Bob and Nell Wise Wechter - Uncommon People
This article describes alumni Bob and Nell Wechter. This and other articles may be found in the University Archives.
Citation for this article is: "Bob and Nell Wise Wechter - Uncommon People," ECU Report, Volume XII, No. 2, July 1980.
The drive from Greenville to Stumpy Point is a trip to another century that takes only about two and one half hours if you dawdle along taking time to smell the changing air -- pine and earth with just a touch of pulp mill thrown in-- to the smell of mud and marine life left to ripen in the sun when the tide goes out.
The eye becomes accustomed to the change from green and blue to shades of beiges and blue as the landscape changes from the tall pine and the deep shade of oaks to bushes that line the roadside and rim the canals until the sand and sea oats take over, and the eye sees miles of waving knee-high stalks of sea grass. Sturdy trawlers -- shrimpers and fishing boats -- some grungy with time's grime and others sparkling bright with new paint line the docks on the canals.
The hum of traffic changes to the lapping of tiny waves as the tide comes in.Seagulls sound a lonely cry over the flat marshes.
Everyone in Stumpy Point waves and speaks as if you were a next door neighbor. Wearing rubber boots, jeans or overalls and mackinaws; faces ruddy and tanned as only sea salt and sun can make them; cleaning fish, unloading boats, mending nets -- they look like every canvase that has ever been painted of seafaring men and their women who tend the house, gardens, children and family finances while the men struggle to make a living from one of the hardest vineyards on earth.
This is the land and the way of life that nurtured the unquenchable spirit and hardy character of Nell Wise Wechter throughout her life and that has drawn Robert Wechter to remain in this part of the world for the last 39 years.
Nell Wise is in her sixties, Bob Wechter is 81 and both of them retain the fire and passion that they had as young adults. Now it has been tempered by experience and made wiser by age, but the spirit has not diminished during time by so much as the weight of a grain of sand.
These fascinating people met during the early years of World War II when she was a very young teacher on Hatteras and he was sent to the Coast Guard station there as a pharmacist's mate.The only medical man on the entire Outer Banks, he served "480-odd" men, their families and 2,500 residents of the areas."I did everything, including delivering babies, even though I had two midwives to help me," Bob said of his tour of duty on the island. "When I left after two years, they had four pharmacist's mates and a dentist to do what I had been doing by myself."
Both Nell Wise and Bob are graduates of East Carolina University -- many times. She has four degrees; a two-year degree from the normal school in the 1930's, a BS in 1951, and an MA in Education in 1952 and an MA in English from UNC-G.She has attended East Carolina under nearly every name -- ECTC, ECC and ECU -- under every president and chancellor the University has had except Dr. Brewer.She received the Distinguished Alumni Award in 1959.
Bob Wechter entered East Carolina as a freshman in his 50th year and earned both bachelor's and master's degrees.Both Nell Wise and Bob worked on their doctorates at UNC-Chapel Hill.
That he could have any career at the age of 50 is a minor miracle for Bob.The Coast Guard discharged him in 1946 with the admonition to take it "easy" -- to abstain from the pleasures of cokes, tea, coffee, tobaccos of any kind and "very little if any sex."Bob's reply was "Doctor, you have taken all the pleasures out of life, so what is there left?"
"For three years, I just hibernated here and then Dr. McGinnis came here for a week's visit to hunt and fish and told me about EC's new industrial technology course.He saw that I was interested in wood work, so he invited me to come to ECC.
"I got into everything in college.I was on the debating team, a member of the College Players, the staff of Teco Echo , the trainer with the football team, the Veterans Club and I made Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities."
Then he started his second career, the same one that Nell Wise had been pursuing since she was a teenager.They both taught in Lumberton and Greensboro schools after Bob received his degree.
It was during their Greensboro years that Nell Wise became known as a writer in North Carolina.She free lanced for the late Miles Wolff of the Greensboro Daily News and covered such stories as the huge fire that ravaged the mainland woods of Dare and Hyde Counties and the hurricanes that devastated coastal areas of the state in the mid-fifties.
She and Bob talked of the difficulty of getting into Dare County in fire and hurricane -- Hell and high water. At one time, fire was burning alongside every road and several attempts had to be made to find passage into the burning area.During the fire, the driver had to keep his door open with his head haning out to see the road.
