Grandma: I was born June 19, 1930, a depression baby, right when the depression started.

Grandpa: I was born in 1924, Halloween Day.

2. Were you born in Cherokee County?

Grandma: We both were, yes.

3. Were you born at home or in a hospital?

Grandma: Home.

Grandpa: Home.

4. How many brothers and sisters were in your family?

Grandma: I had two sisters and two half sisters.

Grandpa: I had three brothers and two sisters.

5. Are you the youngest or oldest child?

Grandma: I’m the youngest, he’s next to the oldest.

6. Were your parents born in Cherokee County?

Grandma: My mother was.

Grandpa: My mother was born in Nacogdoches and my daddy was born in Anderson County.

7. Were your grandparents born in Cherokee County?

Grandma: My grandmother Holiday was born in Cherokee County and my grandfather Holiday was from Tennessee and the Wallaces were from Houston County. His grandparents were Nacogdoches and Anderson Counties.

8. What is your earliest memory?

Grandma: When I was a very small girl I was sitting on the front steps and someone was helping my grandmother Wallace down the steps, she was blind. And that’s one of my earliest memories.

Grandpa: I have no idea.

9. Where did you go to school?

Grandma: I started right up here when I was in the first grade. This great tall red brick building up there and that bell that’s down there I believe was on top of it. And Joe Mack Lanier’s daddy rang that bell every morning and every evening you could hear it just forever.

Grandpa: I went to school in Sardis, Texas. That’s about nine miles south of Rusk.

10. How did you get to school?

Grandma: I walked.

Grandpa: I walked about, I guess two and a half miles, or three miles, something like that.

11. What kind of school supplies were you required to bring?

Grandma: Pencil and tablet was about all.

Grandpa: That was about it.

Grandma: That was in our earliest grades of course. Later on we had a notebook and a pen, fountain pen.

Grandpa: You had to have a small box of crayolas somewhere down there.

Grandma: And a ruler. Ruler.

12. What did you wear to school?

Grandma: Just dresses. I did. I didn’t have anything but dresses. Few dresses. Shoes.

Grandpa: I wore overalls. I had two pair of overalls.

13. What did the classrooms look like?

Grandma: This school up here had one grade, one room per grade. [Students attended] through the sixth grade in that building.  Jr. High was next door--seventh and eighth grade.

Grandpa: In Sardis, they went through tenth grade I believe, and there’s five classes in a two-room schoolhouse for five grades in each room. Then I went from there, I went to Maydelle.

14. Did the school have air-conditioning? How was it heated in winter?

Grandma: We opened the windows for the cool air and had a wood stove in the winter. I guess this one up here probably had a gas stove, but the Sardis school would have had a wood stove.

Grandpa: Yeah, we had a wood stove and the upperclass ones [older students] had to build a fire in the heater in each room. And that was the heat. We had a well outside that we had to draw water out of. Drank out of a dipper.

Grandma: When I was in the fifth grade, I went to Salem school for a while and it was like Sardis school. First four grades were in one room and then three grades in the other room.

15. What did students do for lunch?

Grandma: Most of us carried our lunch.

Grandpa: Yeah, mama would always get up in the morning and maybe fix us a couple of biscuits, and she might fry an egg and put in one of 'em and fry a piece of meat and put in the other one.

Grandma: About 1940 I remembered is being about that time, we had a school cafeteria opened. Cost ten cents a day to eat lunch.

16. Where did you keep the lunch?

Grandma: A little brown paper bag.

Grandpa: That what I carried.

17. What games did you play at recess?

Grandma: Up here we had a big merry-go-round, and I loved to do that, but we played ball, just not much else.

Grandpa: Well we played basketball, had a basketball court, and we played softball. And that was about it.

18. What classes did you have? What was your favorite?

Grandma: Oh, reading was my favorite class and I liked to spell. When I got in high school I loved biology.

Grandpa: Well it was about the same that we had, just had to read and write and learn your multiplication, and then somewhere down the line we had to learn fractions.

