>> So let's see. Today is January 29th, 2018.
My name is Adina Langer,
and I'm the curator of the Museum of History and
Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University,
and I'm here at the Sturgis Library with Jean Owsley.
First of all, do you agree to this interview?
>> Yes. Absolutely.
>> Could you please state your full name?
>> Interesting because I told you I'm Jean,
remember my story is that
Gloria Jean was named
because my grandmother wanted my name to be Gloria.
But then I think my mother was
trying to exert her independence.
And she never called me Gloria.
So Gloria Jean Spriggs Owsley.
>> And what's your birthday?
>> April 22nd, 1945.
>> And where were you born?
>> I was born in Gainesville in
the Hall County Hospital. Gainesville, Georgia.
>> So before we talk more about your childhood,
I'd like to go back a bit
further and talk about your parents.
What were your parents' names?
>> My father was Samuel Eldo Spriggs.
The middle name kind of unusual.
From basically Gwinnett County, Georgia.
I guess, I haven't even thought about.
I guess he was born in Gainesville.
My mother, Laura Bell Millikan Spriggs
was born in Bogart,
Georgia, which is in Oconee County.
>> And when was she born?
>> June 22, 1922.
When I said 22nd,
I went back to my birthday there.
>> Sure. So 1922 and Oconee County.
And do you know the name of the town where she was born?
>> Actually, I discovered looking at
her birth certificate again
this morning that it was Bogart.
I had thought that she was
born and they lived in High Shoals,
which is another booming metropolis.
I think Bogart these days is a service station and
a little community center, a concrete block,
and High Shoals is
basically devoid of commercial activity,
so they're both tiny towns.
>> Do you know what they
were like when she was growing up there?
>> The High Shoals area we do
because we've been there so often.
My great grandparents are
also buried there in High Shoals Baptist Church,
High Shoals Methodist Church,
across the street from each other.
And it was a big deal from mother and
her older sibling, Mary,
to travel back to High Shoals just
to drive around so we could drive,
that was a big pastime in
the '50s and '60s driving around.
And so I do know a lot about the town itself.
The mill was at the shoal, which is, of course,
a high almost waterfall effect, textile cotton mill.
Don't know when it burned
because I haven't looked that up,
but I do know that my grandfather worked there,
her father, until it burned.
Now with all the dams
and the straightening out of the river,
it's not really impressive.
You would think, how could they built a textile mill with
this fairly small source of water?
But when I was a kid,
we would go there and slide down the rocks.
It was so cool, just a really neat big flat rocks
where you would go down and land and go down another
one, very high, actually.
So I know exactly where they lived in High Shoals,
a couple of places they lived and or stayed.
But I don't know exactly when they moved to
Gwinnett and that's where she met my father.
So sometime in the late '30s, I guess.
>> So you mentioned that your grandfather worked at
the mill and that's what most folks did there.
Were they a poor family?
>> Absolutely. I think I had also mentioned to you,
they never owned a house until my father built them one,
which was just a little house.
In the maybe late '50s, early '60s.
They always rented.
I guess you would call him an itinerant laborer.
He worked on other people's houses sometime
, farm sometime,.
But since they didn't own a house or any land,
couldn't grow cotton or big crops of corn or whatever.
I think it was mostly subsistence farming,
if anything, garden out back, that stuff.
There's a story in the family and that to
me is a symbol of,
I don't want to say poverty, there are actually
two of them and they were very poor.
But there's one story that they did not
have enough money to become
vaccinated when they were kids.
And that was when, of course,
measles and mumps and all those vaccine and polio,
of course, polio was a little later.
But measles and mumps and those vaccines were coming in.
And there was a lady in the town.
We were talking about charity earlier.
One of the wives of the social pillars of
the community who picked up
poor children and took
them to the local health department.
They had no car. She picked them up and
took them there to be vaccinated,
which I thought was cool.
And then later on, I learned this story.
I mentioned the older sister, Mary.
My mother was apparently the sharpest of the group.
She's very intelligent woman,
and I can see how this would have happened.
