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Web Site Guide | News | About OWDNA | Neighborhood Info | Photographs of OWD | Media Spotlight | Citizen Resources | Home Depression-era WPA Interviews With Erwin Mill workers A part of our oral history of OWD. The Haithcock Family 945 Case Street West Durham, N. C. Last house still standing on Case Street today (home near Duke School for Children once belonged to Guy and Eula Eubanks) July 7, 1938 Down in Monkey Bottoms in a small four-room house there lives a family of four women, two men, and four children. The house in which they live is typical of the houses in this section of the mill village. Monkey Bottoms begins with a washed-out, hilly road, flanked on one side by closely-placed and disorderly-looking houses and on the other by a jumbled growth of hedge, scrubby trees, and briars. The road leads down into, a bottom and meets at right angles another road of like kind. The houses, of the second road, all located on its right side, maintain the same unlikely appearance. These two roads with their houses comprise Monkey Bottoms. In the particular house already mentioned Haithcocks, Ways, Fosters, and Piners live in dreary confusion. One small room into which two beds are crowded serves in the daytime as a place for tagging tobacco sacks. The little available floor place is littered with strings and tags. Freida Haithcock and Hulda Foster sit in this room hours at a time, both fortified by a generous quantity of snuff, tagging the tiny sacks and dreaming of the day when they will again have a job in the mill. Together they share a tin can spittoon which is obligingly shifted from one to the other as the need arises. Flies swarm thickly about the poorly screened house and hunt out the bread crumbs scattered by the three oldest children. The walls give one the impression that some member of the mixed family has made calendar collecting a pastime. Over the mantelpiece enlarged pictures of departed relatives hang crookedly against the wall. On the mantelpiece, the central feature is a large picture entitled "Christ in Gethsemane Praying." On one side of the picture stands a blue and silver tinselled combination with the words, "Book of Life; Is My Name Written There," and on the other, a simply framed assurance, "Jesus Never Fails." This household grew around four of Perry Haithcocks' daughters, three of whom are now living. Perry, a tenant farmer, was the father of ten children. Their life on the farm was dull and hard and empty of promise. Perry felt that the cotton mill offered his family a slightly better chance than the farm had ever given. He took his ten children to the mill, and as soon as it would have them he put them to work. Of this crowd none went further than the third grade in school. The youngest of the Haithcocks, Clara, is now twenty-five. It fell to her lot after her mother's death to stay at home and keep house. When the time arrived for her to go to work there was no job for her. Now a slovenly and disgruntled person, she stays on with the three of her sisters whom circumstances have kept together. The daughter second to the youngest married Evart Piner and they began housekeeping in Monkey Bottoms. She died at the birth of her first baby, and soon after her death, not quite a year ago, her sister, Effie Way, with her husband and three children came to Evart Piner's house to live. The mill at which they worked had closed with no prospects of reopening in the near future and they hoped to secure work in Durham. After weeks of waiting Effie was given a job and she now makes $16 a week. Her husband Tom has not found work yet and his health is such that it is problematical whether he will ever hold a job again. Kidney trouble, high blood pressure, and asthma, make it necessary for him to go to the doctor two or three times monthly. Effie comes home from the mill tired and irritable and she quarrels with her children so much that they have learned to treat with contempt the threats she makes against them. The fourth sister, Freida, had been living with the Piners before the Ways moved in. Freida has had pneumonia three times and typhoid fever twice. At thirty-six she sits like an old woman, stooped and sallow and wrinkled, as she tags the sacks for which she receives weekly a dollar and a half. Up until a year ago she was a spinner in the mill and drew $15.98 a week. Her health became so bad that she was forced to give up her job. Each time when she goes back now to ask the superintendent to reinstate her he tells her that he is unable to make a place for her. Should he give her work it is doubtful that she could keep it, for she still goes twice a week to Watts Hospital to receive treatment. Evart Piner, the only member of the household except Effie Way who is working, makes fourteen dollars a week. Out of that he pays board to his sisters-in-law for himself and young baby. Besides the three sisters Effie Way, Clara and Freida Haithcock, the two brothers-in-law, Clarence Way and Evart Piner, the three Way children and the Piner baby, there is in the same house Hulda Foster. Hulda was left an