Q How old are you ?

A I am 86 years old.

Q What did your parents do for a living?

A My dad worked on a drilling rig and my mother was homebody.

Q Did you have to work when you were younger?

A Yes, if you could find work but work was scarce, real scarce.

Q Do you remember anything about the depression?

A Yes, I remember everything. A loaf of bread was a nickel, two pounds of hamburger for a quarter. If you made $100.00 a month, you were really in the top notch. There was no welfare, and if you didn’t have a job, well, you went hungry. So many things were bad. None of it was good. If you spent $12.00 a month on groceries, you were really in the top notch. There was a lot of grocery stores that aren’t here now. On Saturday night no one went anywhere. A lot of people didn’t have cars, and if you did, it would have a flat tire before you got out of town. The roads were unpaved and the monument that is in front of the court house now used to be where the traffic light is now. No one had electricity, most people used gas and had gas lights. There was no indoor bathrooms, you had to go outside and it was like that at the school too.

Q Do you recall any major fires or floods?

A  In the 1920s the middle section of town burned out. There wouldn’t be any floods in there because they're in town, but the south part of town would flood.

Q Do you remember your first car?

A Yes it was a 1929 model A Ford .  I had several used cars after that but none of them were new. I never bought a new car until after World War II.

Q Do you remember anyone else’s car and how fast it went?

A  Well, a car back in those days were either Model A's or Model C’s. If you went 50 miles per hour you were really flying.

Q What war were you in?

A  I was in the South Pacific. I had brothers and brothers-in-law in the war with me.

 Q What was it like after the war?

A. Well, I gave the president a lot of credit. He helped get the soldiers jobs and homes.

Q Do you have any stories you want to tell us?

A I used to drive an old doctor around and we had a call down in Radcliff and it had rained really hard the night before and the water was up. We came to a bridge made of planks and they had traffic stopped.  So the doctor got out to see what was going on and they yelled over at me and said, "Bring it on over."  The doctor walked over and I drove over.

A. Another time I had to take him to Chillicothe and he had medicine bottles full of moonshine in the pockets of the door and he kept sampling it on the way over and by the time we got there he was pretty well loaded. On the way back he would yell and say I was either going too fast or he would yell and say I going too slow. By the time we got back to McArthur he was passed out so I got his office girl and we stretched him out on the couch in his office and called his wife and told her he was resting. He was resting alright. He ended up shooting himself.

A. I went through high school and played on the football team. Now days there are two football squads. We didn’t have anything like that. We had to play the whole game. We had to buy our own shoes and uniforms because the school didn’t supply them. One day we were playing a game and I had the ball running - the ball - and there were two guys coming at me and instead of hitting me they hit each other and knocked one of the guys out. They took him to the doctor and the doctor had a friend in town that was a undertaker and when that guy woke up, he thought that they was embalming him.

Q When did you move into your own home?

A  In1942.

Q How many children do you have?

A  I have one son.