We had parties down at Cleo’s in South Carolina sometimes when I visited.  It was a little hot one time and Uncle Ed didn’t have any ice.  Cleo wanted to make ice cream for the party.  So he says, “Well, I’m sorry, I don’t have any ice.” So we were trying our best to get over to Treon to get some ice from the ice factory over there and in the process of doing that it turns out that Uncle Ed really did have the ice, he just didn’t want us to know he had it!  He let us run around scheming about how we were going to get over to Treon and back and didn’t give it to us until late that afternoon when we just figured, well, we’re not going to have any ice cream.  Right then, he brought the ice in.  He liked to play tricks on the kids like that.  He was such a tiny person that I was as tall as he was.  He had a going business there and he had two of his kids working in the store that he owned.  They made it so pleasant when I went there that I always remember it as the best of times.  I always wished I could stay.

As I mentioned earlier, we had some neighbors with a lot of kids and they had a telephone business for the local countryside.  I loved to go over there and get on the switchboard and eavesdrop on all the people!  At that time, they had one party line and you would have three or four people on the one line.  They’d ring it once, or if it was another party it was twice, another party would be three times, and all these people could get on the same line and hear somebody talking from one place to another.  It was really fun to go over there and sit in on that.  It was during the Depression so we just heard gossip about all the people around.  I can’t remember anything specific of what I heard but it was fun to get on the switchboard and listen.