orphan at fifteen and she came to live with her neighbors, the Haithcocks. One senses in a little while that to Hulda the household owes whatever semblance of order there may be. At ten she went to work in the Belmont mills and there the rest of her childhood was spent. She tells you how glad she was as a little girl to hear the six o'clock mill whistle in the afternoons because it meant that as soon as she had eaten supper her playtime would begin. The hours from six-thirty until eight-thirty were her own. Tired as she might be from her ten hours of work she was not too tired to join the other children of the neighborhood in their games. As she grew out of childhood there was no form of recreation to take the place of those play hours. The sound of the mill became the one rhythm to which her life was attuned. She says that ever since she has been without a job she has missed the hum of machinery almost as much as she has missed the money with which to buy her food. Hulda lost her job when the Haw River mill closed. She was then living with the Ways and she moved with them to Durham. A good spinner and a hard worker, she had high hopes of securing a job. A year of unemployment has dimmed her hopes somewhat, but hardship has not yet made her bitter. She sits there, unlettered but not unintelligent, tagging tobacco sacks, while with a quiet concentration she prays for the one thing life has not yet given her -- work. Even though Hulda is unable to contribute financially to this confused family, one feels that she gives to it something which keeps it from sinking lower than its present depth. There is quiet humor in her eyes as she says "Yes, we eat beans and potatoes and hardboiled cabbage mostly. Most cotton mill folks is a fool about beans but here in this family they aint one of us that cabbage agrees with." She talks on in an effort to keep you from noticing too much the loud, coarse voice of Effie Way who, in the adjoining room, is quarreling with her children. Effie's wrangling makes the house seem dirtier and more confused than before. Hulda and Freida both look at the tin can spittoon and Hulda oblingingly passes it to Freida. After a while Freida speaks in a sickly, whining voice. "Time was when the mill was always needin' hands and a job was no trouble atall to git." Awed a little by the sound of her own voice she looks at Hulda who nods her head in support. In a manner more decisive than Freida's Hulda reaches her hand for another sack. source: Library of Congress Mary Smith 740 9th Street West Durham, N. C. 740 Ninth Street today (now a Lebanese restaurant). July 15, 1938 It was about two o'clock in the afternoon and Mary was still busy with her dinner dishes. She asked me to come back to her kitchen, and there I met her oldest daughter, Janie, who was with her mother for a two weeks visit. Mary continued washing dishes while Janie, after rinsing them in a pan of hot water, dried them. The kitchen was clean and orderly and the least disturbing of all the rooms in the house in which to sit. I was glad that Mary after finishing with the dishes did not suggest that we go into another room. I had been told that Mary was ill and I expected to find her in bed. When I asked her about her health she replied, "Yes, I'm sick with diabetes most of the time but I try to stay up as much as I can. The doctors at Duke are treating me and I go in twice a week when I'm able. They tell me my body is suffering from the brutish treatment I've give it all my life. If they mean work I reckin I have done as much as the next one." Then Mary told me her story. Mary Smith was born in Orange County fifty-seven years ago. Her father was a renter and he found it difficult to support his eight children on what was left after the landlord was paid. Not that the children didn't lend a helping hand. Mary cannot remember when she did not contribute her quota of work-hours toward her own support. At six she stood up in a chair to wash the dishes and prepare the scanty meals for cooking while her mother labored in the fields. There were then three smaller children who required the time left over from housekeeping duties. As she grew older there seemed no way to make a little time for school. She thinks that reading must indeed be a great pleasure. Many times she has picked up a book and sat with it in her hands wishing that she might know what was inside its pages. When she was eleven the family income was supplemented by group participation in a relatively new industry. Smoking tobacco was gaining in popularity and the manufacturers of the product needed many small bags in which to pack it for distribution. The bag factories which grew up in answer to this need sent the bags out by the thousands into the surrounding countryside to be strung and tagged. During periods of slack in farm work Mary and her young brother walked the five miles into Durham and took back to their home two large sacks, each containing ten thousand small bags. She can remember sitting up all night on occasion during the rush season, each member of the family working as hard as he could to string these sacks for which