Nell remembers the water being "18 inches deep in the houses" during the hurricane and many houses as being washed off their foundations and moved to other places.She took pictures of the devastation of both the fire and the floods with a box camera and took them to Aycock Brown, chronicler of the Outer Banks to be blown up.
Nell Wise described herself as a fairly decent newspaper reporter to "just pick it up on my own." William A. Shires, now director of the East Carolina University News Bureau, then News Manager for United Press in Raleigh, NC, remembers congratulating Wolff on the Greensboro Daily's coverage of the fire and described Nell Wise's stories as "being some of the finest pieces of close-up reporting that I have ever read."
Nell Wise believes that you "either have it or you don't" when it comes to "newspapering." But she adds that you can learn things to help."Nobody on God's green earth can teach you to be a creative writer.You are born with the talent to do and people can help straighten you out on the construction of your sentences and maybe rearrange a sentence to make it sound better but as for teaching you writing, nobody can do it."
Nell Wise continues saying that she ". . . once had a class down at Manteo -- an adult class -- and I had a smarty professor visiting one night and he said, 'Mrs. Wechter, would you give me some pointers on how you're going to teach creative writing?' and I just looked at him, and said, 'Mister, you know as well as I do that nobody can teach you or me or anybody else creative writing. All we can do is guide what God gave you and try to see that what you write doesn't fall in file 13 when it hits the publisher's desk.'"
Nell Wise, who is best known as a writer of children's books about the Outer Banks, described one afternoon during the early war years in Taffy of Torpedo Junction, when ash cans (depth charges), were exploding in the shipping lanes.The Navy was hunting German submarines which were threatening American ships onlya mile off Cape Hatteras and children stood on the dunes and watched.
Besides Taffy, Nell Wise has written Betsy Dowdy's Ride, Swamp Girl, Mighty Midgett's, Teach's Light, Some Whisper Our Name, Windrift and has a new book on the Battle of Roanoke Island at the publisher's which will be released sometime this year.
All of the notes and manuscripts for her books, many of them recipients of prestigious literary awards, have been donated to the ECU Manuscript Collection.
The stories told in the Wechter books are sophisticated enough to fascinate adult readers, but Nell Wise explains she never expanded the stories for adults because of "security problems." After publication of Taffy, she learned from Naval Intelligence that scenes and incidents in the books have, in several instances, never been declassified by the Defense Department. Nell Wise says, "I stayed scared to death that I was going to be put under the jail because I was an eyewitness and right to this day some of the stuff in the books is classified material.One day after publication of Taffy, along came this long official-looking envelope from Washington, D.C. and I thought, 'Oh, dear God, here she comes.' I've never been as frightened in my life to open an envelope. I had named ships that I had seen.Bob was the pharmacist's mate at the Coast Guard station and I worked at Norfolk at communications during the summer, and neither one of us could turn around without someone from Naval Intelligence being right behind us.Anyway, I finally went in the envelope and it was from the Commandant.He said that he had read Taffy and wanted to tell me how much he appreciated it and how well I had treated the subject matter.I thought I would die from relief it nothing else."
Living on the Outer Banks was like having a seat on the fifty-yard line of a naval battle and watching all your relatives play in the games.Nell Wise and Bob both remember vividly the battles offshore and the land area of the barrier islands being prepared for war with barbed wire, fences, radar towers, guard dogs, jeeps riding the perimeter and newfangled walkie-talkies for the sentries to stay in touch with each other.
"But," NellWise said, "We knew.We knew what 'a loose lip can sink a ship' means. The kids that I was teaching had fathers and brothers who were on those ships and they were in every theater of the war you could name. Those kids knew how to keep their mouths shut.
"All you had to do was stand on the beach. You could cuont the ships as they were hit. One night -- bang, bang, bang, -- six ships of the merchant fleet that were carrying this high octane gasoline got it one right after the other. You could count them.
"Bob and I were courting. One night we were eating supper and the old jeep came down from the station and they hollored 'Doc!' and he had a mouth full and finally said, 'I'll be there in a minute!' They hollered back, "Come right now.' So he got up from the table and said "I'll see you some time' and we didn't see him for six days. That was a very stormy night and there had been some ship sinkings -- some torpedoed and a shipwreck from the storm. Of course, he could not tell my mother or me anything."
