ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 29, 1997 TAG: 9703310070
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WILLIAMSBURG
SOURCE: ALISON FREEHLING THE (NEWPORT NEWS) DAILY PRESS
It's seen better days, but the worn glove is a treasure for owner and Wise County native Page Dye.
The worn leather glove that Page R. Dye keeps in a plastic bag in his living room has seen better days.
Its thumb is gone, and only the top half remains. The half that would have covered his palm also is gone - disintegrated after some 53 years of sitting in a World War II foxhole in Belgium.
Dye dropped the glove there when he was a 19-year-old Army private, a self-described ``little old country boy'' sent overseas to remove mines.
Dye doesn't remember losing the glove. He does remember writing his name and Army serial number on it with a black pen to keep from losing it during the bitterly cold winter of 1944-45.
It didn't work. But the name and numbers brought the glove back to Dye this month.
The handwriting - Dye, Page R., 33646459 - is faded but easy to read. A larger stamp of the last four letters of his serial number, made by the Army, also is clear.
``It was a real odd thing to see it,'' said Dye, who turns 72 in April. ``You get to thinking about people you knew and who you were back then. You start to remember things that you hadn't thought about in years.''
Dye, who was born in Wise County, served from July 1943 to December 1945 in the Army Corps of Engineers.
In December 1944 and part of January 1945, Dye was stationed near the Belgian-German line, just after the bloody Battle of the Bulge.
A Belgian named Jean-Luc Menestrey found Dye's glove outside an Army camp near the German border. He gave it to a friend, Jean-Louis Seel, who runs a small World War II museum in Belgium.
Seel saw Dye's name and tracked him down through a list of phone numbers on a CD-ROM. On Feb. 10, Seel telephoned Dye at his horse farm off Rochambeau Drive.
``I thought he was trying to sell me something,'' Dye said. ``I almost hung up on him. But he said, `Please, please listen to me. I've found something of yours.'''
On Feb. 27, Seel mailed the glove. Dye received it during the first week of March. ``Here it is!'' Seel wrote in an accompanying letter. ``It finally rejoined its owner!''
What happened to the other glove? No one knows.
``Probably,'' Dye said, ``that's hiding somewhere, too.''
LENGTH: Medium: 55 linesby CNB