I had a brother named Joseph Marshall.  He and I got along all right but we were never real close until later in life.  He went his way and I went mine.  He had friends and he and the boys didn’t want the girls hanging after them so we went the other way.

There was a family that lived right back of us who had six children.  There were two boys that were the youngest ones and four girls which were about my age.  After I got to where I could run away when I wanted, I’d go over to their place and stay as much as I could. 

We just played outside as kids.  After my Father remarried, he came and picked me up at my aunt’s and took me back to Garner.  I wasn’t too happy because his new wife was a very strict person.  I had to toe the line, and it just wasn’t as pleasant as staying with my aunt and my best friend in South Carolina.   I didn’t get to go back to South Carolina until I got to be fourteen years old.  My Father let me get on the bus and go by myself down there for a visit.   I had to change buses one time and it was very exciting but I made it.  Cleo and I got along so great.  She had friends there that we shared and it was just like going back home.  We got along really well and she gave me parties.  I met young boys there and she married one of them.  I also met the brother of the one she married.  We had a lot of fun at that age.  One day, we walked all the way to Tryon, which was four miles away along the highway.

It was 1935 so it was right after the Crash.  This was during the Depression.  Every year thereafter, I’d go back down to Landrum to visit Cleo and we just would have a great time. They’d let me stay about a month every summer.  During that time, we went to Pameco Beach, which was down on Pameco River about five miles from the Sound.  I had a great time there because we could run anywhere we wanted to. They didn’t say, “Stay at home” or “You can’t go” and you didn’t have to get permission.   We just took off and went to where we found there was vacationing down there.  A lot of the people were from Aurora, North Carolina, which is where my stepmother was from.   It made it nice because she didn’t figure we could get into trouble there. We would go out on the pier and crab, and we would ride in the boats of people that actually lived in that section of the country and had boats on the river.   We’d get in them and get rides and it was a lot of fun.

To go crabbing, we would take a string with a fish head and hang it over the end of the pier, and when a crab came along we’d take a net and catch him. And that’s the way we got our dinner a couple times during the weeks that we were there. We caught enough crabs that we had enough to eat. And then from there we would go over to the Aurora side of the river and we’d go to Evan Trip’s home, who was my stepmother’s uncle.  They would let me stay there for a couple of weeks to visit with them. We could go swimming in the river there, but the river was only three miles wide at that point. At Pameco Beach it was seven miles wide.  It was a lot of fun growing up during the Depression because we didn’t have any money to spend. We had fun with things you had around you.   They had a great big—I don’t know what you’d call it—a great big thing that had grapevines that covered a big area, an arbor. So we had scuppernong grapes any time we wanted to go out and get them.

Father had a dog called Sambo and then my stepmother raised Persian cats.  At one time, we had thirty-seven of them there.  I used to have a playhouse out in the back of the house and they’d close the playhouse up and use it for a cat house.  They built a yard on the side of it and she was raising cats for sale.  I had one that I dearly loved and evidently loved me, and one night my father sent me across the highway to take a pair of shoes to get them half-soled. In that day during the Depression, you didn’t go down and buy shoes like everybody else.  I took them over to the house across the way and not knowing my cat was following me.   She got lost and I called and I called and I looked and I looked.   A couple of weeks later, I was walking home from school on the railroad tracks and I found her head in one spot, her feet in another one, her body in another one, and her tail in another spot.  I’ve never really cared for cats since then.  It just broke my heart.  We always had cats around back then.

There was a vacant lot next to our house, and everybody in the neighborhood would go over there and play baseball.  Even the grownups would get out and play with us.  We would play kick the can. You’d have a can and you’d kick it as far as you could, and everybody would go hide and then when you got the can and brought it back then you had to find the people. That was one of the games we used to play. I can’t think of any of the others. Though we had a crowd of young kids there so we always had a lot to play. Well, we played cards too, but that was when we got older.