19. Where did you live as a child?

Grandma: When I was in the fourth grade I think I lived in a big, old two-story house that set about between where these two houses are [pointing]. My mother and I lived there after my daddy died.

Grandpa: Where did I live? I lived down on the Boxes Creek there in Sardis, Texas till I was way up on the farm there, then we left there and went to Maydelle.

20. If you lived in the country, what were the roads like?

Grandma: Just not paved, just little old narrow, crooked rough roads.

21. What did the first house you remember living in look like?

Grandma: Not painted. Little ol'--they called them shotgun houses.

Grandpa: Well we lived in a, I guess a full bedroom house. Grew up in that thing.

22. Did you have electricity?

Grandma: Un-huh. No.

Grandpa: We didn’t either.

23. Did you have chores? What kind of chores?

Grandma: I didn’t much. I was the youngest in the family. I just, kind of got by without it.

Grandpa: Well, we lived on a farm, and I was the oldest boy. I had an older sister. But my job was to get up in the morning, and especially in winter time, and build a fire in the fireplace. In the afternoon, if I didn’t get my wood in there, then I had to go to the woodpile and get it in the morning when it was cold.  So I always brought enough in to start that fire in the morning, and when I got that done I had to go and feed the mules and the horses and hogs before breakfast. And then mama would get up and fix breakfast.

24. Where did you go to shop for groceries or clothes?

Grandma: My mother made my clothes. We had little old grocery stores. In town then we had several grocery stores. One on every side of the square.

Grandpa: Well we lived down there in Sardis, and we had a little store up about a block and a half from our house. Usually daddy would go to town and he’d buy a hundred pound sack of flour and we’d shell the corn and carry it up there to the gristmill and get it ground up to make cornbread out of. And then he’d get a bunch of staple stuff [from the store].  'Course we canned up nearly everything we ate. And we grew ribbon cane and we’d make syrup out of it and then in the summer time we’d take them gallon buckets and kill a calf and cook that up in the washing pot and put in them buckets and store it in the storm house so we’d have meat to eat. Then we had a smokehouse.  We’d kill a hog or two and hang it up in there and smoke it, so we’d have meat to eat there. So most everything we canned up. We’d make a bunch of sauerkraut. We’d put that down in the barn because it smelled so bad. But we done pretty well on eating.

Grandma: Well, Brookshires was a long time ago. My first ice cream cone, Mr. Jarred had a variety store down there on the same side of the square where Wallace Thompson is now. And my daddy took me to town one day, got my hair cut, and we went over there and got an ice cream cone.

25. What stores do you remember shopping at as a child?

Grandpa: Well I don’t remember going in any store when I was young.

Grandma: There was Rusk Dry Goods. What you’d call a department store now I guess. We had two movie theaters here when we were young. Two of them.

26. What is the earliest kind of car you remember?

Grandma: I don’t even remember. Daddy had what we called an old hoopie. I guess it was a Model T. But he died when I was nine years old and we didn’t have a car after that.

Grandpa: Well I remember whenever daddy got a bonus, and I don’t remember when that was, it was somewhere along about 1936. And daddy bought an old T model. And I guess that’s the first car that we ever had. Other than that we used to drive a wagon to town.

27. What was your favorite thing to do as a child?

Grandma: I just loved to play, and I loved to climb trees. I’d climb every tree around. Just make play houses.

Grandpa: Well, wasn’t much to play with back then. Take a wagon wheel, the rim off of it stand up about high as your head and take a syrup bucket and bend it around it, and follow that wheel all around over the place.

Grandma: I always had a doll. I never had but one at a time, but I loved dolls better than anything.

28. Did you have television as a child?

Grandma: No. No.

Grandpa: They didn’t even make televisions back then.

Grandma: We didn’t have a television till your daddy was a baby.

29. What did you do for entertainment?

Grandpa: I remember the first radio that come to Sardis. Bill Everett bought it. And he’d invite all the community over there on Saturday night to listen to the Grand Ole Opry. And all the kids would sit around there listening to them folks talk on that radio. And it had a big old battery on it.

Grandma: And the sound would just come and go, just fade out and after a while it’d come back.

