Wharton, Don, 1905-1998

Don Wharton was a journalist who lived in New York City during World War II and wrote articles on the war primarily for such magazines as the "Reader's Digest," "Look," and the "Saturday Evening Post."

From the description of Don Wharton papers, 1941-1945 [manuscript]. WorldCat record id: 26064094

Lacy Donnell Wharton was graduated from Davidson College in 1927. After graduation, he attended Harvard University. He made a career in journalism serving on the editorial staff of the New Yorker; executive editor of Scribners' and as a roving editor for Reader's Digest. As a student at Davidson he participated in many clubs and wrote articles for the Chameleon. He also wrote a book on Franklin D. Roosevelt.

From the description of Papers, 1934-1992 and undated. (American Museum of Natural History). WorldCat record id: 722092323

The following was written by Don Wharton when he placed his World War II letters at the Manuscripts Department in 1981.

When the United States was brought into the war on December 7, 1941, I was living in New York, at 24 Gramercy Park, with my wife, the former Mary Louise Tilley, and our daughters, Margaret and Julia. My work was writing articles, on assignment, for mass magazines, chiefly the Reader's Digest, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post . Our apartment was on the 10th and 11th floors and my workroom, or office as it was called, was on the 11th. Here I worked all through the war, except during summers when from early June to mid-September we lived in a cottage by the sea at Sagaponack, a hundred miles from New York. There, too, I had a room set aside for my writing.

Into my workroom came a stream of letters from persons I had interviewed or worked with on magazine articles and from members of my family and my wife's family. Because many of the family letters are signed with a single name perhaps it would help to identify some of the letter writers. My mother, Mrs. Lacy Donnell Wharton, nee Lilian Ashley Benton, was living in Smithfield, N.C., where he was born in 1874 and where she would die in 1958--84 years in the same town, 79 years at the same street corner. She had four sons. The first was David Benton Wharton (Ben), who Pearl Harbor found in California; he was married to Grace Teeter. I was next, Lacy Donnell Wharton, Jr., whose by line was invariably Don Wharton. Then came James Gilmer Wharton (Jimmie), who was living in Nashville, Tenn., when the Army grabbed him; he was married to Myrtle Bledsoe. The youngest was Dr. Charles Watson Wharton (Wat), a physician in Smithfield where our father practiced medicine for a third of a century. Whatson was commissioned in the Navy. A half-brother, William Lacy Wharton, was living in Winston-Salem. He was married to Mary Haynes, and they had two sons who went to the Pacific: William Lacy Wharton, Jr., and Thomas Donnell Wharton.

My wife's family was even larger. Living in the South when the war came were six sisters and one brother: Mrs. Charles E. Fleming (Madeline); Mrs. E. Edward Wehman, Jr. (Helen); Mrs. Joseph Kershaw Shannon, Jr. (Amy); Mrs. William J. Sherrod (Marguerite); Emma Stone Tilley (Em); Christopher Elizabeth Tilley (Liz); and LUcius Tilley, whose daughter, Gladys, was married to John J. Barreto, whose death in the Pacific is revealed in the letters. Robert Lucius Tilley was her brother. Walter Marshall Bailey, in the Air Force, was the husband of Elizabeth Dean Fleming, the daughter of Mrs. Fleming.

I am writing this in the winter of 1981, nearly forty years after the first of these war letters came in. I do not remember why I started saving them, why I saved some and not others, or why I made (and saved) carbons of some of my own letters, but not others. It may have been a subconscious sense of history--I discovered recently folded away in an over-sized album a copy of the New York Times of December 8, 1941 and a copy of the same newspaper, May 8, 1945, its huge headline telling THE WAR IN EUROPE IS ENDED! These are the papers that were delivered at our apartment, my name in pencil across the front page, scrawled there hurredly by our newsdealer. Of course, I knew what I was doing when I saved them. In constrast, it was chance that determined the survivial of some of the letters and carbons.

From the guide to the Don Wharton Papers, 1941-1945, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. Southern Historical Collection.)