In this Senior Voices web extra, we meet 92-year old Delores Wilson. Better known as Dee, she tells us about her first job during World War Two. Dee worked for William Preston Mayfield, renowned Dayton photographer, and she describes her brief brush with fame. She shared her story with Dayton Metro Library volunteer interviewer, Dana Kragick.
Transcript:
Dana Kragik (DK): And where did you go to high school?
Dee Wilson (DW): Wilbur Wright. So I went to Wilbur Wright and I was in the first class to go from the beginning to the end. I graduated in 1944.
DK: What did you do after you graduated from high school?
DW: I had taken some photography in high school, and that was during the service, they needed people to come in and do some of the work that the guys weren’t there to do, and it just happened that my teacher had taught me how to make prints. They called him asking if he knew anyone that could do it, and he said yes. That’s Mayfield, he was a friend of Wilbur and Orville Wright and that’s him on one of their planes and he was thirteen years old when he started business. I worked for him in the dark room making prints over the film.
And I was there until well my wedding. I’ve got wedding pictures with him in it that no other people have, I mean ‘cause he was well known. I met a lot of famous people and didn’t know it. When I wasn’t busy I would use the elevator, and somebody was ringing the elevator, went down, got him, he got on, talked to me, we got to the top. He got off, I went and sat down, and Mr. Mayfield’s wife worked in the office and she said, “Do you know who that was,” and I said no, he looked a little familiar, but I don’t know who it was, and she says, “That was Orville Wright.” I thought , oh! When you’re a teenager you don’t think of people like that. Afterwards, years down, I was telling somebody and I thought, oh for heaven’s sake! You’d think I’d be “Oh boy!” But I wasn’t.
Dee left her job when she married James Wilson after the war, and they were married for fifty years. Thousands of William Preston Mayfield’s photographs are preserved at Dayton History, which has received a grant from Ohio History to digitize the collection.
This interview was edited by Community Voices producer David Seitz. Senior Voices is a collaboration between the Dayton Metro Library, Rebuilding Together Dayton, and WYSO. This series is made possible through the generous support of the Del Mar Healthcare Fund of the Dayton Foundation.