I first started working part time in Raleigh during school when I was about sixteen years old.  I’d gotten a job in  Raleigh.  I’d hitch rides over to town to go to work and they worked you pretty hard.  We worked eight hours a day six days a week.

It was fun. I was kind of on my own.  I could do as I pleased when I was over there.  I didn’t have Mother telling me, “No you can’t go” and “No, you can’t do this.”

I grew up during the Depression and I hung on to the money I made.  Whatever I would get, whatever I’d make, I would take half of it and put it in the bank and the other half I used for spending.

I don’t have any idea where to start.  Things were so different back then.  People were different than they are nowadays.  I don’t know how best to describe it.  I went from high school, managed to get a job working for a cousin of mine in an office, and move over to a job at the dime store working full time.  From there, I managed to get a job working for Western Union.  I worked for them for a long time. 

I had been taught to type on the mux machine and when I would type, I would hit two periods to send with each message I sent.  I wasn’t supposed hit two periods but I did.  The people at the other end of the line knew it was me that sent it.  I was a fast enough typist that I could get on the regular fast lines.  They had Charlotte, Richmond… there were four different lines that were fast lines that would send messages out.  And I was one of the few younger ones that got on those machines and worked fast. The teletypes were slower.  The mux machines were fast. 

To get on the mux machines, I would catch a ride into Raleigh.  I didn’t have any transportation so I either had to ride the bus or find a way to get there.   One of the supervisors would go to work at four o’clock in the afternoon so I talked him into letting me ride with him every day.   Since he was the boss of the office, he’d let me get on the bigger machines and I learned to work those.  Eventually, When I went up to Norfolk, they put me on a main line to Richmond.  They had boxes over the machines that had messages that went out.  They put me on the Richmond machine because I was fast enough to clear out the backlog.  The other girls in the office couldn’t handle it.  I was fairly accurate with my typing too.  Take the message down, type it in,  and send it.  If the message went across country you used two periods at the end of a message.  That’s where I got in the habit of using the two periods.  

I found out that they were sending people around to different offices if they wanted to go.  The office I was at had more people than they needed so I talked them into letting me go to the Norfolk ofice.  Norfolk was my first place where I was able to live without anyone telling me what I could do and couldn’t do.  I was eighteen years old and I worked there for four months.  When I found out they were going to send somebody to California, I talked to the district manager once when he came by the office.  I told him I’d like to go to California.  And he says, “Well, I don’t know how you’re going to do it.  They can’t afford to give up your help here because they are short handed.” 

I had been there on assignment from the other office for three months.  After the fourth month, I went to the manager and I said, “I want to go home; I want you to send me back to Raleigh.”  So he said, “Okay, at the end of the month you can go home.”  

I went back to Raleigh and I talked to my boss.  I said, “I understand you’re going to send some people to California.”  And he says, “Yeah, but I’m not going to send you. You’re too good to send out there.”  And I thought, “Oh, shoot.  I came home for nothing.” Anyway, he didn’t have any plans on sending me out to California. 

A couple of weeks later, the district manager came through again and I told him what went on, and I said, “That’s the reason I left Norfolk.” And he said, “Well, I’ll talk to him and see what we can do.”  A couple of days later, they gave in.

I was the first one that left their office to go to California.  They also sent another girl from the office with me.  Her name was Marilis Holloway.  She was a mama’s girl and she had to have somebody to tell her what to do and what not to do.  So we came out to California together.  Western Union bought us tickets on the train, first class.  We had drawing room A, which was the top of the line, and we came out to Los Angeles.  When we got to Los Angeles, there was nobody there to meet us.   We had no idea where we were going.  We finally found the Western Union office, and they sent us to a hotel to stay.

When I came out to California, they put me in with a bunch of kids in the office that didn’t know how to type half the time and didn’t work the machines very well. They put me on a CAP machine and in the morning when I’d go in, that thing would be so full you wouldn’t believe. I’d go in and start sending the messages and I wouldn’t send more than one or two and the girl would come on the other end and say, “Hi, Dot! How are you this morning?”. Because she knew it was me. She said, “The others can’t send worth a damn.”

I never complained because I had all the work I wanted. Those machines were like a typewriter only with three rows of keys.

Well, it didn’t work out very well at the first house they put us in.  We hadn’t been in the hotel more than a night and boys kept knocking on the door and wanting to know if we wanted company.  They wanted to bring boys in to entertain us, and I says, “No.”  One of the girls that we met up on the train which was with us in the same room was all for that.  She wanted to get in with them.  And I says, “No, you’re not going to do it.”  So next thing you know, she’d moved into another room and Marilis and I were there by ourselves.  Well, it was too expensive for us to stay in the hotel so Western Union found us another place to move. 

We moved into a house and the woman that owned the house was going through everything we had, reading all our mail, into everything.  Fortunately, I had a trunk and I could lock the trunk up so she couldn’t get into it.  Marilis got cooties—what do you call them now?—lice.   She got lice in her hair.   So I was treating her for that and I called the manager down at Western Union and I says, “You gotta find us some other place to go.  We can’t stay here.”  And so they moved us, and some of the girls were leaving and going back home to Texas, and so they moved us in the room that they had at Emory Inn, which was Fatty Arbuckle’s old home and it had three stories on it.  Out in the back it had a garage that been rebuilt and had rooms.  The boys all stayed out in the garage.   That’s where I met Bill.