Interviewer: When were you born ?

Dollie: November the 12^th, 1926.

Interviewer: That would make you exactly how old?

Dollie: I haven't had a birthday this year so I'm still 71. I'll be 72 next month.

Interviewer: Have you lived in Vinton County all your life?

Dollie: No.

Interviewer: Where did you live before that?

Dollie: All over the country.

Interviewer: Did you travel a lot?

Dollie: A lot

Interviewer: What countries have you been to?

Dollie: Well, I've been to Mexico and I've been to Canada. Of course, Alaska. Those are the main ones.

Interviewer: Were you in any wars or important events in history?

Dollie: World War II. In the beginnin' I thought I wanted to be really in the war. So I signed up - I lied about my age - and I signed up. I wanted to be a WAC, so they sent me to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. And when I got there, they laughed and told me - they said, "You'll have breakfast in bed, now." And I believed them because, see I was still real young. And I didn't get breakfast in bed. The next morning, way before daylight, they was bangin' and yellin' and screechin' for everybody to get up and to get dressed and make up your bunk. And then you had to go to a big old hall where they fed ya. But when you went in that door, they had big old heavy trays there. And there was someone standin' there saying, "Get a tray - Get a tray!" And when you started walkin' with that tray, someone behind - they was servin' things like cafeteria-style. And here these people behind there, they'd grab spoonfuls of stuff out of these big containers and throw them onto that tray. And I didn't know any better. I didn't get my tray past 'em, and when I got done, I had a tray full of stuff. And I was ordered to eat it. And you know me, I don't eat breakfast, but I had to eat it. I was sick for two days and on the third day, they caught up with me and found out I was only sixteen years old. They bought me a ticket on the train and sent me back home.

Interviewer: What exactly is a WAC?

Dollie: That's the Army Corps of Women. I wasn't really there long enough to learn a whole lot about it. I just wanted to be in the service. I thought, boy, I can go and do something big. Everybody was patriotic at that time.

Interviewer: Were you married?

Dollie: At that time? No, I hadn't even graduated from high school yet. I had all my credits and I got to go back in 1944 and graduate with the class that I should be graduating with.

Interviewer: Do you remember anything from the Great Depression?

Dollie: I can't remember anything bad on my part. The only thing that I can remember bad about it was my grandparents. They had full and plenty at that time and so did my family. But there was so many people that didn't have. And they would make sure every day - especially where they had little children in the house - they would make sure that either the help that worked for them or their grandchildren or someone would take milk to these families and take enough food for a day. And that's about all we could carry. And if the people lived, say four or five miles away, they would put the food in a buggy - take it in a buggy. Or if they had to go very far and take food to very many families, they would load a wagon down and take the wagon full of food to families.

Interviewer: Did you meet any important people in your life such as presidents or senators?

Dollie: Oh yeah, in my own family I've had senators. I believe that I've got a cousin right now that's a United States Senator. His name would be Joseph McDade. Now I haven't heard from him for quite a while, but the last that I heard was that he was a United States Senator.

Interviewer: Did you ever get to chaperone anybody really important?

Dollie: I surely did.

Interviewer: Can you tell us who that was?

Dollie: That was Eleanor Roosevelt. She was one of the loveliest ladies I ever met.

Interviewer: Do you remember any major hardships under World War II?

Dollie: Not mine. I didn't have many. But during World War II, the people here in this country, they couldn't get sugar without sugar stamps. They couldn't but shoes without shoe stamps. Meat was hard to come by. Tires for your automobile - it was almost impossible to buy them unless you worked in a government job. If you was workin' for the government, then they tried to make sure you had old tires that you could patch up and get to your job with. But I was always lucky. I always had plenty of those things because I had a good job. And some people didn't have enough money. And they'd say, you buy me so and so like maybe a sack of coffee - you know that you would grind - I'll give the food stamps to you to get something. You know, like a sugar stamp or something. They had the stamps but they didn't have the money to buy with. So I made out and they made out.

Interviewer: Did you enjoy your life as a kid although you had to go through The Depression?

Dollie: Oh, absolutely. I had a wonderful childhood. The only thing I ever really was - I had to work because now my family believed in working. Most of the time, my grandfather had a big agricultural farm which now the state owns those things. But back then, they was private-owned. And they raised everything on that farm - anything almost imaginable you could think of. And I had to go out and help work in all the fields. I had to work in the gardens, in the cornfields, in hayfields. And even though I was sick, when I had good days I still had to go out and work because my grandparents believed that all children should learn to work. It didn't make no difference. If you had money - you wouldn't of had that money if someone hadn't of worked for it. That's the way they looked about that. The only thing that I ever hated to do - that I was made to do - was wash dishes. I was never allowed to cook, so I grew up not knowing how to cook, but I had to wash dishes. And I hated that.

