The Writings of Jeffa Porter Hill, Jr.

When my grandmother died in September 2007, my family began the difficult process of going through my grandparents' belongings. Dad was going through a trunk in the garage and found a mildew-y Dailyaide diary for the year 1944 that belonged to my grandfather, 2nd Lt. Jeffa Porter Hill, Jr. There aren't many entries in the diary, but since my father was born in 1944, I was particularly interested in its contents.

The night Dad found the diary, my cousin Emily and I sat down in the floor of one of the guest bedrooms with my brother, Scott, and Leyden and read some of the diary. One particular entry had us laughing until we were crying. It was comforting to us in our time of sorrow to laugh together as we saw a side of our grandfather that we had never seen before.

When I spent the weekend at Emily's back in March, I took the diary and we read the same entry again, and laughed just as hard the second time as we did the first. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to read much more of the diary, and since we live in different towns, it looks like it's going to take us years to read the month's worth of entries in this diary if we wait until we see each other. So, I've decided to post the entries here, on my blog, so that my family can see them. It won't be the same as reading them together and laughing, but at least we'll get to read more of the diary sooner.

I hope you'll enjoy reading Grandaddy's writings. We think he was an amazing writer, and we're really proud of him.