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Partial Transcript: It’s of my grandfather’s enormous rooster knocking me down and attacking me and sitting on my chest. And if when I have nightmares today, that’s still – that’s my nightmare. I was younger than 2 when that happened. And my next memory is of my brother being born at Christmas when I was 3. I had a baby brother for Christmas and that memory is so vivid that I can remember the (01:51 indecipherable) run. And it was the year that I had just turned 3 so that was one of the most exciting moments of my life, when he was born, of course.
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Partial Transcript: Well, I was a store child. I grew up literally in the store. I’m told that my parent brought me home from Marion General Hospital when I was 3 days old and they were still too poor to buy a bassinet. So they put a pillow and an OK Washing Powder box and placed me beside the cash register. And, of course, it was a very interesting multicultural community, although I had no concept of that at that point. And my mother loves to boast that a hundred people came by to see me that day. I guess I was a little worn out. But I have no memory of that. I’ve only heard about it. Growing up in the store was an interesting place for a child. Based on my graduate studies, I’ve learned that if you wanted to produce a verbally adept child, you put them in the environment in which I grew up. Because my parents – We lived in the apartment in the back above the store and I was taken into the store probably almost as soon as I was fed in the morning and I was surrounded by language. And not just the language of the older residents of the community who spoke mountain dialect for the most part, but the store was a pickup location for the school bus. So at times that I remember there would be 30 children or more of various ages from 1st grade through 12th waiting for the school bus in the morning. And there were the German and Czechoslovakian workers for the kaolin plant that was literally within sight of the store who lived in that community. There were boarders at (3:53 indecipherable) Wiseman’s Boarding House who shopped at the store. There were workers from the plant who came over to have my mother bake bologna sandwiches for lunch. And there were lots of summer people from Florida and there were the people who stopped to buy gas on the major thoroughfare between Chicago and Tampa. And I have one very vivid memory – I don’t know how old I was, I suppose 4 or 5 – in which a group of teenagers – and of course, at that age, those are very interesting people who didn’t sound like people I knew so I know that they were from somewhere in the Midwest – stopped by to buy gas. And I watched daddy fill their car and they counted their pennies to pay for the gas. And – I don’t remember – I remember that my parents making lots of sandwiches and my daddy putting me in the car and driving after these kids and stopping them and giving them food. Apparently, I heard later they had told my parents that they were on their way to Florida to pick oranges. They had run away from home and my dad – We didn’t have a phone at that point but there was one at the Wiseman Boarding House. Daddy went down and called the police who found their parents and the kids were picked up and sent home but oh, that was an exciting adventure for me. So there were lots of people in and out and one of my favorite things as a little child to do – On cold snowy days, there was a big stove in the back of the store that had a filigree top, a silver filigree metal top. It was purely decorative and a lot of the farmers who couldn’t work on the farms would come to the store and talk about politics and farming and whatever. And sometimes they’d tell stories and I would hide under the counter and listen. And another unpleasant memory for me was that we had the only radio in the community and I still have in my basement. It’s a Philco and it still works. It picks up AM stations. People would come in the evenings and gather around it to hear the war news because I was born as World War II started. And there was a man called (06:14 indecipherable). I can remember his voice. I was terrified of that man. He delivered the war news every night and people sat around and listened and discussed not only the war but there were a great many of the kids who waited for the school bus there who were soldiers and I knew some of them and they were away and I knew that war was terrible. I don’t think I had a real concept of what it was like other than – My parents often went to the movies on Friday or Saturday night and they took me. And my impression of the war was the scenes from news reels and the only airplanes I remember seeing were dropping bombs. When I was in 1st grade, my first grade teacher who is still living teases me that I would climb under my desk because I was so sure that we were going to get bombed, given Mr. (07:09 indecipherable) and my experience with the news reels. When I decided because I wanted to travel to become a flight attendant, she found that very amusing since I’d hidden from every airplane when I was small. So I had a lot of vivid memories relating to the fact that my environment was quite different. My living brother who is seven years younger did not grow up in the store. We’d lived in the house by that time and his world was very different from my world. But I think that it gave me a verbal facility at a very young age simply by being surrounded by language and by speech because the research demonstrates that if you want to create a verbal child, you immerse that child in language experiences. Well, I certainly had plenty of them and I had played story recounting by those people sitting around the stove and I still love politics and world affairs and I think that had a lot to do with the discussions from Mr. (08:20 indecipherable)’s broadcast. And I remember my bedtime was 8 o’clock and he was on like at 7:00 and there was the Perry Como Hour. And my uncle Sam taught me to dance while standing on his feet listening to Perry Como. And I vividly remember – I must have been 6 or 7 – hearing “Faraway Places with Strange Sounding Names,” still one of my favorite songs. And I think I had an interesting childhood. It was a very lonely childhood. I was a very imaginative child and I had no other children around me until my brother was born when I was 3. But he couldn’t play with me, you know, until I was about 7 so I was surrounded by adults and I lived inside my imagination and I loved stories. I was allowed to go out on the hill behind the store and play alone as long as I didn’t go out of sight so I created imaginary playmates and the most of them were bears. I had numbers of bears that I would play with and I would come in and tell my mom about the bears and not once did she ever tell me I was lying. The mountain term for an imaginary story is a bear tale and she would listen to my bear tales and if not applaud them, not disapprove of them. And I think that influenced my writing fiction because it was perfectly fine for me to imagine. And then when my brother was old enough, I started acting and every story I read or heard had to be produced on the counters in the store and I don’t know how in the world my parents allowed that. But customers were subjected to my plays I had created and my little brother was subjected to playing all the roles I wanted him to play. So it was an interesting time to –