Grandma: We talked, sat around talked, played games, that was about it. When we lived at Jones Chapel, the school bus driver on Saturday night would gather up a bunch of people and bring them to Rusk to the movie, but I never came then, I was too little.

Grandpa: Well my grandpa and my uncle and our neighbors played the fiddle and the guitar, stuff like that. They’d get together and play a lot of stuff once or twice a week and we’d have some people over and we’d have a little party and everybody played and sang. Course that was some entertainment. We’d gather a bunch of folks on Sunday and ride some bull calves. Course that was pretty good fun then. We lived in Maydelle while I was pretty big then. We had some old Brahman cows, had an old bulldog that’d catch them cows. We’d pin them things up and the boys go over there and we’d get them things out there and ride them. Didn’t nobody ride very long, but we had a ball I guess.

30. What did you do during the summers?

Grandma: I don’t know. We just did the same thing we did all the time. I used to love to have paper dolls and I’d draw clothes for them, cut 'em out. Just I loved to draw always. Paint with crayolas.

Grandpa: In the summer? I usually worked. 'Cause we raised a lot of tomatoes and cotton. I could work on the farm. Haul hay and stack it in the barn and all that good stuff.  But in 1936, back then we had what they called a County Meet.  And we played right up here on this high school ground.  We come up here on a Saturday, I guess.  And we had softball. We had what we called a County Meet. We played four games up here one day.  And we won that year, 1936. The last game we played was Corrine. I don’t even know where Corrine is anymore but, anyway, we were the number two team, and we beat them. I believe it was one to three. We won that Meet that year.

31. What was your first job and how much did it pay?

Grandma: My first job was in a hamburger joint in Houston, Texas.  I lived down there about a year during the war and I got paid about fifty cents an hour. And later I worked at, after we married, I worked as a waitress for three dollars a day. Walked a mile to get there to do that.

Grandpa: My first job, I guess was helping a farmer set out tomatoes. I got fifty cents a day. We’d start about sun up and work till about sun down.

Grandma: Your first real job was in the, shipyard wasn’t it, in Houston?

Grandpa: Well, no that was after I got grown.

32. Did you go to the movies? Drive- in or theater?

Grandma: Well, shoot, I didn’t go to any movies till I was nine or ten years old.  I remember asking my daddy one time for a dime to go to the movies on Saturday evening cause it cost nine cents to go to the movies and he let me have a dime to do that.

Grandpa: Well I remember whenever I worked for fifty cents a day, I could take a quarter of that and I could come to Rusk and I could go in the movie for nine cents, then I could buy three big ol' pieces of candy for a dime, and I could get a big ol' twelve-ounce bottle of soda pop for a nickel. Then I could get me a big piece of double bubble gum for that penny. So, then I could see a double feature on Saturday.  I could spend a whole afternoon there and eat a lot of candy and chew that bubble gum.

33. What movies were popular when you were a child?

Grandma: I don’t know. Back then, we had a western on Saturday and a continued piece. I remember the Mark of Zorro was a continued series, a serial thing. Then Saturday midnight, Sunday and Monday was a movie, and Tuesday and Wednesday another, Thursday and Friday another. So, course we didn’t go all the time, we didn’t have any money to go.

34. Who was your favorite movie star?

Grandma: I don’t know. I guess, I think of Gary Cooper, so I guess he was one of my favorites.

Grandpa: John Wayne.

35. What was your favorite television or radio show when you were a child?

Grandma: We didn’t have any TV then. We didn’t even have a radio. I don’t know how old I was when mother bought a radio. I was probably twelve or thirteen years old. I remember one of them was The Shadow--that was a mystery, and there was a Stella Dallas Soapie during the day and Portia Faces Life.

Grandpa: Well, I don’t know how old I was when we got a radio.

36. Did people tell you ghost stories or scary stories when you were a child?

Grandma: Oh, sure, sure, that was when the grown-ups would sit around and talk and the kids would sit there just spellbound. Yea, we had a bunch of storytelling.

Grandpa: Well, that’s about the way it was around our place. The old folks would sit around and talk and the kids would listen. They passed a lot of stuff along to the kids then. Now, the old folks don’t talk and the kids don’t listen.