But they only had one or two good dresses between
them and they would send
mother to school more often than aunt Mary.
Which is fairly sad.
But they rotated clothes.
>> They rotated clothes. And so how big was their family?
>> They had five children.
But the two boys were born quite a bit later.
In fact, my uncle, who's still alive was born in '30.
So he was by far younger than aunt Mary,
who's been dead a while. So five kids.
>> And you mentioned that
they would rotate clothes and go to school,
what was your mother's schooling like?
>> I have not seen the schoolhouse she
attended in High Shoals
because as we used to say in the country,
it fell in, not there.
But it's up behind
the High Shoals Baptist Cemetery way into the woods now,
but I imagine they had a dirt road to get up there.
Then later on they went to a little school
called, oh darn,
I've forgotten Good Hope maybe,
which is a little community and there's still
a store there just down the way from High Shoals.
And it's one of those '40s,
'50s low elementary school,
the way all of our elementary and high schools
in Georgia looked at that point.
It's also not in very good shape,
hasn't been used as a school
for years. So she went there.
Then when they moved to Gwinnett,
she went to Sawnee Elementary
and graduated from the 11th grade.
They did not have a senior year.
>> So this Sawnee High School went up to the 11th grade?
>> And later I attended it.
In fact, I went there and graduated from
the eighth grade because by then they
had established a high school.
And so Sawnee was only up to
what would be middle school at this point, I guess.
So I graduated from the same school my mom did,
which is pretty good in these days.
>> And did your mother
work at all while she was still in high school?
>> Not that I'm aware of.
I don't think there would have been many places to work.
They lived in Hog Mountain.
You probably know where that is,
but in those days, it probably
was a wide spot in the road.
They lived in Braselton, same thing.
There was that Braselton Brothers General Store,
but even where we lived in the country when I grew up,
there were miles and miles of dirt roads and no stores.
So unless you could get a job in Lawrenceville or
Buford working in the five-and-dime I guess.
There weren't part time jobs.
I sense there weren't temporary,
people probably worked in the stores 30,
40 years, and they didn't have room for teenagers.
>> So after she graduated,
then did she start doing some work?
>> She worked at a shoe plant in Lawrenceville,
which I've since learned was called
Genesco General Shoe Company.
It's gone now, replaced,
I think by a lumber store.
So I know she worked there and there
were some rooming situations going
on even before the war so that
people were taking in rumors
maybe because of the depression.
But instead of living out in the country,
she moved into Lawrenceville near
General Shoe and roomed with
someone so that she wouldn't have to drive because again,
there was no car.
>> And given how poor your family was and everybody was,
was there a sense that the depression
made a huge difference?
>> Well, of course, I was born in '45.
So I heard them talk about it.
I can't tell you what big Democrats they
were and what big supporters of Mr. Roosevelt.
They all thought he was god.
So I sense that pulling them out of the depression,
whether they were poor or not,
was a big deal.
And of course, you know the South was totally
Democratic for so many years.
But yes, they absolutely thought he was incredible.
So I had the feeling
that it was worse in
other places because we lived on the farm.
And we could go get a pig,
which we did and kill it, or grow the corn.
We had corn and cotton fields when I was a kid.
So I think it probably didn't impact them except to
the extent my grandfather was working in these mills,
and they probably weren't hiring
as many people in the depression.
I know he did. I didn't mention this.
At one point he had to walk from
High Shoals to Watkinsville to work.
And it's 10 miles, twice a day.
So probably because the High Shoals mill was gone,
and as I said, there weren't many places to work.
So yeah.
>> He must have to get up at 3:00 AM.
>> I know. Impossible.
But they did it.
And I know it's the old story of
going to school uphill both ways.
Maybe over the years,
it might have been embellished,
but we do know that he did have to walk to the mill.
>> So when did your mother meet your father?
>> Again, I'm guessing about this.
You should ask more questions.
But I believe that sometime in the late '30s,
they both ended up in
either Jackson County or Gwinnett County.
And I say Jackson because,
in fact, this is odd,
both sets of my great grandparents are
buried in the same cemetery
and you don't find that real often.
