with Desmond's guess as to the probable date of the photograph, If it was taken in the summer of 1945, my dad would have been 30 years old (I've colorized the image from the original black & white).
Let me go back to the beginning, so far as I know it. My paternal grandparents were Warwick Henry Shultz and Jessie Davidson Pedigo Shultz. They were living in Martinsville when my dad was born on January 2, 1915. His father, Warwick, was born in most likely the early 1890s in Augusta County, Virginia, probably on the Sugar Loaf Farm property or thereabouts, located some 7 miles south of Staunton. He may not have been born there, but he and my grandmother lived at Sugar Loaf later in their lives and his brother, Fred, and Fred's wife, Lee, lived there until the 1950s. I've found his obituary here from the Danville (Va.) Bee dated 1939.
Warwick went to work for the B&O railway and then got a job with Norfolk & Western which had a station in Martinsville. My grandmother, Jessie, probably was born in Martinsville and that's where they lived for awhile before moving to Winston-Salem, NC, where the headquarters of Norfolk & Western was at the time.
So, I'm almost positive that they would have been living in Martinsville in 1915 when my father was born. Even though I have discovered an article that states my father was born in Augusta County, I am sure that's a mistake and the reference was to my grandfather, not my father. My parents told me when I was growing up that my father was born on Starling Avenue in Martinsville, probably in their house, and that date is probably correct.
Apparently the family moved to Winston-Salem, NC several years after my dad was born, since that is where the main offices of Norfolk & Western were located at the time. Also, I know that they were living in Winston-Salem when my dad went to high school because the records state that he attended R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem and graduated in 1933. Also, he was living in Winston-Salem when he met my mother while she was working at the Carolina Theater in downtown Winston-Salem. They were married in 1937.
The earliest photo I have of my dad as a baby has apparently been lost by my dear son Bill with whom I left countless photos & information from my past to hold onto when I moved to Panama in 2005. But the other day I discovered a website with high school and college yearbooks so I've researched the Reynolds High School photos from the Class of 1933 and found this:
The resolution is pretty bad, sorry, but it's as good as I can get it. Blown up, the photo and information looks like this:
Most of this text you can pretty much figure out and I apologize that it's not any clearer. I also changed the aspect ratio because I think the images on this website aren't accurate and everybody looked too fat. These look right, at least to me.
These pages came from the
e-yearbook.com website. I had already researched trying to find my father on classmates.com but it appears their records totally skip the 1933 yearbook. However, I was delighted to find it on e-yearbook.com.
My story about my dad picked up in earnest when last month I ran across a newspaper article online that mentioned Radio Station WSTP in Salisbury, NC had closed down after 76-plus years on the air. I knew that my father had been manager of the station and left it to take the same position at the new Martinsville radio station, WMVA. I was two years old when we moved. So that news made me awfully curious to find out if my dad had been the Salisbury station's first general manager also. I wrote the author of the article, Mark Wineka at the Salisbury Post, and got a very nice email back from him saying that yes, my dad had been the first manager of WSTP, and he offered to send me some newspaper clippings and photos!
Here's an image taken in December, 1938 of my dad (age 23) when he was getting ready to open the station. The station went on the air on December 31, 1938 (New Year's Eve), and their first major broadcast was the Rose Bowl Parade the next day on January 1, 1939. (The recent article written by Mark was one year off. I'm using the correct dates from the original newspaper article.)
Mark sent a couple of other photos of my dad while he was at the Salisbury station. This one on the left is pretty good (I colorized it) while the other one isn't - Michael (my stepson) says he's too rigid in the other photo and looks like he's in the army, so I won't put that one in here since I agree with him.
So, the story picks up in 1941 when my dad took over as station manager for WMVA, the brand new radio station in Martinsville. Shortly thereafter, in probably around June 1942, my mom and I moved from Salisbury to Martinsville to join him. We moved into a two-unit apartment at 628 Mulberry Road owned by Buck Jones and his wife who lived in the other unit. We stayed there until building a new home about a half mile north of there also on Mulberry Road. Here's the article from Salisbury (Thank's Mark!):
By the mid-1940s, my grandmother, Jessie Pedigo Shultz, and her brother, John H. Pedigo, Jr., had decided to move back to Martinsville from their home at Sugarloaf Farm, about 7 miles south of Staunton, Va. They purchased the former home of Mr. B. L. Fisher located at 611 Mulberry Road. Mr. Fisher was the owner of Lee Telephone Company and had built the home, if I remember correctly from the date scratched in the basement cement floor, in 1934. When he decided to move around 1944 I believe, he constructed an almost exact replica of his home on Mulberry on property that he owned that was located south of Martinsville somewhere off of Route 220, although I don't know the exact location. I was told that he had installed his own electrical generating plant (!) on a stream on the property too, so apparently he must have made quite a lot of money operating the telephone company, plus I'm sure construction prices and materials at that time near the end of the Depression were quite inexpensive.
I also remember being told that the only thing at his Mulberry house that he couldn't duplicate at the new one was the roof tiles. Those things were really thick and heavy - the roof of my grandmother's house actually sagged from their weight, and the beams in the attic were 12-inch rock-hard oak! I used to stumble over a pile of them he had stockpiled in the woods behind my grandmother's house while playing there as a child.
In 1954, our family moved into a new home that we constructed on the vacant part of the north side of my grandmother's property next to her home (the old Fisher house). Our house officially became 607 Mulberry Road and the number 609 disappeared.
That same year, my father and his old friend, Phil Hedrick, the chief engineer at WSJS in Winston-Salem, formed the Patrick-Henry Broadcasting Corporation and started Radio Station WHEE in direct competition to WMVA. We had already opened a station in South Hill a year earlier and would eventually add a third station, WHEO in Stuart, Va. in 1959.
This is the station's ad in my 1958 Martinsville High School yearbook for the station. (A full page I might add!)
My dad died in 1961 at the Duke University hospital in Durham, NC after having a heart seizure in Martinsville. The ambulance took him to Durham and Dr. Philip Sprinkle, our family physician, called me when I was living at the student dormitory at Wake Forest to let me know that he had been taken there and my mom was there waiting for me. I drove to Durham and met my mother in the hospital hallway. My dad had already passed away by the time I got there. Here is the obituary from the front page of the April 20th issue of The Martinsville Bulletin:
I am hoping that my children and grandchildren will eventually see this file and the others in this blog so they can appreciate their great grandfather and how much he meant to the community of Martinsville, Virginia.
If I find more, I'll put it in here.
Thanks for visiting this blog!!!
Rick Shultz
Santiago, Veraguas, Panama
July 22, 2018
This blog is dedicated to my grandchildren, Elena, Devin and Drew Shultz who currently live with their father, my son John Moser Shultz in Dallas, Texas. I hope they will be visiting this blog at sometime in the future. I have also put together individual blogs for each one of them:
Elena Margaret Shultz. Please visit her blog located at https://elenashultz.blogspot.com/
Devin Matthew Shultz. Please visit his blog located at https://devinshultz.blogspot.com/
and
Andrew William Shultz. Please visit his blog located at https://andrewshultz.blogspot.com/
My personal blog is here: https://rickshultz.blogspot.com/
My personal email address is panama.rick@ymail.com or you can write me at my Google address of rickinpanama@gmail.com.
A special thanks to Mark Wineka at The Salisbury Post and Desmond Kendrick at the Martinsville-Henry County Heritage Center & Museum for their enormous and most gracious assistance in helping me put this page together. Thanks a lot to you both!!!
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