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Terry Firsching Box 667
Cloudcroft, NM 88317
January 31, 1995
Mr. Charles Gray
Hancock County Historical Society Box 312
Bay St. Louis, MS 39520 Dear Mr. Gray:
It was a pleasure talking to you last week and I look forward to sharing information about Bay St. Louis.
My father is nearly 89 years of age and now resides in a retirement center in Alamogordo, New Mexico, 16 miles from our town of Cloudcroft. I visit him nearly every day and find his mind and memory as sharp today as ever before.
All of my life 1 have heard stories about the Bay from my grandparents, my father, and his two brothers. Somehow, recording these valuable recollections has escaped us until now. My father and I are my family's closest links to those simpler pre-electronic days and we wish to commit Dad's recollections to paper. It is important to me that we separate fact from legend and I will try to be absolutely sure of authenticity in my correspondence with you.
My grandfather, George C. Firsching, was born in Cincinnati, and went to Baltimore sometime before the turn of the century. He saw service in Cuba during the Spanisli American War (I have his sword), married my grandmother, and secured a position with a Mr. Torsch, who was in the seafood canning industry. I have been unable to discover whether or not Mr. Torsch's company was called "Peerless". He must have thought a great deal of my grandfather because he sent (or took) him to Bay St. Louis to run a similar operation there. I do not know whether they built the Bay St. Louis plant at that time or whether it was already in existence. That must have been around 1907 because my father was one year of age when they moved from Baltimore. (Perhaps my grandfather commuted between the two towns before