Well, my mother and father were married September the 12th, 1917, and we lived in Garner, North Carolina. He had a drugstore in town originally, and he went from the drugstore into a grocery store, and eventually got the post office in with the grocery store. He was postmaster for fifty years in the town of Garner before he retired.

I can remember going over to the store and people sitting around the stove in this grocery store, and they had spittoons. They’d chew tobacco and I remember seeing them spit and it would go sailing through the air.  Most of them would hit the spittoons. I have one that I kept here in the corner. His store had drawers that had vegetables, dried vegetables, all different things, and he also had candy in there. Anyway, to me, it was a delight to go over there because I was just a little thing and people always paid me all kinds of attention, which I hadn’t gotten as much as I wanted at home. So I got a lot of attention over there from people that were sitting around the stove.

I remember they had a cigarette machine that you could make cigarettes with. You’d put tobacco in it and then you’d roll it and make your cigarettes. Of course, I didn’t use cigarettes but it was fun to play with. My grandmother and grandfather lived across the street and across the highway from us behind the depot, and another aunt lived kittycorner across the way. Aunt Elsie lived in one house, Aunt Alice lived in another house. Elsie Whittaker and Alice Broughton lived across the way, and then another aunt lived right down the street from us.   So I had a lot of people to keep tabs on me.

My mother died when I was four years old and we had a colored nanny that came in and took care of us—my brother and I— for a while, but it didn’t work out.   My father had me stay with Aunt Alice, who was across the highway from them.  She kept me for a week or so but I kept running away from home. I would just disappear and they’d have to chase me down.  I always went over to one house where there were lots of kids, so they always knew where to find me.  She couldn’t keep me at home, so then my father took me down to South Carolina, where my mother’s family were from, and left Marshall and I down there with the Brooms, Uncle Ed and Aunt Myrtle Broom.  They had a girl that was a year older than I was, so it was like I had a new sister and we just got along great.

I stayed down there until my father remarried so we were there for six or eight months. Father remarried his old girlfriend that he had known before he married my mother. I was four and half or five years old by then.  It was real pleasant to be there because I felt very much at home.   Cleo, who was the daughter that was almost the same age as me, and I got along great.  They had a lot of relatives around there.  It was in Landrum, South Carolina. It was bigger than Garner was and it had streets and sidewalks and blocks.  I don’t know how many people lived there but it was a larger town.

My ancestors were from England and Ireland. As far as I know that’s where we were from.  My mother’s maiden name was Esse Lake, and then she married my father.  She had four sisters and one brother.  One of the sisters married a Bridges.  My grandmother married three or four times, so her name was Esse.  So in all, she was a Lake, a Penny, a Bridges, and I don’t remember what the other one was.   She married four times.

I was named after my mother.  The Lake is my mother’s name, and I was named Dorothy Lake.  I managed to do fairly well in school, and I made A’s and B’s, some C’s but mainly I did very well because I knew better than not to. My mother would have jumped on me if I hadn’t.

We had running water in the house and for years we had a pump out on the back porch.  We had to go out and crank the handle to pump a bucket of water.  We had a well but the pump made it so we didn’t have to go down to the ground or anything.  It was hooked right onto the house.

We had two bathrooms in the house when I was older.  At first, we only had one.  You’d take in a bucket of water  and pour it in the toilet to flush the toilet, because it was not hooked up to the water system. And we had a cess pool outside the house and every so often we’d have to have the cess pool emptied.  Some people’s leeched, but ours didn’t leech.  They would come in with a truck and pump it out every so often.