Interviewer: At the end of The Depression were you happy or were you just normal as ever?

Dollie: Oh no, I think the whole United States was happy. People got together after The Depression was over with, they would have parties. They would have what they called taffy-pulls. The would have - like my grandparents - they would cook big suppers and invite people in for parties. Of course most of those parties would be outdoors. They'd even have a party to make popcorn balls. That was gettin' everybody together and you would always have - some clergy would be there to talk to people. And at that time, clergy visited homes. I remember we would have some clergy at our house twice a week for dinner. And sometimes I'd say, "Why do we always have to have 'em?" And my grandfather would say, "We don't go to their church, but they're good people. They're trying to make everybody see good things in life instead of bad things in life and they're welcomed at my table." He had all denominations and back when I was a little girl, Jews was distrusted so much. And my grandfather said you don't distrust Jews, they're some of the nicest people you'll ever meet. So we had Jews in our house. We had Catholics in our house. We had black people in our house because black people worked for us, but my family never owned slaves. They bought slaves, but they never owned slaves. Now, this was back before my time. I used to have the books of when the black people was bought and practically all of them was bought by a family of them.. Like if there was the man, the wife, and they had children - they was bought together. And after, they would be - on both sides of my family - that would be on my mother's side on her father's side and her mother's side - they had made a pact between them that they would keep the slaves, but after sixty days - they would get their freedom. If they weren't mean, if they was good and I only can remember reading in that one journal that one black woman was really mean. She tried to kill - it would have been my great-great aunt, I believe at that time - with a butcher knife in the kitchen. But they still gave her her freedom after so long a time. But I believe it went into several months.

Interviewer: When you drove for Eleanor Roosevelt, was that in the three-day period when you joined the WACs?

Dollie: No honey, the WACs came the very first thing. That was before I ever went to work for the government. That's when they told me that I could leave school, that I had all my credits. And they said you can leave school and if you need to get a job - where you can find a job - they'll let you work this job. So the first thing I did, I went to Columbus and I signed up and got on a train. And I went to Georgia. And I didn't tell my mother, she thought I was in Columbus looking for a job. See, I storied, which I shouldn't have done. I did that twice in my life and got caught both times.

Interviewer: What did you do for fun when you were growing up?

Dollie: Oh my, well the first thing I can remember was our - not as a wee little child - but when I got big enough to ride a bicycle, we had bicycles. Would you like to know what they looked like? They had the little wheels and a great big wheel and the seat was way up high. And I was never a bike rider. I would get on it and I would lean over too far, even if it did have two wheels on the back, I would fall off. So finally I was told not to bother the bicycles anymore unless my grandfather was goin' along with me. But then, the children would get out in the yards and they would play hide-and-seek. And the boys had a game that they played called mumbletypeg. Do you know what that is? They played it with a knife. All boys carried a pocketknife at that time. And they would open that knife two blades, I believe, up and then they had a circle drawed around and they would flip that knife. Now they didn't flip it where it was going to hurt anybody. And where it landed, I can't remember exactly how the game worked, but anyhow this knife had to be a part of it. And they played marbles. The one that had the biggest tiles - I think they called them that at that time. You know they'd be a great big one. Or maybe if - my grandfather was real good about saying, "Let's put a little sport in this game." And he would go in his bedroom and he'd come out with a beautiful big marble. And he'd say, "This belongs to the winner." Everybody really worked to win that.

Interviewer: Did you know anyone who worked in a coal mine in Ohio or any other state?

Dollie: Anyone close to me, or just anybody? Now I've met people since I lived here in Ohio. In fact, [gestures to interviewer] his father worked in a coalmine. One time my father, after he and my mother divorced, he wanted to be a rounder. And he had an uncle that owned a coalmine. So this uncle told him that he would give him a job of - I don't remember now what the title would be - but it would be makin' sure the coal was sold - you know, when it would come up in cars, I guess, from under the ground. But that didn't last very long. That was just when he was trying to get back together with my mother - which he didn't accomplish , thank God. But no, to really grow up around a coalminer, no. We bought coal because we used coal back then. And I was lucky enough to live in a house - before there was electricity put in the area that I live in - that we had a system called carbide. Did you ever hear of a carbide system? It was - they had big tanks. I mean great big tanks that was buried under the ground. In fact, this was buried out in the back behind the kitchen. And it had - well, I call them tubes runnin' to lights. You could even heat an iron - use an iron off of that. But it worked like gas works today, if we had gas then - which there was no natural gas through the area at that time.

Interviewer: Do you have any brothers or sisters?

Dollie: I have one sister. I had a brother, he's dead. He committed suicide when he was forty-five years old. He was a smart - he was too smart. He worked for Pepper. Do you remember someone in Congress or a senator named Pepper? He worked for him in Florida. He went to college twelve years. And he was just too smart to settle down to any one thing. But his mother always kept him pretty stable as long as she lived. And when she died, he couldn't make it on his own, even though he was married and had a wonderful little son. He committed suicide.