they received thirty cents a thousand. When sleep laid such a heavy claim on her that she felt she could no longer stand it her mother sent her out on the back porch to dash cold water on her face that she might keep her eyes open yet a little longer. The year she was twelve her skill increased so that she raised the family income by several dollars, and her parents out of appreciation of her industry bought her two percale dresses instead of one. By the time she was fifteen years old her father had decided his family would have a better living at a cotton mill than they could ever make for themselves on another man's farm. They sold the mule and the cow but they kept the twenty-six chickens for a while after moving to town. The nice fresh eggs came in handy because wages weren't so high that such things could be bought in plenty. Mary began work at twenty-five cents a day. Her hours were from six to six but she will tell you that she doesn't believe the twelve hours then were any harder than eight hours now what with the speed-up system they have. Her man Jim comes in clean wore out at the end of a day, but of course she knows he's not a young man any longer. In fact, his working days are almost over because he's not so far from sixty and his body is none too stout. When she married at eighteen she was making four dollars a week and Jim four dollars and a half. If it hadn't been for the installment plan she wonders if they ever could have bought the two beds and stove with which they began housekeeping. Nighttimes Jim made four chairs and a table. With so much furniture in their house they decided to take a couple of boarders to help with the installments still to be paid. The furniture wasn't more than paid for when Mary had to have an operation which cost Jim fifty dollars. That was three momths before her first baby was born and another baby was on its way before the debt was finally paid. Sometimes when her health was too bad to work in the mill Mary took up her old occupation of stringing bags. The wage had increased to fifty cents a thousand and with steady use of her spare time she could do a thousand a day. In the course of time five children were born to Mary Smith and four of them managed to live past babyhood. Mary's last child was born in 1912. It didn't live but three days and the Smiths had to borrow the money to bury it. "That year was one of the hardest in my life," Mary told me that afternoon. "The doctor started comin' to see me in early May and there wasn't a day from then on until the middle of September that he didn't come to our house. As soon as I was out of bed Jim took sick with the typhoid fever and for six solid weeks he wasn't able to work. Two of the younguns took the fever from him. If we couldner got credit we woulder starved. It was many a year before we ever caught up again. We was in such bad shape that the two younguns was forced to go in the mill though I'd hoped to keep 'em out until they'd had a little more chance for schoolin'." The oldest boy entered the mill at twelve and the oldest girl at thirteen. The boy has been there since except for sick leaves in the past few years when he has been bothered with hemorrhages of the lung. He was such a scrawny, pale, little fellow that many a time when Mary went to rouse him on a cold winter morning she felt like turning away from the bed and letting him rest through the day. But she knew he might lose his job, and the money he made was badly needed. Sometimes now she wonders if his health wouldn't have held out better if she could have kept him out of the mill a few years longer until his body had been given more chance to grow. This son married after thirty and he has three children, all too young to work, and a wife whose health is so poor she cannot work. He was brought home from the mill with another hemorrhage the other day and Mary is wondering how she can help him. It seems to her that the fourteen dollars a week Jim is making cannot be stretched over another need. Mary paused at this point in her story and sat with her hands folded in her lap. Janie looked first at her mother and then at me. "If it hadn't been for Mama my younguns wouldner had no clothes atall the past year," she said. "The mill where my husband works aint give its help but four days' work a week in over a year. Tom makes eleven dollars and its all I can do to feed, let along cloths, my crowd on that. "My children is pretty good about not complainin'. They'll set down one day right after another to dried beans and potatoes without raisin' a row. Of course, that oldest one has got all manner of pride and she caused me a sight of trouble for awhile when she had to wear a old coat to school that never fit her nowhere. "The worst hurt I ever seen her, though, was along 'bout the last of school when her teacher tried to collect rent for the school books she'd been usin' all the year. I thought the State was furnishin' 'em free but they say everybody is supposed to pay rent on 'em. Emma Lee kept after me but I never had the money to give her. One day she broke down in school and cried and told her teacher they