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Dahlgren 



list of everything wanted on Station by the other wives, and then they would do 

 the shopping and would come back that afternoon in an official car. Also, until 

 the Dahlgren Store handled the items most housewives wanted, there was a trip 

 to Fredericksburg once a week. One wife would take a list for everybody and 

 one or two wives would buy the stuff and bring it back. Those early days were 

 right interesting because the roads in Virginia were pretty bad then. 



That's what I hear. 



They could bog down in nothing flat. In fact, I think that one of the reasons 

 they started changing the time for getting license plates from December to 

 March was that people would lay up their cars down here, and they objected 

 to paying a license fee for a whole year when they couldn't use their cars for 3 or 

 4 months because of the roads. But then about this shopping trip to 

 Fredericksburg — the roads were bad. Nobody knew when the car would get 

 through. They had some mules down there, and they always kept a team of 

 mules hitched up. Bob Pulliam, who just died a few years ago, was hostler here 

 for years. The Air Detail had carrier pigeons. In those days, planes didn't have 

 any radios to speak of, so they would transmit messages by carrier pigeons. 

 They put a capsule on the leg of the bird, and if they wanted to send a message 

 back to the home base they would put a message in this capsule and let the bird 

 go- 



Shelton's Store at Dahlgren in May 1927. 