Interviewer: Do you believe in teaching children about oral history?

Dollie: Oh absolutely. Because you don't realize it when you're younger, but after you get older you have such wonderful memories and things that you lived through, things that you know about. And you read it in a paper then or you had a grandfather who fixed up an old radio and you had crank phones on your wall at that time. And he had one crank phone on one wall and another one on another one. One went into a little town and the other one went out into the country. And the only way those people had telephones was for my grandfather to get them together to help him. He had eighteen thousand acres of timber at that time. And he would take them out into the woods and he would mark trees for them to cut for the poles. You know, you had to put the wires on. And then he told them they had to help dig the holes to put the poles in. And he bought all the wire for them. And he even ended up buying a lot of telephones for them. But he wanted - he had a blind mother that lived a few miles away from him. And she lived alone; she wouldn't let anyone take care of her. And he wanted her to have a telephone. So he talked all these people into helpin' -if he bought most of the stuff - help him do the work which most of them wasn't doin' anything anyhow. They was just settin' around waitin' for Mr. Herdman to send them something to eat. So that is what I got against people and welfare. If they belong on welfare; if there's anything wrong with 'em - fine. Don't just give them a little old bit to live on; give them enough to live on good. But the ones that’s able to work, let them get out and work. There's plenty of work in this country. And a person doesn't have to live right in the town that they was born and raised in. If they can't make a livin' in that town, let them go out and hunt them another town where they can go out and make a living. And there's also something else that people should do. They should teach their children that they should vote. They should insist on the business people in their communities to try to do things to better their town instead of getting little cliques. You get a half a dozen families in a town that got the money and they don't want another - whatever they got - they don't want another competitor to come into that town. That is not right. The business people in a town should work to better the town or a little village or whatever it is. But in Vinton County they don't do it. There's no one that I know of that works for the people of Vinton County.

Interviewer: Do you remember the first time television was invented?

Dollie: Yes, but I can't remember what year it was. It seems like to me that - I can remember the first time that my grandfather laid the newspaper on my lap and he says, "Now you read this." He says, "This is something that's going to be big in your future." And I says, "Hmm, it's not going to help me any." And he said, "I told you don't be that way. You start followin' this and see, if in your lifetime, if this isn't a big thing." And then he said, "Think back - who told you to keep up with it?" I'd forgot that for a long time.

Interviewer: Would you do an interview for more kids - some other day - next year, I guess?

Dollie: I can help out if it will help them - will help them with their grades - and if I don't make a fool out of myself. Sure, I will. I love to help children, school children. Now I'll tell you I got one little thing. No, I better not say this on that [gestures toward the videocamera]. My mother was a schoolteacher. She made fifteen dollars a month when she taught school. And she couldn't stand to be a schoolteacher so she went to her dad and said, "Dad, I don't want to be a schoolteacher. Them little kids drive me crazy." This I can prove by Andy, that they drive me crazy too. I love them, but I think they ought to have to set down and set still. Don't I, Andy? I really do. Now I don't mean to confine 'em all the time. And I don't believe in puttin' them outdoors and lockin' the doors and making them stay out in the yard all day either. But I think they should have a room set aside in a home where adults can be free from them. They can go to a playroom and play, and they don't have to be in your face all day.

Interviewer: Do you remember when the Vinton County High School was built here?

Dollie: I don't know what year it was built. See I don't - Vinton County, I don't know that much about. It's probably one of the only places I've ever lived in my life that I didn't know what was going on it -where I lived.

Interviewer: Do you remember the radio?

Dollie: Oh absolutely, honey. I grew up with radio.

Interviewer: What was it like?

Dollie: Wonderful! Only I didn't like comedians. That was another thing I didn't like. I always liked to hear Franklin Roosevelt. He used to have "Fireside Chats." And we always listened to those. And I was raised a Republican and my grandfather said it doesn't make any difference what your politics are, there is smart men in both parties. So don't ever be so fickle that you going to vote a straight ticket and leave some good man out that could help you or your community. I had a smart grandfather.

Interviewer: That's all the questions. Did you enjoy this interview? Is there anything you would like to say that we forgot to ask?

Dollie: No, but I do want to say this - I want to thank you both - sorry, all three of you. And I'm especially proud of my grandson for calling me because I'm sure he called me with the knowledge that his grandmother was going to help him. I believe that is why he called me. I would help him with anything I could. I'm only sorry that my mind is not better today then I could remember a lot of wonderful things that been in my past. But I've had a lot of strokes and I'm sorry my face looks like it does. But if you have a few strokes, they get that way. And I hope you come back sometime for a visit.

Interviewer: We really enjoyed this interview and thanks a lot for the information about the past.