wasn't a penny at her home to pay for book rent. The teacher told her to stop worryin' then, and she never bothered her any more. Emma Lee says she's not goin' to stop until she goes clear on through high school." Janie's four-year-old child came into the kitchen and propped herself against her grandmother's knee. Mary put her arm about the child and seemed to forget for a while that she was there. "Well, she'll have plenty time to go through high school since the mill can't take 'em until they are sixteen or eighteen, I don't know which," she said. "Of course it's hard to say if things keep on like they are who's goin' to furnish the money. "It's been a funny thing about my own family," she continued. "Pa didn't have a single child that wasn't willin' to work to try to get ahead and they aint a one of us that's got anything today. They aint never been a time when one was havin' trouble that the others was able to help him out of the bog. They's three of us livin' now. One of my brothers whose wife died last year is gettin' just two day's work a week and him with eight children. I don't know how on earth he's livin'. The other brother is makin' $8 a week and he has four children at home. "This is my pet," Mary continued, changing the subject abruptly as she drew the child closer to her. "She come over a week before her Ma did and I never heard a whimper out of her." "Is she the next to the youngest?" I asked, addressing Janie. "No'm, there's two younger than her," Janie answered. "My lap baby is just three months old and the knee baby in yonder room with her is two year old." "Six children and her thirty-three," Mary said. "That's more children than a working man can take care of" I ventured. A queer sort of smile flitted across Janie's face and she lowered her head. Presently she looked up at me and said slowly, "You are right about that." Before I left, all of Janie's children had been in the kitchen. The oldest girl, twelve, looked pale and undernourished. Two of the younger ones played about with a great deal of energy. They would be considered pretty in any average group of children and as I looked across at Janie I wondered how it could be. At thirty-three she is fat, sallow, and unkempt with a look of forty-five at its worst about her face and figure. Good-naturedly she watches her children at play and thinks no further than the next feeding of her small baby. Mary, clean and not unattractive, smiles with patient affection at her daughter and her grandchildren. She has a capacity for thinking ahead that Janie seems not to have. Mary looks back over her past life and can see in it no period in which she might have saved for the days that are ahead. She will tell you that she has on occasion spent a little money for foolish pleasure but she wonders if a person could stand all the ups and downs of life without giving over now and then to foolish things. Occupying a prominent position on her mantel in the front room is a rose-colored goddess edged in green, propping itself against a green scooped-out tray which serves miscellaneous uses. She bought it for herself at the fair about ten years ago and she's still proud of it. In no less conspicuous places in her front room are framed pictures of the Rock of Ages; Jesus, the Savior; and a bordered motto of her missionary society. A good many of her extra quarters have gone through the channel of the church to help the heathen in foreign lands to a better way of life. She faces sixty with assets spent and liabilities yet to be reckoned with. Her chief asset in life has been her capacity for labor and from that, the one material asset she has saved for herself is something like two hundred dollars worth of furniture. The mill can no longer use her and she knows that Jim's days of usefulness are numbered. There has been talk on the hill in recent months about old age benefits. All that Mary understands out of that talk is that when Jim is sixty-five he will begin to draw a little money. She says it isn't reasonable the amount will be enough to keep them both. Actually Jim will draw with interest the 1.5% of his wage saved for him and matched by his employer during his work years beginning with 1936. If his fast-failing health will permit him to serve the mill for two more years he will consider that nothing but luck is carrying him on. He will be sixty-one then with only four more years to go before he starts collecting his old age benefits which with care would last him about six months. Just before I left Mary's house she looked out of her kitchen window and across the hill. For awhile no one spoke and the hum of the mill was the only sound to be heard in the room. When Mary began to talk it was as if she thought that Janie and I, too, must have been thinking with her on the growth of the mill. "Yonder mill want one-tenth the size it is now when I first come here forty-two year ago," she said. "It seems like me and Jim's got old with the mill but age aint hurt the mill none. When it slows down it can git new parts and we caint. What's worse we soon aint goin' to have money to buy rations for feeding our wore-out