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Partial Transcript: Almost totally when I was a child because almost – The people that I knew, the men particularly, in that community worked in the kaolin processing plant at Harris Mining, or it was Harris Clay Company then because kaolin is a very fine clay. It’s only found in 3 locations in the world and my china that’s in my china cabinet contains clay from those mines. It was the most important industry around and the men either farmed or worked in the plant. And my mother and dad charged groceries and gasoline and everything that they sold. And they sold most everything that people needed and couldn’t grow on farms. And at the end of two weeks when they received their paychecks – they’d come in, mama would cash them – and they’d pay their bills. The charge thing is still over in the store and I just always found that fascinating that you could write down everything somebody bought and they would pay in two weeks so charge cards were not particularly new to me, you know, as an adult. And there were very few people in the community who in some way were not associated with that processing plant. There were the Wisemans who ran the boarding house and Mr. Wiseman – or uncle Robert as he was called – was involved in some small farming but his wife ran the boarding house and that provided, I think, with more income probably than his farming. And most people did, rather, subsistence farming. Some sold their wares but I think most of them just grew what their families needed. I was born in and spent my early childhood in an interesting transition period that my brother didn’t experience and we’ve often discussed that. I think that I was born at, sort of, the end of the old Appalachian culture in that community in which there was subsistence farming. And there were still people, when I was a little girl, who came to buy their groceries with horses and wagons. But at the same time, my dad sold gasoline and there were cars and trucks and all those kinds of things and we lived in a major highway. In my book But No Candy that’s set in that store, the illustrator has us reading by – well, of course it’s fiction but it’s set there – and it’s based on the fact that one of my earliest memories is that the candy showcase, which typically held candy, was totally empty. And that was my real perception of World War II. We didn’t have any candy and the –
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Partial Transcript: I don’t think it was hillbilly music. I think hillbilly music developed, actually, during and later in my childhood. I was exposed to mountain music almost as early as I can remember because daddy always played around the store and in the evenings and people would come by to play with him. And I knew a number of people who played instruments. All his sisters played instruments so it was just a part of what was. And I think it was pretty typical of the area for many years and the people created their own entertainment. Most people played some sort of instrument and they played by ear. They had no music lessons until Mrs. Erickson, my mother’s friend, began to give me piano lessons. But I always listened to WWNC here in Asheville which was very different in those days and that was the nearest radio station, I believe, in the station out of Charlotte. Then Marion got a station and that was really big news, long before Spruce Pine had one. We listened to all kinds of music and, of course, at night we listened to the Perry Como Show. Daddy liked the Grand Ole Opry, of course, so we listened to that. But I was very into radio dramas. That was one of my favorite things. I actually enjoyed those, I think, as much or more than I enjoyed the music. But I was sort of exposed to an eclectic assortment of music. I don’t think that hillbilly, per se, as it’s called – I think that was an outgrowth of the radio era which had begun by the time I came along and the Carolina barn dance was kind of at the apogee of that before, as television came in. During that era, I think, on that program I heard what I would call hillbilly music, music that was written and developed for a listening audience, not folk music that had been handed down. But, of course, daddy loved the Jimmy Rogers’s railroad blues those were among his favorite things. And I grew up hearing those, although I don’t remember hearing Rogers very often and I think he might have been dead by that time. I know I’ve heard his recordings. So we listened to a lot of different kinds of music but daddy mainly played mountain music and I make a distinction between the two. I think hillbilly music is more commercial.
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Partial Transcript: Well, I think to an extent, it might have been cultural glue. Yes, because almost all the social gatherings when I was a little girl had music of some kind and my mom did not tell you the story of their shivaree when they got married. They went to the local speakeasy dance hall where there was a pickup band that played for dancing and she didn’t tell you about the day that she and daddy opened the store. They had a square-dance in the store before all the stock was brought in. It was empty except for the counters and the shelves and every musician within miles came. Scotty and Lulu Belle Wiseman who were later, only a few years later – Well, actually they were quite famous at that point. But they were from the community and were daddy’s cousins. They played at the opening of Sunnybrook Store when my book that Barbara Cooney had included the store in the illustrations was published in 1988. And we decided to change it to a bookstore because my parents were getting too old to run a general store and it was, kind of, not making money anyway. We tried to recreate the entire gathering and I think it was pretty typical. Classmate of mine who had a country band who got together with his family every Sunday afternoon and played and sang and I attended one of those soirees one afternoon. Had a grand time. Came out and daddy played with him. That was daddy’s last, kind of, big performance for that day. My editor came from New York so we had people from all over but it was, kind of, a recreation of what I had seen as a child. When there were family gatherings of any kind, there was always music. At church gatherings and a favorite thing in the mountains – I don’t know if you know much about it – was and still is the homecomings at churches. It’s like a big family reunion but it involves all the people who have attended or who are related to people who might be buried in the cemetery at the church. It’s a very old custom but there was always music that (19:11 indecipherable) not dancing and it was a very church oriented society. It still is, I mean, this culture – that was the gathering place. I think that my parents store, as most general stores probably were at that time, were social gathering places that were not centered on the church, one of the few around. But I don’t remember attending anything other than my grandmother’s Sunday dinners in which music was not a part.
