Where and when were you born?
May 10, 1944 Mobile Alabama
How long did you live in Mobile?
I don’t remember ever living there, but apparently we lived there until I was about 1 or 1 ½ or something like that so I’m not exactly sure. I do know that I was probably about 18 months old.
And after living in Mobile, y’all moved to Hattiesburg?
Yes.
What was your relationship with your siblings like?
My siblings? Well, okay Helen was the oldest and she’s 5 years older than me. Helen was always my big sister. I always looked up to her. She was beautiful. She was always like a second mother to me. I mean she was very motherly and still is. And even now she is like the mother because our mother is gone now. She’ll check up on us and has always been that way. I think she’s practically perfect. I call her my practically perfect sister. Buddy is two years older than me, and we had a very close relationship. I was the brother he never had. He made me a tomboy. I played with him. I ran races with him. We did a lot of things together. We didn’t have a lot of other children who lived near us except for my cousins when I was growing up. Actually until I was about 12 or 13. We had our cousins who lived down the street from us. We had my siblings.
How was your experience going to school?
I was extremely shy and quiet. I don’t think that I said a word the first year of school. They tried to get me to read in class, but I wouldn’t. I wasn’t the only one, but I was hesitant to speak up through 1st and 2nd grade even though I had the same teacher both years. It made a big
difference though.
What were some of your hobbies growing up? What are some now?
We just played outside. I don’t remember reading being a hobby at the time when I was real young, but I liked sports and I loved all sports. I learned to love poetry in the 5th grade. I had a teacher who loved poetry, so I learned to love it at that time. I guess the things I enjoyed doing the most was just playing with my siblings. We played in the woods. We played jungle and we played store. You know… things like that. We didn’t travel much. We didn’t do much of anything but I remember having good times at home, but it was always with my siblings and my two cousins.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to either work with animals or be a nurse.
What were some of the most impactful things that you learned from your parents?
Well, most of the spiritual type things, I learned from my mother who was very very spiritual minded and always kept us in church. And from my father, what he really emphasized to us as kids was to live the way you’re taught, to always be on time, he taught me one time that you always leave early enough to go to work or to school or wherever you’re going so that you have time to change a flat tire and still get there on time. So you always have to leave early. You never walk into a meeting late, and momma didn’t drive a car. We always got rides to different activities and if we weren’t standing at the door ready to walk out when they got there. We weren’t supposed to go. Whatever you said you were going to do, you were expected to do. Do what you say.
What were some jobs that you had as a teenager or young adult?
First job I had was as a telephone operator in California, San Bernardino. I was 18 years old and had just gotten out of high school working as a telephone operator. The kind with all the wires like in the old movies. Yeah, that’s what I did. I was living with Helen helping out with David. And when I moved back home I began to work for a telephone company at home here in Hattiesburg. It wasn’t the same at all. It was very different. It was very old fashioned. They didn’t have all the modern equipment that they had in California, and I hated the people I worked with. They were all women but they used bad language. Daddy picked me up after work one day and I was crying. And he said, you’ll never go back there. If they are going to use that language, you don’t need to be around it. So I never went back. My next job, I worked at the Hattiesburg Clinic where I worked a couple of years before I got married. I worked as a bookkeeper and a telephone worker.
Did you ever work outside of the home after you got married?
Yes I did. I went to Georgia. Didn’t know a soul. I got a job right away at a chemical company in Macon. I worked there as a bookkeeper with a huge bookkeeping machine with a computer that was as big as a room. You know. It was not the pocket sized things that do everything now, but it was fascinating to me and I liked it. But I did not like the women that I worked around. They were back-biting, and talked about everybody. They were just not very nice. I worked there for, I don’t know, a year a year and a half. Then I decided to go back home and we were going to try to have a baby. The doctor said I was under too much stress and I just need to quit my job and go back home. So I did. But I still didn’t get pregnant. That’s when we adopted Tim, and I stayed home from then on.
What was a normal day for you while raising your kids?
Well, I would get up around 6 and get them dressed and off to school and I would sleep and clean and vacuum and mop and go to relief society. My kids are so spread apart that I always had little ones at home too. Tim was about 17 years old when I had Ben. I had a lot of them late.
What were some of your favorite things about raising your children?
We would take little trips down to the coast and go kite flying or go swimming. Our little vacations together were the happy times. Just going and being together and having fun all together.
What were some of the hardest parts about raising your children?
It was mainly during the time when Nelson was busy with tax returns. He would get up really early in the morning and get back really late at night. The kids would never see him because he left before they woke up and came back when they were already in bed. It was stressful to keep things going and to keep him going as well because during those 3 months when it was really really busy, I had to take care of him as well as dealing with all the kids’ teenage problems and what have you. It was hard to keep everybody going at one time.
How did your focus change as they began to leave home?
I started reading a lot more. Reading became my get away time. We started having our sister meetings where we would get together and go for a trip. Sometimes it would just be going shopping for a day. That was my time to relax and just enjoy being with my sisters. I always liked getting out and going to do something. And I liked reading. I read a lot of books.
History Behaved: Storytelling Project 