bodies. The mill keeps makin' money but it has to give to them that's young and strong, I reckon, and even to them it caint give a regular livin'." Mary would like to have a little place of her own on the edge of town where she might raise a garden, and small patches, along with chickens, hogs and a cow -- especially a cow. She knows the country can be hard, bitter hard, because she hasn't forgotten when she was six years old. But then she was working for the other fellow and she believes it would be different if the land and house were hers. Nobody knows better than Mary that such thoughts are but an idle dream. She says that all her life she has known nothing but half-living and she expects no miracle when her days of usefulness are behind her. She does wonder sometimes what kind of a life lies before her children and grandchildren. source: Library of Congress The Dunne Family 1001 Broad Street West Durham, N. C. 1001 Broad Street today (now a music store). July 12, 1938 Sally Dunne is the mother of thirteen children, three of whom are dead and three married. Seven of the children ranging from two and a half to eighteen live with their mother and father in an old, four-room, loosely-built house located a short distance from the houses belonging to the company which owns the mill where John Dunne works. Some of the people in the mill village will tell you that the Dunnes were asked to move off the hill because the near-by neighbors discovered that their coal was disappearing at night; others will tell you that they did not take proper care of the company's house. At any rate the Dunnes cannot rent a company house and they pay $13 a month for the dilapidated one in which they live. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to find a house of any kind because there have been months when the rent was not paid. John Dunne makes fourteen dollars a week and on that the family of nine must live. As you come to the intersection of Broad and C Sts. you will more than likely see Sally's smaller children playing in the little patch of front yard and when you ask them where she is they will answer readily, "Mama, is settin' out on the back porch." One of them runs ahead of you into the house and you walk uneasily through the confusion which is their home. The first two rooms are crowded with dirty beds and a few shabby chairs. The bedroom on the right contains a dusty table and a dustier radio. You look at the dirty floor and your mind is brought back to the fact that the woman who keeps this house is "settin' out on the back porch." You find Sally out there on the small porch surrounded by three of her children who are helping her tag tobacco sacks. Her unwieldy body bulges over the sides of her chair and an enormous tumor gives her the appearance of permanent pregnancy. She tells one of the children to get up and give you his chair. She waits for you to speak and when you have made some introductory remark she says "I keep alookin' toward you but I can't hardly see you. They aint no sight atall in one eye and the sight in the other is gettin' dimmer fast." She speaks of her blindness in a tone of such complete acceptance that you do not know what to say. You look into the dining room at the crude, home-made table with its ugly oilcloth and then at the icebox which is the other piece of furniture in the room. You decide to ask Sally about her work and soon she is telling you that she and the children tag 20,000 of the sacks a week and for it they receive $1.53. "It seems like that money goes further than John's wages," she continues. Sometimes we use it for clothes and now and again we buy somethin' foolish which I reckin we ought to get along without. I buy the "Durham Sun" for the children and it costs 15 a week, but they do love to read the funnies." As Sally goes on to tell you of her early life you decide that even if her eyes were strong the paper she takes for the children would interest her very little as reading matter. She had time to go no further than the third grade, for her public work-life started at ten. Sally was born in Arkansas on a 160 acre farm belonging to her grandfather, Josiah White. As a young man Josiah was a tenant farmer in Durham County and after he was married he moved to Mississippi, hoping to find there such conditions as would give him a chance to become in time a land-owner. Believing, after two years of hard labor, that possibilities of his becoming a land-owner in that State were remote he moved with his wife and one child into Arkansas. No other children were born to him and by the time his daughter, Molly, mother of Sally, was eighteen he had paid for his 160 acre farm and furnished it with live stock. Molly married a neighboring tenant who then came to live with her on her father's place. When he died eight years later he left Molly with Sally and three younger children. It was not long until Josiah died and his widow, after selling the farm and stock for $1,300, returned to North Carolina. Near a bag factory in East Durham Molly's mother bought a four-room house for herself and Molly's family. While the grandmother looked