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The World War I Letters of Mechanician Theodore Price
The posthumous reputation of Theodore (?Buzzy?) Price, son of Arthur Thomas Price and Alice Gentilucci Price of Edwardsville, Mississippi, as a young man of exceptional merit, morals and character is borne out by his modest and unassuming words written, we assume, under extreme battle conditions as he served in WW1 as a volunteer in an infantry company of a machine gun battalion.
Twelve letters have survived out of 40 or more he is known to have written to his Mother. Many more sent to other relatives and friends no longer exist.
Those letters that we have were preserved after Grandma Price?s death in 1939 by Bertha Price Tomeny, and after her death by her son (and Buzzy?s namesake) Ted Tomeny.
Frustratingly, no concrete details or places more specific than ?France? were allowed to be mentioned in soldiers? correspondence. Buzzy?s companions who might have told about them after the war disappeared completely from the scene.
Since the mail had to be censored on both sides of the ocean, transported by slow and irregular convoy, and sent to and from a backwoods town in Mississippi, postal delivery to the fighting front was sporadic and maddeningly delayed for the soldier, whose only consolation? other than the fact that he was doing his part to ensure his country?s victory over the deadly enemy before him?was a warm word from loved ones he had left back home.
Grandpa Price, who died in 1921, would take me on his knee and we would read the daily paper together (he with a magnifying glass) in a rocking chair on the front porch of the Price home on Bookter Street in Bay St. Louis. Never did he cease grieving about Buzzy. ?Straight as an arrow,? he would say, and he did not mean only in physique but in every other way.
A room was added to the house for no other use than to hold Buzzy?s picture, enlarged and framed, and other personal memorabilia.
S.	Me Neely