So that's my father's relatives and
my father's father's family
and my father's mother's family.
So I know they lived in Jackson County.
And then I've heard stories that mother lived in a town,
I think it was called Victorian,
which is also Jackson.
But I also know that Barrow and
Gwinnett were switching places.
They were re drawing lines in those days,
and so there's a part of Barrow
that might have at one point been in Jackson.
All I know is they were in the same vicinity.
Mother went to a school called Thompson Mill,
which I know is in
Jackson County because Thompson Mill
is still there, not the school.
Again, it burned, they all burned.
But I know that she did go
to later elementary school in that area.
So that would have been where they met.
>> So they met before high school even?
>> I think or perhaps during.
I never got the sense they were long term sweethearts,
as in it was all of high school.
I think they met, they went to some movies,
they liked each other.
Why am I saying some movies?
Probably one movie every six months,
[LAUGHTER] but a movie.
Again, when we go to church events, I'm sure.
>> So they went to the Baptist Church?
>> Methodist, I think, all along.
I had ancestors in Dawsonville,
in fact, for years.
It's a strong Baptist element in my family.
But my parents were Methodist,
and I've never figured out where that started.
>> So did your mother share
any early memories of
their courtship or their relationship with each other?
>> Not much. And here's a really sad thing.
I had actually some memories from her,
how even those things can fade,
that I decided to write up in a little story.
And I think I write okay.
So I was writing this little thing,
I was going to call it between
the two wars or something very exciting.
Wrote up what she told me about
their courtship and the early years,
and it has been lost.
It was thrown away when we moved at some point.
So there's some details of that I didn't really get,
but I can think that they didn't have a vehicle.
And so their courtship would have been probably
based around walking to church and going on picnics.
And I'd have to say my courtship of
my teenage boyfriends was
almost that except we had a car.
Times didn't change much in
those 20 years in Gwinnett County.
>> So what was your father's family like?
>> Very strict upbringing Baptist.
They actually founded a school where Vogel State Park is,
and so there's a road between Vogel and Sir Walter Scott.
What is that called? This is something Scott state.
There are two state parks there between Scott and Vogel,
and they founded a school called Spriggs Chapel,
which was on land donated by the local Baptist minister.
And I'm talking when you go there now,
you're on Forest Service Road 35,
the bottom of the cars coming out, that sort of thing.
It was not a real civilized area at that point.
But that family,
obviously, I think wealthier, for one thing.
They came from South Carolina and did
gold and copper mining in
the area where the Cherokees had been unfortunately,
and we're talking 1845.
So they were probably there during the trail of tears.
Probably, I know they got land in the lottery,
and that's where it came from.
So their family would have had more money,
at least in the background,
but the Civil War had come
along and nobody had any money.
So they became, I would say,
probably about as poor and hard
scrabble as my mother's family were.
But again, very straight laced, I'd have to say.
My grandmother didn't want me to
wear shorts, for example.
I was 10 years old [LAUGHTER] and I wasn't supposed to
wear shorts because it was a sin so
>> So when did your parents decide to get married then?
>> Well, they married in '40.
So she would have been 18,
which is maybe even a little old for that time period.
But December 25th,
as I said there was a strong
Baptist connection in the family,
so they were married by my uncle who
was a Baptist minister at Mulberry Church,
which is where the great grandparents are
buried in his house.
And my feeling is that they probably rented
a little place between
then and the time my father went to the war.
So maybe lived with my grandparents,
that I'm not sure about,
but I think they probably rented something.
And my father built houses all over the land there,
but I don't know of a house that
they occupied at that time.
They all seemed to be
later after he came back from the war.
>> Did they have a sense that there might be a war
around the corner in 1940?
>> I don't know that for sure.
I have some information about my uncle,
for example, not being
equipped for the war because he had flat feet.
And so he got a deferment.
I had an uncle who had polio
from a very early age. So he didn't go.
And so in that immediate side of the family,
my father was actually the only one who went to the war.
That's really about all I know about their background.