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Partial Transcript: Well, I wanted daddy to let me sing. I liked to sing and I could sing almost on pitch and I think that being allowed to sing at all had a lot to do with Shirley Temple and the influence that she had been, you know, on films. And most of those radio shows at that time had a little girl singer. And I was not the little girl singer, per se, for a long time and finally convinced daddy to let me prepare something so maybe I could sing. I don’t why I wanted to do it. I guess it just looked like fun because I was hanging around backstage anyway. And they marched me out when daddy’s clipboard didn’t have enough names on it and I got to sing and Cal paid me. He gave me popcorn and a free movie if I went back on Saturdays so that was a pretty good deal in those days. I loved westerns and I could go watch a western and eat all the popcorn I wanted so, you know, I was employed and it was an interesting part of my life. At the time it was – When you’re a child, they’re what happens, you know, you don’t think about the context that’s larger. I went with daddy on Friday night. It was very fun. Spruce Pine was such when I started going that I was allowed to walk around downtown alone, perfectly safe. And I would go up to Dave’s drugstore and get and Orangeade and I would go visit my cousin Doris who worked in the Woolworth’s and I would wish that I had the money to buy some Blue Waltz perfume. When you’re 7 it’s a wonderful perfume. And then the Callahan brothers had a little sandwich shop that was in the left corner of the theatre in a separate little room and they made the best grilled cheese sandwiches I have ever tasted, made with old-fashioned sharp rat cheese and they were cooked in butter and you could get one for a dime. Daddy would give me money and I’d go wander around, maybe have an Orangeade at the drugstore and have a grilled cheese at the Callahan’s and visit Doris and then I would sit on the curb and watch the trains. I still adore trains. So that town was very important to me and it was, sort of, a focal center. We always shopped there. I never felt I belonged to Avery County and I think that’s sad because I lived in Avery County but to me, Spruce Pine was home. We bought groceries there that we didn’t carry in the store. They didn’t carry fresh meats and things like that so we had to go to a larger store to get those and we mainly shopped at the Spruce Pine Grocery which was down the street and I was allowed to go down there and walk around in the store. I think everybody in town knew me and they all just, sort of, looked after me and daddy was perfectly fine with my wandering around so I didn’t spend all my time backstage. And I was having what, to me, were great adventures.
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Partial Transcript: I think it was kind of a central – Not only a social event – Everybody showed up for those Friday night performances after they started but it was a topic of much discussion and then when it was broadcast – it may have been from the beginning. I’m not sure. I’m not sure who would know that either. It was broadcast on the Marion station and we would all gather to listen the next day and it’s always bothered me to hear myself and I wouldn’t listen to me so I really have never heard those performances and I don’t think they’re on tape anywhere. I’ve looked because now I’d like to have one but I wouldn’t listen. I would go outside. I don’t know why it bothered me but it did. But it was a very big event, not only in Spruce Pine but at least in my world. I don’t know if it was a big event, you know, as far away a Yancey County or even Newland, the northern part of Avery County. But in the Toe River Valley, it was an incredibly important event on Friday nights and people made great efforts to dress and to go out. It was always, sort of, a double feature. The live show happened, as I recall, at 7. I may be wrong. It might have been 8 but I believe it was 7 because I was allowed to stay up. And then they showed a movie after so you could have a really big evening on the town and if you went next door to the Callahan brothers you could have a grilled cheese so that was a pretty big evening in Spruce Pine in the late 40’s.
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Partial Transcript: I don’t know much about that because that happened about the time that I was no longer involved. I know that came about. It was in discussion during the last weeks I was there because I heard daddy talking about it and he and Cal were very excited about that possibility. Spruce Pine still didn’t have a radio station. Marion was the closest and I remember it was a big event and the Morganton station picked it up and then there were a few other stations around the state that broadcast it and I think it grew. I don’t think it was a sudden thing. I could be wrong but it was my impression that it was not sudden, that it grew, kind of, exponentially. But how the Liberty – I don’t know anything about the Liberty Broadcasting System. I don’t know who founded it. As I said, when you’re a child, it’s what is.
