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Monday, January 9, 2012

1940's memories

I was an only child when I was a kid. We moved a lot. Daddy was a Georgia highway engineer so we moved to be near the road job. The three of us and all our stuff fit into our two-door 1939 Chevy. We lived in boarding houses or small furnished apartments.  We never had books or many toys, or a washing machine. Mama never learned to do laundry, anyway, or cook. She would have loved TV dinners. She would find us a cook and wash lady first thing in each new town.
When World War II came, we went to live with my grandmother in Sparta. She subscribed to "The Confederate Veteran." My other grandmother lived in Dublin  so we could visit. she had turkeys and chickens in the yard. Most of my cousins moved in nearby with their relatives when all our daddies went to war. It was a fun time, shooting down enemies and watching for foreign planes. We would catch a ride to town on the ox cart the vegetable man drove.
After the war we moved to Jacksonville Beach,Florida, and lived in nicer furnished apartments. The beach was our back yard. My sister Susan was born with serious birth defects. They patched her up and she thrived. We still moved a lot, but still in the neighborhood, so I got to stay in one school, Fletcher, from grades 7 through 12. I had already been in 5 or 6 schools.
Daddy died of a heart attack when I was twelve. He taught me to drive before he died. That was a good thing, because Mama was kind of a mess, and I could run errands. The Chief of Police, Jimmy Jarboe, knew I was too young to drive, but he would just tell me to be careful. He was actually the only police, and he was loved. 

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