37. Do you remember any of these stories?

Grandma: No, I don’t really remember them.

Grandpa: What I remember is the people would tell what they had done in the past, and you know, back then if somebody died, a bunch of men would go over and three or four would sit up all night with 'em and maybe two nights before they buried 'em. Everybody would sit around and talk. I remember my granddaddy telling one time that there was four or five of them sitting there talking and talking about how many hogs they had running down in the river bottom and all that, and the guy laying over there in the coffin, he’d been dead all day, he kinda raised up and he said "that son-of-a-gun stole several head of hog from me." Then everybody run off and left him.

38. What kind of music did you listen to as a teenager?

Grandma: Mostly western, well no, no, I liked all of it, all the popular music. I could go down to the drugstore and they had little booklets of the words of all the popular songs and I would go down there and buy that and I knew all the songs. And the radio had a hit parade, the top ten songs. I always enjoyed that.

39. Who was your favorite singer or musical group?

Grandma: When I was about 14 years old I loved Ernest Tubbs better than anybody.

40. What did teenagers do for entertainment when you were their age?

Grandma: Not much, because we didn’t have any money and didn’t have any cars. I lived with my mother over there across from the State Hospital. In fact, 53 years ago today I was standing there waiting to cross the highway to go over to the hospital, the State Hospital, and here Earl and his cousin came down the hill on their motorcycle. It was the first time I ever saw him. And, later that day I met him. And three months later we got married.

Grandpa: And then lived happily ever after.

41. When did you first start dating?

Grandma: That day, he, his cousin and my girlfriend were going together and they introduced us and we went out that night.

42. Where did you go on dates?

Grandma: To the movie and that’s about it. We went to the café and sat around for hours and talked.

43. What do you remember about the Great Depression?

Grandma: Well I was so little I don’t remember much about it except we didn’t have anything you know, we were just super poor. My dad couldn’t work if there’d been any work to do. He was not very well.

Grandpa: Well, we done pretty well. We lived on the farm there and didn’t have any money but grew nearly everything we had to eat. We got by pretty well then.

44. How did it effect Cherokee County?

Grandma: Well, Cherokee County was a very poor county, an agricultural county; those who had farms did all right. When the war came, so many people left here and went to Houston and Dallas to the defense factories, shipyard work, and most of them stayed there. But now they’re retiring and coming back up here and their kids come to visit and they like it and stay, and it just keeps growing.

45. What do you remember about World War II when you were young?

Grandma: I don’t remember a great deal about it. I was living with Fay and Leeman out there on the Palestine Highway a year or so at that time and convoys of soldiers would come by hours at a time in those trucks. No telling how many.

Grandpa: I was in Houston and had just come out of the theater. The old Joy Theater on Congress I believe it was. There was a hamburger stand right next to it and me and my cousin came out there and ordered us some hamburgers and the radio announced the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. That’s the first I remember of that.  So anyway, I worked there till I went into the Service. I worked at the shipyard out there. I left to go to the Service and that’s where I left from.  I went to Fort Sam Houston and then I went from there to Biloxi Mississippi then I went from there to Chinook Field, Illinois. And there I learned how to do aircraft welding.  I went to Salt Lake City and done my overseas training, then was shipped out there and went to California and then was shipped out from there and went to Brisbane, Australia.  I stayed there awhile and then we went from there to Port Moresby in New Guinea.  Then from there where did we go? Went to Markham Valley I guess.

46. Do you remember when you first heard about Pearl Harbor?

Grandma: I remember that my sister and I were crossing the street and her boyfriend drove up and told her that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and he was in the National Guard so he was being called up that day.  That was my first knowledge of it.

Grandpa: Well, didn't I tell you when I heard it?  When I first heard it I just came out of the Joy Theater in Houston and was ordering a hamburger and they had a radio there and they was announcing it on the radio and that’s the way I heard about it.

47. Did you have relatives in World War II?

Grandma: He was, Earl was in World War II. Me, I had cousins, several cousins and a brother-in-law, two brothers-in-laws.