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Partial Transcript: Well, the one that Cal teased me about for many, many years even after I was married was the night I fell out of the chair. I was so tiny when I started singing that I had to stand in a kitchen chair, you know, the kind that had metal – I don’t know what they’re called. They had one of those backstage and they carried that out on stage and Cal would lift me up and I would stand on the chair because they couldn’t lower the microphone low enough for me. And one night – I guess I got a little rambunctious, probably during “Camptown Races” or something – and the chair slid out from under me and I went screaming down to the stage floor. And one of my memories – and I won’t discuss why. I do know why now but I won’t discuss it. There was a character – The shows had stock characters and there was always a funny, kind of, hillbilly character like Grandpa Jones. Well, we had a character, he was like 18 and with a faded beard called Grandpappy. And Grandpappy was a high school kid but I never saw him without that beard. He put it on as he got there, and I was terrified of him and he thought it would be such great fun to have me dance on stage with him. And I would run outside, I would hide, I would roll up in the curtains, I would do anything to keep from dancing with him. I knew him by now but it’s private. And there were three singing sisters that I vividly remember who wore white may dread boots and there’s only one word to describe how much I wanted white may dread boots like those women. I lusted for white may dread boots and finally Santa brought me some. And I know that the night I finally danced with Grandpappy, I had on those boots because I stomped holes in the floor because I was so angry at him for making me do that. And Cal even said, “Gloria, I was not going to.” And it was a thing with me. I guess there were other funny events but I remember those that involved me, you know, I was a small child. I was a small – young child, after all.
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Partial Transcript: I wasn’t really aware at school. I know that I still have some of my fan mail that, I think, one of my teachers typed to so nobody would know. Many of my classmates came with performances and I find that interesting now. I don’t think I was teased. I’d been singing and I studied piano since – Well, I learned to read music before I learned to read so I’d always been the one in the class who played for class plays and so I don’t think my classmates saw it as anything special. It was what Gloria did. Big deal. I don’t think it gave me prominence. I don’t remember any particular jealousy. It may have existed but I don’t think so. Again, it was just what was.
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Partial Transcript: Not really. I’d always sung in school and I was always in school plays and I continued to do that even when I no longer was involved with the program. And then, of course, I always – Because I could play the piano, I was asked to play. (30:45 indecipherable) convinced my parents to allow me not to attend this church that I hated and go to the church that I wanted to attend with my aunt Wilma. I played the piano there and I directed the choir. I was quite active in that and in high school, I was always in the chorus and in the drama club but I didn’t really perform in other venues until I was in college as a music major. There were no opportunities, in all honesty. I mean, I began to sing at weddings and things like that but there weren’t opportunities. There were no theatre groups. There were no performing groups other than the pickup ones or the ones that played on radio stations and my mother would not allow me to be a part of that, you know. As I told you, she selected what I sang and I couldn’t sing about divorce and the man leaving me and cry in my beer. I could sing the songs that were appropriate for children. And I’ve found recently in a stack of stuff I’ve moved all over the country the sheet music from my two big hits. I still have it which were candy kisses which was appropriate for me to sing and there’s a bluebird on my windowsill and then my favorite that I sang. The last time that I sang – I remember it because when we started a new project in Spruce Pine a few years ago, I didn’t sing it but I recited it. It’s called your hearts in gentle people who live in my hometown. And other than that I sang mainly Steven Foster but that woman selected everything that came out of my mouth and it was not going to be inappropriate for a child and you know what respect I have for that? That’s class. She was not going to have me exploited and she’s the person who picked out my clothes and what I would wear and I had to be dressed appropriately for a child. And I’ve worked with, as a music teacher and in other contexts, I’ve worked with mothers who would exploit their children. Not my mom. I was going to be a child and I have so much respect for that.
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Partial Transcript: Well, I think that – I don’t know if this is important or not but I told you earlier that I didn’t realize my dad’s skills and abilities, I guess, that a great many people who became important in country music had until I watched the fifty great things in country music. And I realized that some of them had come to the store to jam with daddy and I had actually seen those people perform when they were nobodies on that stage at the barn dance. The best-known people, I guess, who came there – Roy Acuff came once and he was very well-known because he played regularly on the Grand Ole Opry and the Carter Family and little Jimmy Dickens. And he and Jim Carter were most fascinating to me because they weren’t even bigger than I was when they came and I hadn’t seen many people who were small as I so it had nothing to do with their music, you know. It had to do with the kinds of things a child notices
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Partial Transcript: Well, I think my dad was so hurt by my not being part of that part of his life and I don’t think he realized for many years – me and him talked about it later – that it was not my choice. I was a child. I had to do what I was told. And I’m working on a novel called Carolina Barn Dance and it’s taken me many years to recognize that yes, I can write about the position that my dad was in and I’m going to and several years of therapy about other things. I sorted some of those things out. The pain that he must have felt and the disappointment because he had not gone on tour and I think that he could have. And I think that Lester Flatt and Carl Story and a lot of those people came by to jam with daddy spoke to the fact that he must have been pretty good. He didn’t get to go on with that career. And then he thought he could have somewhat of a career in that field in his hometown and be at home with us every night and then that was taken away from him. Having that happen within two years of my brother’s death, almost did my daddy in. And I’m going to write about that, I have begun to in the early drafts of this novel because I think it’s a critical part of the whole story because he had a lot to deal with, you know, in a short time. Having two of the most important things in his life taken away. So yeah, I think daddy was always disappointed. He was very disappointed in me and one of the most hurtful things he ever did after the little girl who replaced me from Asheville, Passie Edwards, was invited to sing at the White House and daddy was just so disappointed that I had not been invited. And years later, when I was invited to the White House, daddy was no longer there but that’s a whole other thing. But I remember I cried and cried about the fact that he carried her photograph from the newspaper in his billfold along with mine. I’ve never quite understood that. I spend a lot of time talking to the shrink about it but we didn’t come to any conclusions either. I think it spoke to his disappointment for that part of his life, you know, it didn’t work out. I have a great deal of empathy for him in that situation now that I was not capable of having, certainly, without maturity.