after the three smaller children Molly went into the mill. She took Sally, then an energetic child of ten, along and found work for her at twenty-five cents a day. Molly made around fifty cents daily and on the combined wages of mother and child the family subsisted. Sally had worked a long time before she was sixteen. When she reached that age she felt that life must indeed be half over. Work without any sort of recreation always had been her lot and marriage appeared to offer at least one advantage -- change. Child bearing began immediately and with it even more responsibility and less time for thoughts of recreation. It seems foolish to her today that grown people should want to go to ball games and picture shows. Her dislike of billiard parlors is pronounced but not nearly so much as her fear of liquor stores. Before she has finished with her remarks about liquor stores it is obvious that John goes to the one just down the street a little too often. "If John was to get drunk and get himself arrested the company would fire him," Sally tells you in affirmation of what you are already thinking. She says that she has not forgotten the two months not more than six years ago when John was out of work and there was not so much as a dollar to buy the children food. The mill at which John Dunne then worked was closed suddenly but it took the workmen some time to realize that the shut-down could be permanent. After two weeks John started on a trek through North and South Carolina to look for a job. Sally had gotten up early and made bread from the last dust of flour, and fried the last egg. John looked at the table and turned away. "I aint hungry" he said. "I'll leave what's there for the younguns." Sally sat there alone in the kitchen long after he had gone. She knew John was hungry. She knew, too, that his mind was miserable with doubt. He didn't know whether there was any job ahead of him and he didn't know how his family would get food. Suddenly Sally stops speaking and a smile lights up her ugly face. With an abrupt jesture of her right hand she pushes her hair further up under the bonnet-like cap shading her eyes. Then she says, "We had neighbors close by who was workin' at another mill but my mind wasn't on neighbors that morning John left. I just kept settin' there while the little bit of breakfast got colder and colder. Then all of a sudden I heard a knockin' on the kitchen door. When I opened the door and seen about a dozen folks standin' there with their arms full of groceries I couldn't help but cry. Well, John stayed gone a month and they wasn't a day we didn't have at least one meal. He come back without a job and it was a good month before he got one at another mill in Durham. Them was hard, hard times. I was needin' cover that winter but they wasn't a chance to save ahead for it." You know that any comment you might make would sound trivial. The silence gets deep and is broken only when a young woman you did not know lived here comes out of the house leading her two-year old baby. The child, dressed in a sunsuit, laughs gleefully as her mother puts him out in the yard to play. The woman sits down on a box in the corner of the porch and begins to smoke a cigarette. "That's my daughter Stella," Sally tells you and then adds "Her and her man both is out of work and they're stayin' with us a while." Stella is drawn into the conversation and it is not long before she has told you of the furniture she tried to buy. When she and Bill were first married they selected a bedroom suite, a cedar chest, an upholstered chair, two linoleums, and a big fine oil stove. When she first saw the bedroom suite marked at $39.50, she thought it must really be the greatest bargain in town. When, after the sale was made, the proprietor began adding carrying charges which brought the price up to $61 she was a little baffled, but he explained to her just how easy the payments could be made. The bill for the furniture came to $200 and she and Bill had paid all of it but $80 at the time they lost their jobs. She doesn't see yet why they couldn't let her keep at least the bedroom suite. The subject of furniture is soon passed over and Stella tells you why she lost her job. Stella lost her job when new spinning machinery was installed. The spinners retained were given eight sides instead of seven with a pay increase of two dollars a week. That sum was the regular wage paid heretofore for the operation of one of the old frames. The new Long Draft Machinery has around two hundred spindles and the old spinning frame contained 112 spindles. Stella has a friend still working who says she had never dreamed that eight hours of work could be so hard. Once she was able to catch up with her work and enjoy ten or fifteen-minute rest periods throughout the day, but since the installation of the Long Draft Machinery she stays continuously behind as much as fifteen or twenty minutes. Stella's husband lost out when the doffers were asked to sign a paper stating that they were willing to do more work. Out of the sixteen then employed eight signed and they immediately began doing the work of all. Stella