He had a sister who had,
I would say, three or four sons.
In some families, there were
three or four people who were killed in families.
It didn't happen often, but it could.
So three or four sons, in fact,
one of her sons
was in the original Merrill's Marauders group,
my son has discovered in his research.
So no, I don't know about that.
And as I said, I was born when he was overseas.
So didn't really experience it.
And all I remember is mother just
being very self sufficient
with everything around the house.
She fed the chickens,
and I'm talking at one point we had 12,000.
These were not yard chickens,
they were in big houses.
She did that when he went to work when I was older.
Obviously it affected her knowing where he was,
but I'm sure she just got on with things.
>> Did you have a sense for what their hopes and
dreams were for the future when they first got married?
>> Well, my father was, again,
coming from that Baptist and stern background,
quite a pragmatist, very, very hard worker.
But I have the feeling
that having a child meant a lot to him,
and of course, I was the oldest child.
Just from the way he treated me my entire life,
I know they wanted things to be better for us,
better for all the siblings.
And I just had the feeling that he was
extremely proud of us, always.
I know they wanted a house and they got a little house,
didn't want to live with the grandparents forever.
But I've always said there's
a lot of hard working ethic in our family.
It's carried on,
my sons would say, unfortunately,
I passed it down to them,
which is probably true because they work all the time.
They're still good family people,
but they're really hard workers.
And I just get the sense that
they were just going to try.
My father had hogs,
he had 12,000 chickens.
We had an orchard.
I remember him going to
the county extension agent to
learn how to do his farm better,
to learn how to be a better farmer.
And this is from a guy,
which I didn't mention earlier,
he only had a seventh grade education.
If that, we have
always thought it might not have even been
seventh grade because he left to help
my grandfather who was elderly at that point,
not necessarily on the farm,
but my grandfather had been
a blacksmith and ran moonshine.
So he helped him run moonshine.
This will go no further, I'm sure.
[LAUGHTER] They had a sawmill,
which was powered by Model T Ford and he did
this I think after he had the Blacksmith shop.
So the Model T Ford engine powered the sawmill.
They would go up into North Georgia and get
trees cut them and bring back the planks,
the two by fours or the one
by eight or whatever they were.
Maybe they weren't even finished at that point.
And in the load of wood would be bottles of moonshine.
So he actually was
the Robert Mitchum type running moonshine
down the hills in North Georgia.
>> I have the city version of that
with the bathtub gin in my face.
>> Exactly right.
Whatever they could do.
>> So how did they get news at that time?
Did they have a radio?
>> Yeah, and that was a really important part of life.
It would be a little,
what did they call those?
Bacolite before plastic, but it was a plastic radio.
I can I think they were bays usually.
Although my parents, I was
thinking about that this very morning had
a taller radio that had a built in record player.
Did we think we were uptown because we could play?
What were they? Seventy eight in those days. Only 78.
But, the news came and entertainment.
I remember loving country music
because my grandmother liked it so much.
I'm talking Johnny Cash, Chad Atkins,
that vintage, Ernest Tubb, all of those folks.
But there was a little newspaper.
I wouldn't have thought about it until you
mentioned it called Grit.
That came into what I later
learned was came into rural areas just in general.
I don't know where they were published.
If they were published in a central
place and then distributed
everywhere or if there was
a publisher in Lawrenceville? No idea.
It was not local news though.
It was human interest stories, and of course,
it was what was going on in
the war in the world and that thing,
but it may have been a weekly.
There was a Lawrenceville paper.
I assume there was in every small town,
but I don't remember seeing it in their houses.
It's probably the Gwinnett daily
news or something like that.
I don't remember seeing it there.
I can remember getting because I thought it was
so cool sale papers, they call them.
When Belk or somebody was having a sale,
they would come out with, I guess
you call it a broad sheet,
which was then folded and one side was plain,
so one side had the lettering on it,
and that was how my Granny Spriggs taught me to write.
Because I would trace the letters on the back of
this sale paper and
wonder I didn't make my letters backward,
you're going, wait a minute, they were backward.