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Partial Transcript: Well, I’ve always sort of realized and even since college that when you grow up in a small town, particularly, you are a separate human and you receive a lot of attention that you do not receive in larger populations. I wanted my children to grow up in a small town. I married their dad when they lived in New Orleans. We moved to Dallas and then to Tampa so that didn’t work out. I had hoped that when we got to Tampa that we would live in a small town so that they could have the experience of being an important person because in a small population, everybody is an important person. And that’s not true. My children graduated from the 6th largest school in the United States so that went out the window but it made me very aware of the self-confidence and self-esteem that I gained out from being in a small school. Yes, it was tough. All my teachers were my cousins or my aunts and that is a tough life believe me. But I was a VIP. Everybody in my class was a VIP because there were so few of us and I think that gives you a sense of self that’s much more difficult to develop when you grow up in a much larger population. You can’t be a VIP in 8,000 students that you can be a graduating class ’58. And anything that you did in that small town or its (39:26 indecipherable) was in the local paper. I mean, your name was in the paper for sneezing, almost. And that’s a boost to your self-esteem that you don’t get in a more cosmopolitan situation. I think it was a valuable experience and in almost everything that I’ve ever done because I really believe that I could do whatever I set my mind to do because my community, sort of, showed me that I could. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think that comes from growing up in an environment like that.
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Partial Transcript: After I was published and had a book on the national best seller list – A bookseller in a nearby town came to visit the store which we had turned into a bookstore because my parents weren’t capable of operating the other and they weren’t making any money. It was a used bookstore so they could sell nice books and she looked at it and, of course, it was not the bustling business that it had been when I was a little girl. And she said, “Gloria, why don’t you exploit your poor childhood? Dolly Parton has done that so effectively.” And I looked at her as if she had lost her mind. I didn’t have a poor childhood. One of my students after I moved up here (41:16 indecipherable) university said to me – I found out she was the daughter of a man who had grown up in that community who I didn’t know well. He was older than I but he shopped at the store. And I said, “Oh, please tell him next time I’m over I’d love to have coffee with him.” She came back and said, “Daddy doesn’t really know you, that you were the most affluent child in the community and you didn’t have much to do with kids from his family.” Well, I did. We delivered groceries and feed every week, you know, but socializing with them? No, they didn’t go to our church. They shopped at the store and I knew them there. And it was the first time somebody had said to me that I was affluent but I was. I realized that someone I had thought for years – a girl in my class that I used to resent because she was my friend on the days I took an orange for recess and when I didn’t have an orange, she wasn’t my friend. And my mother finally explained that I was, honestly, the only kid who had an orange 2 or 3 days a week as a snack. And she didn’t get oranges very much and I had thought, You selfish little person, you. I was. I was not a poor child. I didn’t know it. Again, you don’t – It’s what is. And in that community, I was, probably, the most or one of the most affluent children there. That was not true during my adolescence, however. One of those preachers – I won’t call him a minister; I won’t need to fight – who embezzled for my parents store and almost bankrupted them. And my grandfather, kind of, killed their business as I entered my adolescence and we really weren’t nearly as affluent to the advent of supermarkets in town. And with a little more affluence after the war, people could drive into town and do their grocery shopping. When I was little – especially, I guess, during the war – I remember there were Florida visitors for whom my parents saved and the whole community would save the stamps to get gasoline so they could go home after they got here in summer. It was much more difficult to travel distances and so they shopped at our store but with a little more affluence after the war in the general population, people began to go to the supermarket. There was one supermarket in Spruce Pine and that didn’t help and daddy would not modernize. And that’s one of the things that’s made me believe that he stopped with my brother’s death and he could not see modernizing, although I was, really, very into that and wanted him to do so. So my adolescent years were far less affluent and that’s tough on a kid. I think it’s tougher, perhaps, than never having anything, to go from being the most affluent kid to not having quite as much. But I think that the general population around there had more income after the war (44:43 indecipherable), perhaps.
