Herb Collins

[L Verge]

That must answer my question then about whether or not Herb is the gentleman I met at the Lincoln Group of D.C. 1981 would have been about the time that Joan was president of that group as well as a leader in the Surratt Society.

For those who may not know, Maude Motley was the lovely embodiment of a true Southern lady. Soft spoken, the granddaughter of a Confederate general whom Lee referred to as the "handsomest man in the Confederacy (and I have seen his portrait -- he was!), and a great historian in her own right. Her home was a Civil War museum practically, but her greatest treasure was a sliver of Booth's crutch that had been given to her. She would meet our Booth Tour buses in Bowling Green beside the site of the Star Hotel where Willie Jett got rudely awakened, and tell us about growing up around the people who had been eyewitnesses to the capture of Booth and Herold.

Lucinda Holloway, who had cradled Booth near death, was a teacher of Miss Maude's. She also told us that the blood-stained boards from the Garretts' porch were ripped up and stored in a shed at the farm. The boys would scare girls by running around with the boards, waving them in the air.

Miss Maude was in her 80s when we were friends with her in the 1970s and 80s. She stopped meeting our bus when she became too old to drive into town. For years, it seemed like a part of the tour was missing. John Brennan, also a Southern gentleman educated at The Citadel, always arranged for us to have a box of chocolates to give to Miss Maude each trip. I always suspected that they had "eyes for each other..."