and her husband have been living for the past six weeks on the unemployment insurance which they drew and will continue to draw for ten more weeks if their unemployment continues. They have spent a considerable part of it travelling from mill to mill in hope of finding a job. Stella looks out into the yard where her baby is playing with her young sisters and brothers. "I hope I don't never have another one," she says. "I had a miscarriage from lifting a heavy tub of water when he wasn't more than a year old. I went to the doctor and asked him what a woman could do to keep from havin' babies. I'm tryin' to do what he told me." A child runs through the house and says that he sees his sister, Sue, coming down the street. He leaves the screen door ajar and Stella reprimands him for it though there are plenty of holes through which any fly might find his way inside. Sue with her two children arrive and you are told that she is another of Sally's married daughters. She lives with her husband in the near-by mill village. Her hair-style, voice, and mannerisms show a marked resemblance to Betty Boop. You begin to feel that Sally's prejudice against movies is not shared by her children. Sue's two children, dressed in sunsuits, go out into the yard to play with Stella's baby. The two sisters discuss the amount of milk the doctor has prescribed for their children and indicate by their conversation that they try to meet the requirements. In the meantime you knock at flies. "I declare, I bathe that youngun every night before I put him to bed," Stella is saying "but he does get awful dirty." Sally joins in to say that she dreads Wednesday and Saturday nights because on those two nights all of the smaller children take their bathe and they make a great commotion dragging the tin tub back and forth from the porch to the kitchen where the bathing is done. You look out into the yard at Sally's children and decide that they do appear cleaner than the house to which they belong. Sue mentions her grandmother, Molly, and when you manifest an interest in her Sally tells you that Molly still lives in the small house which she inherited when her mother died. With her are her unmarried son and her divorced daughter, who is the mother of two children. The son is a loom fixer with a weekly wage of $22.00. He not only supports his mother but also contributes toward the support of his youngest sister's family when her wage as part-time worker in a silk mill cannot meet their needs. Molly's fourth child married a tenant farmer and they have no children. After a while you leave the over-crowded house of the Dunnes and as you go along you recall other things that Sally has told you. Into your mind there come certain conclusions as to how she feels toward her own problems. With full awareness that her husband's wage can never cover the needs and can hardly touch the wants of her family, she is on the alert for any donations from the outside. She'd like for some of the older children at home to start working in the mill but since the mill cannot use them and the outside world does not need them she has been brought to the attitude that various organizations will have to help her with her problems. Her children had been attending the Methodist Church for a number of years but the kindness of the Baptist preacher at Christmas time last year converted them to the Baptist way of thinking. Sally says "There wouldner been any Christmas at this house if that man hadn't took a interest in providin' for my younguns. He brought a big goods box of things to us and I ain't never been much happier than when I was unpacking it. They was apples, oranges, candy, nuts, tops, dolls, trains, and little wagons -- plenty to divide amongst them still believing in Santa Claus." The teacher which she likes best is the one who last winter bought her twelve-year old son a pair of shoes after he had been absent from school for three weeks on account of the cold weather. She hopes that by next year the school will furnish free lunches for the children and eliminate her problem of providing three meals a day. If you should manifest any interest in how she manages to provide food for her crowd, her characteristic answer is, "Every head I've got would go hungry if I didn't keep peas aboilin' in the pot all the time." With continual acceptance of unsolved problems Sally has reached a state of lethargy which she does not or cannot disturb. There seems to be no appreciable effort to train her children in the tasks about the house. After the Dunnes have eaten, some of the children will wash the dishes in a hasty and slip-shod manner and then join the rest of the family in one of the two dirty bedrooms where the $12 radio is turned on at full-blast. Some of the children are good looking and as a group appear of average intelligence. With no direction of their energies they play a little, scrap a little, and live from meal to meal while Sally sits among them, usually holding a tobacco sack which she is tagging without being able to see it very well. source: Library of Congress Back to first set of interviews with Erwin Mill workers