Grandpa: Did I have any relatives? Yea, I had some relatives. My cousin, my double first cousin, I run upon him in the Philippines.  I was in a jeep going from Manila to Tacloban and three guys were a'hitchhiking so I stopped and picked them up. Two of them jumped in the back and one got in the front seat and I was taking off and looked over there and it was my cousin, H. L. Ross from Maydelle. And I hadn’t heard from him since I’d been in the Service so we went and had a big party that day.  My brother was in there [the war] and I had a bunch of relatives [in it]. I can’t recall all of them but H. L.’s brother was in there, too,  I remember. Nearly all of them boys around Maydelle long 'bout my age was in the service.

48. Were there any German prisoner of war camps in Cherokee County?

Grandma: Yes, there was one at Alto, just west of Alto. I don’t recall how many prisoners they had there, but they had a Army or National Guard Unit to care for them.

49. Do you remember war rations?

Grandma: We had coupon books that you had to use to get sugar, and nearly everything--butter, gasoline, clothing, everything was rationed.

Grandpa: I was in the Service so I don’t remember much about that.

50. Did you or any of your relatives serve in the Korean War?

Grandma: Not mine, but Earl’s brother, was in that war.

Grandpa: Yea my brother, my younger brother was a tank operator in the Korean War.

51. What do you remember most about the 50’s?

Grandma: What I remember most about it was that I was having my babies in the fifties and I was plenty busy because I worked. But it was good times where there was plenty of money and everybody was pretty happy. They’d been through such terrible years of depression and the war and everybody was happy.  It was good times.

Grandpa: Yea, I remember that. I got in the car business along about that time. I bought an old car and set it in the yard out there on the highway. Oh, that was in the sixties, oh my gosh.

52. What do you remember about the Cold War?

Grandma: The Cold War, we figured the Russians were going to attack us at any time. And I read a lot of books about the espionage and everything. It was a scary time sometimes.

Grandpa: I remember whenever the Russians were sending the missiles down to Cuba and the President [Kennedy], he run a blockade on Cuba, held up them ships and we was right there real close to a nuclear war at that time and why it didn’t happen, I don’t know, but anyway the Russians finally backed down and it saved the world, I figure.

Grandma: I remember this was the first time we knew they had the kind of cameras that the military had that they could just, I have no idea how far up in space, but they said they could read a newspaper with these cameras, and that was the first time the civilian world knew anything about that.

53. Were there any bomb shelters in Cherokee County?

Grandma: Yes, there were. In fact, my sister and her husband had a bomb shelter under their house, and their daughter’s house next door, and there was several around Rusk.

54. What do you remember of the building of the Berlin Wall?

Grandma: Well, I don’t know, it was just an unreal thing. We couldn’t believe that it was happening. We couldn’t conceive of that in our freedom to go and do as we please in this country. We couldn’t imagine that they could build a wall to divide a city like they did and they killed people trying to escape over it or go around it.

Grandpa: I remember the same thing she does.

Grandma: They had Check Point Charlie, I remember that was going from the east side to the western sector.

55. Do you remember what you were doing when you heard that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated?

Grandma: I sure do. We had been to lunch and went back to work and going into the ward where I worked, the supervisor stopped me and told me what had happened. I just couldn’t believe it.

Grandpa: Well, I was with her at that time so I pretty well know.

56. Do you remember what your were doing when a man first walked on the moon?  Did you watch it on TV?

Grandma: Yeah, sure, we watched it on TV. They had postage stamps about it and he said one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind or something like that. Was that Neil Armstrong? Yeah.

57. If you could give me one piece of advice before I leave high school what would it be?

Grandma: I’ve been so impressed with you Steven, your academic record and just everything you do. One thing I would say is don’t think that your time right now is what your life is gonna be. You just have so much to look forward to. The more education you can get, the more prepared you’ll be. It is hard to do it now, but it’ll just set you up for your whole life.

Grandpa: Well one of my first thoughts would be just don’t ever think about gettin' on drugs, 'cause if you do, that may ruin your life.