Kern Holoman: Memoirs

and other writings

second edition 

Au Vieux Logis
November 00,  2023

William Kern Holoman (1920–2015) was co-proprietor of the Raleigh department store Boylan-Pearce and rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the North Carolina National Guard. He was an enthusiastic writer and public speaker. His Memoirs of 2010 were built from the long letters he wrote home from France in 1944–45 and much later autobiographical essays, mostly 2003–05, when he was in his 80s. This second edition of his Memoirs includes material identified since 2010. It is edited by D. Kern Holoman, his eldest son. 

A page for ancillary materials for this book.

Manuscripts not included:

Military Day at Springmoor

Commentary, changes, annotations

p. 261 --  "My faith says to me each day that surely God’s goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. I only know I cannot drift beyond his love and care."

These two sentences combine the end of the 23rd Psalm and a line from John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Eternal Goodness.” Whittier’s text served for a choral anthem called “The Silent Sea,” a favorite of the Edenton Street Church Chancel Choir. Kern’s sister-in-law Louise Wilkerson often sang the soprano solo at the end: “I know not where his islands lift their fronded palms in air, I only know I cannot drift beyond his love and care.” The only line from church hymnody that he liked better was “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is giv’n,” from “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

au Vieux Logis

The Vieux Logis, or Old Lodge, of our colophon is our house in France. Nobody knows how old the oldest part is, nor even which part of the structure(s) that may be. Picture postcards from the earliest 1900s show the house more or less complete, and some of the improvements are known to date from the 1870s. The caves, or boves, housed livestock when needed.

See the album.