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Partial Transcript: Well, this comes mainly from my research, from my books because all of the Littlejim books focus on a logging family or a timberland family, including the uncles who own the saw mill, the process – the logs that my grandpa cut. There was a small family kind of logging operation that supplied lumber to the local population when I was a child. And my grandfather’s logger, his brother Bob, have the saw mill and some of the other brothers and half-brothers – It was a very interesting family. Fathers died and mothers remarried, mothers died and fathers remarried so there were brothers and sisters who weren’t related to one another – Were all involved in one way or another in that industry. And with World War I and into the early 20’s, the bigger logging companies, particularly from the north, from the industrial cities, had begun logging soon after 1900. They didn’t really come into the area where my dad lived until 1910 or so. The Tweetsie Railroad was actually an (46:36 indecipherable) railroad built to go into the mountains on narrower road bit than the big locomotives to carry lumber and logs but mainly processed lumber from those big companies down into Tennessee to Johnson City. The little train would come up the mountain – I found in my research – and would pick up the lumber and the passengers and go back down the mountain and where it would meet the big locomotive which would take it into town and the big locomotive would pull it up the mountain and it would go off the siding and make its way around Avery County and Watauga County. And with that, the small – Well, the big lumber companies could pay a wage that was far above what a family operation could pay and they moved into the entire region and literally raked the land. They clear cut most things and they paid a good wage. The men who had been, perhaps working with smaller logging industries began to work for the bigger companies and when they were gone, all the jobs were gone. Now, about the same time, the mining industry began to develop various minerals, including, particularly, mica and kaolin. And that offered jobs to some but there was a period of time that a lot of the logging families had financial difficulties. That was in the decade particularly before the Great Depression in the entire country. They had a difficult time making ends meet, although they grew most of their own food, they had to be – these were self-sustaining farms, I should say, who pretty well took care of themselves except for sugar, coffee, things like that. In fact, early on, my grandmother wove the fabric that made the clothing, you know, for her children. Later, of course, that became a commodity that was bought at Burleson in Plumtree. But the income that had been a part of their lives, kind of, disappeared. It was the difference too in my dad’s family and my mother’s family. My dad’s was much larger so, of course, there were more mouths to feed and my mother was an only child up until the late 1920’s. And so she was much more affluent than my dad was at the same period of time, although his family had been fairly affluent when he was a little boy by the standards of the time and place. By the standards of the general population of the United States? No, they weren’t affluent but by the standards of the time and place they were. The big lumber companies and the big mining companies did a lot to destroy the old culture that had been the small farms of the Appalachian Mountains. Daddy had a favorite saying. I don’t know where he got it but he loved to think of us farmers who could live at home and board at the same place, meaning they had to buy almost nothing. And that was, to him, the ideal way to live because that had been the lifestyle of his childhood, pretty much. Does that answer what you were asking?
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Partial Transcript: I have a list I’ll share with you that I’ve used in presentations. Some stereotypes of the Appalachian people have grown out of those very positive strengths of the culture and it’s sad that that’s happened but I do have that. I’ll be glad to share with you. I think the interdependence of communities which was the only way to survive. This was a harsh environment for growing one’s own food supply. Everything had to be grown to last for the humans and the animals for at least a year until – that was actually more like 15 months from planting because it had to last until the next harvest season. And you don’t have as long of a growing season as you do in some places. And if the crops failed, you were in big trouble so knowing how to grow one’s own food, how to preserve it. I didn’t realize what a struggle that was until I was researching Littlejim or the Christmas moral which became Littlejim. And talking to my parents: every time I asked them questions, it involved food, how they grew their food, how they preserved their food, how they cooked their food. And I’m told by editors in New York that that book makes them hungry because I couldn’t write the book without addressing the absolute dependence on supplying one’s own basic needs that the people had to deal with. And if the crops failed, people had to share. I’m working on a sequel to The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree and one of the things that the editor wants in the book is the interdependence of the community and that we’re going to have a man who comes home from World War I with PTSD which was called being shell-shocked at that time. And I had a great uncle who experienced this and the community had to help his family to survive and I’m going to use that with the community garden in which everybody helps grow the food for this family and works to try to bring this man out of his shell. That was the hallmark of this culture, that everybody had to pull his own weight, that everybody worked with everybody else. Life was, very much, a collaborative venture, I think, with those small farmers. It had to be, not only for them families but within the community and the heart of most communities would have been a church. It could have been most any of the Protestant religions and, in a few cases, Catholic but the social activities centered on that. But the larger family that is created by attending a certain church meant that if your neighbor needed help, if you were sick and couldn’t cut your hay, you took your mowing things over and your horse-drawn rakes and you helped them put up the hay. And I think we need to be more aware of that because in the cities I have lived in and even here today, there is very little interdependence, you know, among even my neighbors. Now, my neighbors are wonderful and once we had to call the 911 people, everybody in the neighborhood showed up to help me because my mom’s ill. But we don’t depend on each other the way we did and I sometimes worry because if we face another Great Depression, and there is that possibility. I hope not but it does exist. I worry because my daughters and granddaughters do not know how to exist and in all honesty, the only reason I know is my research for these books. Yes, I learned to can in 4H. I could if I had to. Yes, I’ve gardened everywhere I’ve ever lived. Got to Florida and I could dig in the dirt after Dallas digging in the concrete. I mean, hard pan in Dallas is like concrete. Thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I always have something growing. I have lettuce out there in a pot. It’s my farmer genes coming out, and I mean G-E-N-E-S not J-E-A-N-S. I have one daughter and both my daughters like to garden but do they know how to preserve food? No, they don’t. And I only know about it because I was a store child. I was not a farmer’s child. I didn’t do all that but through researching how to exist if we don’t have all the modern conveniences for food and shelter and that kind of thing, I don’t think my granddaughters could survive. My daughters might be able to but I’m not sure that, you know, they’re teenagers now. I’m not sure they know how. And even my generation I know from research, for these books, not because I grew up doing it. And I think those are skills that maybe, perhaps, we should be teaching.
