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STEUBENVILLE -- A research project has helped to offer a glimpse into the life of a local man who served with the Army during World War I.
Keith Johnson, a volunteer at the Jefferson County Historical Association Museum, said he has been transcribing and annotating letters written by Charles Tortorice during his service in the trenches in Southern France.
“It’s important to keep the memory of World War I alive,” Johnson said Tuesday while reflecting on the letters and Veterans Day. “There’s still interest in World War II and the Vietnam War, but I think people have kind of lost sight of it. That was supposed to be the war to end all wars.
“And, World War I is the reason for this day that we have. Now, we call it Veterans Day, but originally, it was Armistice Day, because they signed the armistice on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month,” he added.
Johnson, who is originally from California and who received a lot of his museum training in New York City, said he was not sure how the box of letters had ended up in the museum. He said he became involved with the collection when a research request came into the museum from a woman who was looking for information about one of her relatives, Charles Tortorice.
He added that he was familiar with the name from earlier research where he had found information about Florence Burris Tortorice, the wife of Charles, and Bertha Burris, her sister. The two, Johnson explained, were go-getters, and ended up running the Hub Tearoom and owning the Korner Kupboard Bakery and the Federal Terrace.
Linda Hilty, another volunteer at the historical association, was able to produce the box of letters.
Through his letters, Johnson said he was able to determine that Tortorice was a “pretty great guy.” He remained a bachelor after returning from World War I and tried to re-enlist when World War II started, but by then he was considered too old.
His writing was folksy, Johnson said, but also carry the sense of the weight felt by service members like him. He mentioned a letter Tortorice had written after he had been drafted, completed training at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe and found himself on a ship headed toward France.
“It was something like, ‘We haven’t been hit by a submarine yet, so I consider myself to be lucky, but I won’t consider myself lucky until I make it through.’ There was already this kind of ominous sense and atmosphere of imminent danger in the letters,” Johnson explained.
Tortorice, who would became a private first class, ended up in Southern France, but exactly where the letters don’t reveal. Johnson said several of the letters have missing sentences or whole chunks which undoubtedly contained information government censors considered too sensitive or revealing.
He saw action in at least three major battles of the war: St.-Mihiel, Chateau-Thierry and the Somme. In one of his letters, Tortorice told his parents the trenches the U.S. soldiers were fighting from were “the finest trenches to be had, with boardwalks to walk on,” Johnson said in an article about the letters part of the association’s monthly newsletter.
Another letter, this one written to his sister Josie and dated April 26, 1918, indicated, “I have to smile when I read your letter asking whether I am in the danger zone. France is all in the danger zone.”
Tortorice also asked his relatives, who lived on North Fourth Street, if they had heard about the death of Emrys Watkins. Watkins, who was from Follansbee, was killed by an explosion from a German shell. American Legion Post 45 in Follansbee is named in his honor.
“That’s the way trench warfare went,” Johnson said. “You are sitting there in the trench and your buddies are in the trench next to you or maybe down a row, and you might be wearing gas masks and heavy protection, and if the shell comes in, it will take out a bunch of guys, but then, other guys will be unscathed,” Johnson said.
Johnson added at least one of the letters was published in the Herald-Star. Tortorice seems to have been just a regular guy, with cursive writing, and seemed to have been pretty well-schooled. There were some mistakes, but his grammar was pretty good, Johnson explained.
That correspondence, Johnson added, is in pretty good shape, and the letters have been placed in a preservation binder that allows them to be examined. The envelopes they came in, he said, show how much paper can degrade after 109 years. Many of the actual letters were written on stationery provided to the soldiers by the YMCA and the Knights of Columbus. Unlike the envelopes, the writing paper was much higher quality and is still intact, Johnson said.
In addition to stories from the front, the letters also offer insight into what interested Tortorice in the early part of the 20th century. Johnson explained in the newsletter one of Tortorice’s friends, “Issy” Rothstein, owned a Paige, a luxury car at the time equipped with a flathead six-cylinder engine. Tortorice had written to his brother, Andy, asking for magazines which contained stories about the latest models.
The letters offer a look back through more than a century and can give Tri-State Area residents a new perspective on Veterans Day.
“That was kind of the way they saw it, and that’s why we celebrate, but people have lost sight of the original source of Nov. 11 and Veterans Day,” Johnson said. “This is one way of seeing it, that there were local guys who were drafted, and there also were volunteers, but they became great patriots. They liberated France.
“I think they were celebrated,” he continued. “These guys were celebrated, where some of the veterans from Vietnam were not celebrated. These guys had the benefit of being able to accomplish something in that war that didn’t have a lot of baggage.”
The museum, which is located at 426 Franklin Ave., is open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays through November. It can be contacted at (740) 283-1133.