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Late Charleston’s resident’s photos featured in new book
CHARLESTON, Mo. – Over 200 pictures taken by the late Paul Handy Moore of Charleston while serving in France during World War One are featured in a new book that will be presented Wednesday to the Mississippi County Library in Charleston.
Copies of the book will also be presented Thursday in Cape Girardeau to the Missouri State Historical Society, the Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation,and Kent Library at Southeast Missouri State University.
Making the presentations will be Moore’s son, Dr. Charles E. Moore of Tallahassee, Florida.
At age 19, soon after graduating from Culver Military Academy in Indiana, Paul Handy volunteered to join the French Army, hoping to become a pilot. When he arrived in France in the summer of 1917 aboard a French steamship, the air corps assignment did not materialize; and he was assigned as an ambulance driver. His unit was called Brancordier, Section 646” and that is the title of the book. “Brancardier” is the French word for “stretcher-bearer.”
Throughout his time of service, Paul Handy took many photographs with an amateur camera and kept a daily journal. His carefully annotated wartime photo album and journal were all but ignored for a century, but the tiny pictures have now been enlarged and included in “Brancordier” along with the journal entries. This combination of words and photos provides an unusually complete picture of what a young American soldier saw and experienced as he picked up wounded soldiers from the trenches and brought them to temporary hospitals behind the lines while dodging shells and shrapnel.
Providing additional detail is a supplement at the end of the book containing the wartime section of an autobiography written by Paul Handy in the 1960s at the insistence of his son Charles and daughter Mary.
The foreword in “Brancardier” was written by Art Wallhausen of Cape Girardeau, a former Charlestonian and friend of the Moore family, who also prepared the photographs for publication in the book. The 464-page book was published in May of this year by Dr. Moore, and is available from Amazon.com.
Paul Handy was born in 1898. Although a Mississippi County farm owner much of his adult life, he was also employed at various times during the 1920s and 1930s by a newspaper in Washington, DC, in the oil fields of Venezuela, and by the Ford Motor Company in St. Louis. However, when World War II began in 1941, at age 43 he volunteered for duty in World War Two, serving four years as a naval officer in the Pacific Theater.
Returning to Charleston after the war, he continued farming, became the city’s Dodge-Plymouth dealer, and served terms as city councilman, mayor, and president of the Chamber of Commerce. He was also instrumental in the founding of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Sikeston and served a term as its senior wWarden.
After retirement from managing his farms, he moved to Florida to be near his son’s family. He passed away in 1986 and was interred at Charleston’s Odd Fellows Cemetery beside his wife, Margaret Crockett Moore, who preceded him in death.