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Partial Transcript: Well, our culture has become so homogenized. It’s very much like the language and the dialects are disappearing because we all, sort of – The standard of speaking is the midwestern non-dialect non-accent announcer on television. Everything is so homogenized and I think that’s one of the sad losses and, of course, I’m a big believer that we have the capabilities to develop other sources of energy. I’m not a big fan of oil which you can guess in that petrochemicals are my very worse trigger and I have to avoid many of them at all costs. And that’s kind of interesting in that my husband was a troubleshooter for a petroleum company so I’ve been immersed in oil for a lot of my life. My dad and mother sold gasoline. It’s been a big part of my life and now it’s not a part of my life except in that it makes my car go. But I do believe that sometimes influences by big oil, and I’m not a fan, have suppressed other possibilities that we really need to explore and we really need to be aware that there are other ways to do things. I love the local foods movement. I think that’s very important. But are we going to unless we have to give up the pineapples that came straight from Hawai’i? Are we going to give up these things unless it’s an absolute necessity? I think that the demand for a great many things will help if we can ever get the – and it’s not going to happen soon – but the influence is some of the corporations out of the equation. There are all kinds of possibilities for doing some of these things. I think the big problem – and that’s someone who’s life has been the wife of an executive of big corporations – their influence is absurd.
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Partial Transcript: Well, I think one of the best possibilities there is something that I grew up having and it’s still around but almost nobody uses it who doesn’t live out of the country and that is the representatives in each county of the agriculture department for the state, the county agents, and the women were called home economics agents. I don’t know what they’re called today. But there’s such good sources of teaching a lot of these skills that could make a big difference in our survival and they’re available. They’re in the community and there’s so much that can be learned, not only from the mountain culture but from agrarian cultures in general. How do we cut down on the transportation costs of food? Well, it’s not that difficult to grow your own food. In truth, I’m not very likely to have a chicken coop in my yard. I’m terrified of chickens based on that first experience. I don’t want chickens around but there are people who – Chickens are having fresh eggs on top of skyscrapers in New York. So I think there are people who are really, kind of, making little baby steps toward being self-sustaining. Could we do it? Yeah, I think we could. I think the victory gardens during World War II. That whole notion is a really good notion and could come back. One of the things that I’m most impressed with that I hope spreads is the little church I grew up in. It’s the church in The Year of the Perfect Christmas Tree. The minster there has enough grants to hire an organic gardening expert. And there was land donated. They have a community garden and nobody in the community around that church needs to go hungry because if you need food, you can come to the church basement on Sunday about 6 to 7 months of the year and get fresh vegetables. Now, why can’t more churches, community clubs, civic organizations begin to have things like that. There are a couple here in Nashville. Again that’s the collaborative effort that has always been a part of this culture and I don’t think it’s just in the mountain culture. In other places I have lived – Well, I taught in Turkey Creek, Florida, one of the most interesting places. They busted kids in from Fort Lonesome, in case you know where that is. There were people there who had the same kind of community support that I grew up with here so I think in many (1:04:54 indecipherable) communities, you have that. I think it could happen rather quickly if there’s a necessity. I really am so impressed that the First Lady has a garden on the White House grounds. I think that’s such good role modeling. And I’m reading and seeing on television newscasts more and more schools that are doing gardens as science projects and having kids work – I think it can be done exactly how it was done in World War II. It didn’t take long for this country to get with it. I mean, we were lollygagging about until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and suddenly the country was galvanized and within a year there were victory gardens and there were people doing jobs they didn’t think they could do. Americans are capable of a lot and I think that out genetic pool made up of a lot of prisoners and a lot of people who were renegades in other places who came here. I think we brought with us a lot of interesting stuff, genetically, that gives us the brain power and physical will to do an awful lot of things. I’m an optimist about most of this. I really am. Maybe I’m wrong but I am.