Bob was sent to the area by the Coast Guard. "When the war started I was on the Coast Guard cutter 'Spencer' based in New York and when I came off patrol there were orders for me to go to Buxton, North Carolina. There was no highway and no roads. The only way to get to the island was by ferry across Oregon Inlet and after you reached the island, you had to travel by Jeep." The paved road that now runs the length of the islands was not built until after the war.
Nell Wise and Bob both have a very warm feeling for East Carolina University, both feeling that they owe much to it for the richness of their intellectual lives.Nell thinks of Greenville as her "second home." She believes the future of the University and the growth of the Greenville area to be inextricably tied together and sees the type of industry that the area is attracting along with the potential of the ECU medical school as creating an eastern version of the Research Triangle.
They both believe that East Carolina has "still got to reach its potential" and as the University loses its reputation as a "teachers college" and more of its graduates begin to reach higher places in business, in government, and in the medical profession, the school will have the money and the alumni support it needs.
"Think about the kind of school East Carolina was to start with," says Nell Wise, "It didn't have the potential that the Piedmont did for students.We educated in the east where people didn't have money.And it has taken an awful lot of growing and doing.Because, Lord knows, it has been the poorest.It really has."
Describing themselves as traditionalist, Nell Wise and Bob believe in the old values in education and getting back to basics. Nell explained that we tried "too much out of California" in the field of education.Everything had to be innovative.She says, "They can say all they want to about the Vietnam War and the unrest in the country, but I tell you I think that the schools themselves -- some of the teachers in them and the administrators -- are at the bottom of why our kids can't read.It is not all outside forces."
Nell Wise, who won the Franklin McNutt Award and the Valley Forge Award for teaching Americanism in schools, does not believe that Americanism is being taught anymore."There are not too many flag wavers left. I frankly think that is a bad, bad thing because I know that we are not the best country in the world as far as crime and some other things. But when you look into other aspects, you find me a better country than the U.S.A.You can't find one where you have the human freedoms that we have here.
"We are not the country of the common man -- we are the country of the uncommon man.Because we have taken our skills and our work and we have turned them into things that have made our country the greatest country on earth.
"What other country in the world can you go to the church of your choice? What other country in the world cna you go to the store and buy what you want? Even though we can't do it now because of the economy. What country in the worlddo children have the freedom to play, wear decent clothing and go to school?No, I don't think we are the country of the common man at all. I think we are the country of the uncommon man.
"We are a melting pot.We are all from some other country. All of us.It just so happened that the English were here first, and the French, maybe. But we have melded ourselves into what I think is the greatest country in the world.
"I do think that we are lacking vigilance. Once you give yourself up to laziness and are not vigilant then you are laying yourself wide open to the rust and the decay that come in if you let your guard down one minute.We cannot maintain the freedoms that our forefathers fought for if we do that.And I think that our young teachers are failing to put that across to our children."
As the conversation ranged over the whole spectrum of education in North Carolina -- the whole range of which Bob and Nell have the experience to judge -- they agreed that the technical schools and the community colleges serve a vital need.
"We have to have leaders and have to have higher education to train those leaders. No nation can advance unless there is some intelligence at the head of it," Nell says."I agree that not everybody is a college student. Thank God, we have gotten away from the idea that everyone must go to college. There is a lot to be said for experience and hard work. Hard work never killed anybody if it were not done with somebody standing over you like a Simon Legree with a whip.I worked hard for an education from the very beginning.I remember well the kind of years they were in the fishing village such as this one that is like so many that we have in Dare County and on the coast. The years come along when the fishermen fail -- when there are no fish or there are lots of hurricanes and they lost their nets, their gear and the fishing boats. You have to get along the best you can on very little money for anybody. That happened to a lot of people when I was growing up. But I paid my way all the way through. I sort of had a pride in that."
Afterword: Nell Wise has been very ill for a long time now from a fall that broke her hip and many complications that followed it, but she has maintained her interest in life and her quick wit and bright spirit. Bob Wechter, the man who should have died 40 years ago, is like an oak standing unbending no matter how hard the wind blows in this coastal land of blue water and brown sand.
