My first sure memories were the Summer of 1923; the year I started to school, having the whooping cough and worrying about Herman and John not having me at home to tell them what to play like.
I remember Aunt Mai helping Mama make me a dress with matching bloomers with elastic in waist and legs, all new to me. And when Paul was born in August that year (1923) they let me sit in Clara Mai's little rocker and hold him. I felt so big. There were five of us going to school that year walking two miles to Malesus High School.
On Sundays we went to church in the buggy. Grandpa Watlington or Papa would get the buggy hitched up and as we loaded in we each got a penny for Sunday School. Clara Mai usually drove the one horse buggy. Sometimes Mack would drive or he would ride Dinah--his private horse. Some of us would ride with Aunt Mai. Her buggy had a top on it.
The years then were not called a depression. You just did the best you could with what you had. I remember Mama washing and bleaching flour, sugar and feed sacks. She ripped them open, saving the twine to make baseballs and kite string for the boys. She made shirts and pants for little ones, underwear for all of us and the rest ended up as dish towels and hand towels. Aunt Mai helped her with sewing a lot especially in Summer when getting the school clothes ready. Aunt Mai would come over in the afternoon and they would cut out the shirts in different sizes and then she would take them home and finish them while doing her other chores and caring for Grandpa Hammond. If he woke up from his nap time and couldn't find Aunt Mai in the house he would go out and ring the dinner bell.
Aunt Mable and Uncle Will Stephens would bring us a lot of their old clothes. Clara Mai learned to sew real young. She could make over some of Aunt Mable's clothes into nice dresses for her and a jacket or skirt for me.
It was 1928. The new highway coming from Jackson going south was getting closer to us. They were coming right through our best playground--the sand gullies and red clay hills that meant so much to us--but we loved the excitement. Mack and Papa, with wagon and team, got to work on the highway.
In 1929 the highway was well on it's way to Pinson. I seem to remember that the part past our house was near completion by the end of the year. On July 9, 1929 Mama gave birth to a tiny baby girl. After five boys in a row and three older boys we were all overjoyed. Everybody wanted to have a part in naming her. It was finally settled we would call her Betty Juanita.
On July 16, 1930 Grandpa Hammond, age 84, died. He was buried in Lesters Chapel Cemetery. Before cold weather we moved into the big house with Aunt Mai. With a bedroom downstairs and three upstairs we still had two double beds in each room. All beds were usually full, especially on weekends.
We soon learned of the Great Depression: bank failures and unemployment. Papa lost $35.00 (about six weeks wages for a man) when the Peoples Saving Bank of Jackson failed. Crops failed, cotton prices dropped. We read or heard about the long bread lines and hunger in the big cities and elsewhere, too. Thanks to a large family we had hands available to help Grandpa Watlington raise a big garden. Papa and the big boys planted more field peas and potatoes, and with Mama and Aunt Mai canning everything edible they could find we never went hungry. When wild blackberries started ripening all available hands started hunting. Mama put them up in half gallon fruit jars. They were so good on winter nights with cornmeal mush and buttered homemade light bread.
In 1935 I graduated from Malesus High School and Betty started to school so we still had six in school. Since we were still suffering the depression it seemed best that I stay home to work. Mama and Aunt Mai really needed a full time helper with washing, ironing, cooking and washing dishes three times a day plus sewing, patching and cleaning house for 10 to 14 people was no small chore.
Washday was all day--carrying water from the spring below the house, building a fire under the iron kettle to heat water to start scrubbing the first tub of clothes, refill pot for boiling clothes--on and on until the last of the overalls were hung on the pasture fence because all the lines were full. Papa saw that we had help getting the water up the hill. Grandpa was getting feeble but he tried to help.
The ironing was done along with other chores in order of importance. After breakfast we would put the flat irons (or sad irons) on the big cook stove. It had six eyes and a water reservoir so there was plenty of room for four or five sad irons while cooking dinner and washing dishes.
T.V.A. was established in 1933 and we had been waiting patiently for rural electricity to reach us. It did in early summer of 1937. As soon as the wiring was done, electricity connected to meter box and the lights working Clara Mai bought an elecric iron. Mama let me use it on the white shirts and other starched clothes. She and Aunt Mai still used the sad irons on rough things. Then at Christmas she bought a Montgomery Ward electric radio. We got to listen to the fifteen minute soap operas while ironing and sewing. The radio brought joy to all of us at home.
Grandpa Watlington had been in very bad health throughout the summer, and he died Oct. 9, 1937. He was buried in Big Springs Cemetery near Pinson, where so many Watlington relatives are buried.
Herman enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps in April 1938 and was sent out west. Mack had been in C.C.C. for 3 or 4 years, as a work group leader, stationed in Jackson. Clara Mai and Kenneth were teaching near home. Sam was working at carpenter work and got married in October 1939.
Then came 1941. First Clara Mai married in February. Papa decided to start building a new kitchen but had to tear down the old one first. Then in July the first grandchild was born, Samuel Stephens, Jr. Then six weeks later sorrow struck. After a brief illness Mama died at age 54. She was buried August 13, 1941 at Ebenezer Cemetery, near Malesus.
Around the last week in Nov. of 1941 the new kitchen was finished. Then came Dec. 7th, Pearl Harbor, a date all the world remembers.
Elton wants to know where everyone was in Dec. of 1944, at the height of World War II. Well, I was working for Western Union Telegraph Company. After being sent to Gainesville, Georgia for training I was a relief operator in 1943 and 1944. I traveled to several places and ended up in Humboldt, Tenn. in October of 1944 and that was where I was at Christmas of 1944, and for three more years.
-- Evelyn Watlington Black