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Partial Transcript: One of the great disappointments to me in coming back here is that there are people who have lost the sense of collaboration, who have lost the sense of working together, who really don’t seem to care about their neighbors. And I was so disappointed when I tried to do the Home of the Perfect Christmas Tree Project in Spruce Pine because with what I proposed, collaboration would have made it work. But there were a few people who wanted any financial gain to go to themselves and there are still people who are hungry and that didn’t have to happen. And that stresses me because I’m not sure from whence this has reared its ugly head. I know it exists. I’ve run into it in other places I’ve lived but this sense of interdependence and taking care of one’s neighbor has been lost in some people here and yet five miles from where that happened – to migrate this appointment and I hope to bring it back at some point, once we get everything settled – is this little tiny Methodist church that has a community garden where you can get free food if you need food. And interestingly enough, the minister who started that is not from the area at all. I don’t even know where he’s from. I haven’t asked him, isn’t that terrible? I don’t know but I know he spent most of his life in the Coast Guard and has lived all over the world so he came back to foster this that I don’t think ever, really, was gone from that little congregation and that group of people. I think it’s always existed there. I’ve always maintained some touch with people there. And I think that sense of being responsible for the welfare of one’s neighbors and friends – I often say that I’m a liberal for a really good reason because I believe – and I’m not a deeply religious person, understand that – is that Jesus and Buddha taught that I am responsible for the least of these, that I do have some responsibility for helping take care of my neighbor. That’s my rationale. And although many people in the mountains will tell you they’re rabid conservatives, they really aren’t when it comes to social issues. They have the same attitudes that I think I grew up with. I think that is of critical importance and we need to foster. I think the sense of self, the sense that I am an important person in the grand scheme of things. I’m not more important than anybody else but I am an important person. I have a job to do, I have a place in society. And one of the things that I learned from my parents and somewhat from that church is I’m supposed to leave this world a better place than I found it and I think that’s a fairly dominant theme. A sense of self that how you behave when you are alone is what you really are, that you have to have some self-respect and you have to space yourself in the mirror in the morning. I think that is a part of the independence of mountain people the sense of self and that I have to live up to my own standards and I hope that these are things that I’ve helped to teach my children, even though we’ve lived in large cities. I was a teacher for much of their lives and I try to foster that in my students and taught that on children. I don’t know if I succeeded but I know those were important values that I gained from my parents and from the culture and from that little church. And I wrote in an essay for one of the references. It’s very difficult to write about one’s own life from this culture without writing about the place one has in the family. You have to live up to your family in this culture and I think that’s important because there’s a sense of if you let the family down – One of the best recommendations you can have here is, “Oh, she’s from a good family,” or, “You don’t want to trust this person. She’s not from a good family.” That sense of having to uphold the family reputation. I think it’s a valuable gift because it makes you look for something – You have more to live up to than just your own wants and desires.
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Partial Transcript: Well, see, I believe that all history’s important, that history give us context within our own lives and I don’t think that the barn dance was any less important than the other history from that valley. And, of course, I grew up steeped in the history of that valley. Had a young friend from Tampa (1:13:53 indecipherable) me once. I was telling some of the stories I’d learned from my dad and Joe said, “You know, it’s hard to believe that so much history happened in one place.” And what a powerful statement. That much history happened in every place on Earth. It’s do we keep it as part of our heritage? I have never been without a sense of roots because I know some of the history and I think that that small program and the party played on the history of that little town. And its tribute to the really large number of musicians without training and there were a great many who are very well-known who have come out of that valley. There’s some families that you can say – the Wisemans, for instance – I don’t know anybody that can’t play an instrument. All that is a part of the context which I create my life and have lived my life and I will answer why that’s important by telling you a story from my daughter’s life. When my youngest daughter was planning her wedding – Now you do know my daughters were adopted. I married a widower with two little girls and I adopted them and they are my daughters, absolutely and surely. Just ask them. Although I tried to investigate the history of their dad’s family and their mother’s family. And his parents were divorced so when I married him they had three sets of grandparents, my parents became the 4th set. Not a lot of the oral tradition had been maintained in any of those families, although my husband’s family was a very interesting group. We think they were prisoners who were brought from Dublin to Savannah. We’re not sure because some of that’s been lost. They did have, when the civil war started, a large plantation and a great number of slaves. I mean, we can’t change that. I’d learned to that extent but I knew the stories from the valley where I grew up so my daughters heard the stories from my family. Well, with this background, you will understand my daughters come in. We’re trying to plan a seating chart for 4 sets of grandparents and I am now divorced from my husband and he has a current wife. So we have the mother of their birthmother, we have the ex-wife but their adoptive mother, me, and then they have daddy’s current wife and then you have the grandparents. So we’re trying to work this out so nobody kills us. Julie insists that her birthmother’s mother which I insisted sit beside me because her birthmother couldn’t be there. There was one way to honor that she had another mother and that was to put her 98-year old mother who had learned to walk to be in that wedding after a stroke beside me. And then my daughter insisted that my mother sit in the second pew. And I said, “Julie, your dad’s going to kill us. He’s going to come in with a submachine gun when we announce this.” She said, “Mother, it’s my wedding. And I’m sorry I belong to your family. I don’t know any stories for daddy’s.” Her daughter called me last summer and said, “Gigi, I’m making my family tree and I need my direct ancestors.” I said, “Honey, your mom will have more information about that than I do because that’s your grandma Martha who died’s family and your grandpa Larry’s family.” She said, “No, no, Gigi. I need my direct ancestors, your family.” What is the power of the heritage that is conveyed in story, in music, in conveying the culture? My daughters belong to this culture. They’ve never lived here a day in their lives. My granddaughter’s heritage, as she wrote me in her Mother’s Day card, “Thank you and grandma Ruthie for the wonderful heritage you’ve given me. This has come through the stories handed down from my family. Part of that story is that little radio show in my hometown, a part of the story of that hometown, of that little town and the heritage of that town is that aspect, that music, that dissemination of music. Nationally, at one point, is a part of the story that gives us a sense of belonging. And I think my daughter’s comment that day was just incredibly powerful, don’t you? “I belong to your family. I don’t know any of the stories from daddy’s.” I’ve written several articles with that as the lead because it’s so powerful. That’s the reason it’s important to remember.