But she would somehow instruct me
that that was they were supposed to be the other way.
In fact, probably because of
her and the fact she read the comment.
We did get papers because I can remember
her reading Nancy and Sluggo to me.
Brenda Starr, Ricks,
Morgan, whatever his name was, MD.
So we did get those.
But I was able to start school when I was
five and I could read, fluently.
I would walk beside
the other kids and tell them the words.
So somebody did something.
It was either the sale papers or the comics.
Somebody taught me to read.
>> So did your parents share any memories of
how they learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor?
>> Absolutely not. In fact,
you'll see, of course,
in the old TV shows and
documentaries and whatever people sitting around
the huddled around the radio
listening for news of Pearl Harbor,
whether the war was going to be over soon.
I think I was too young for that.
And also maybe because mother was trying to hide
the fact from everybody that my father was there.
I can't remember the family really talking about it.
>> What did they decide to do after the war began?
>> Well, as I had thought later,
I really would have thought that my father would have
volunteered because he was doing 7th grade education.
He was doing so many menial things.
I learned later that he even worked on paving roads,
which was a need in Gwinnett County again,
at that point, the road we lived
on wasn't paved until probably '59,
'60, somewhere in there.
Which is now, of course, a thoroughfare
at the Mall of Georgia.
But he had very menial jobs.
He even went to Detroit once with some of the cousins
I mentioned earlier who later went into the service,
some of those guys and to get
work at the General Motors plant or forward,
whatever was there, but didn't stay and I don't know why.
So I have often wondered why he would not
have volunteered because dangerous,
yes, extremely dangerous in World War II,
but probably paid pretty well.
And it was a steady job.
So as far as I know,
he just decided to do it.
Again, his two brothers could not go.
So there's no one else in the family who could.
He had a brother who died when he was
a year old and so they were the only boys.
And I would think knowing my father,
he probably did it for the country.
>> So then he was been drafted in 1942?
>> Drafted as far as I know.
And well, I know it was
because my son has researched that.
That would have been, what did I tell you '42 or '43?
>> You said 1944. I don't know if.
>> That's absolutely right.
Because I have that paper and it was
from early '44 until late '44 that he was being trained.
>> So what happened to your parents
then after he was drafted?
>> I'm assuming that mother for a while,
continued working and probably doing this rooming,
she did she had a room in Clarkston in a house,
which is pretty far from Lawrenceville in those days,
but I imagine that's where she found a job.
But I'm thinking that
eventually she moved in with my grandmother.
They did not have the best of
relationships because as I said,
my grandmother is very strict,
hardly ever saw her smile.
So serious, they thought of themselves as just working.
That was what they were supposed to
do and take care of that family.
So I think that
probably it wasn't a totally congenial thing.
Maybe that's why she let her name me Gloria but
didn't call me Gloria. I've often wondered.
But I do know that when I was born,
she moved in with them.
So she would either again,
they did not have their own house.
They didn't rent specifically just before he left,
and so they probably lived with him.
Now, their house was tiny and again,
was built by my uncle and father.
It had two bedrooms,
a living room and a kitchen and
a little ramshackle screen porch thing in the back.
So not the world's greatest house,
but at least it was
theirs because my father had built it.
>> So did your father train probably at Fort Bedding?
>> Actually, I don't I think he
was mustered in or whatever they call it at
Fort McPherson because that was a big base at that point
at near Atlanta and then was sent to Fort Custer,
Michigan because he was in a military police unit.
And so my assumption is that's where they taught those
whatever technical skills to
be in that it was a battalion,
and I've actually forgotten the name of it,
but a military police battalion
and they trained at Fort Custer, Michigan.
>> I think I had the 785th military.
>> That's right.
>> Police Unit. And what did
your mother decide to do
when your father was sent to Michigan?
>> I think it must have been fairly
quickly that she made
the decision that she was going to go there with him.
I don't know had she always wanted to go to
Michigan ever be cold.
Did she miss my father that much,
or did she maybe just see an opportunity to leave home?
One wonders.
So she hopped on a train, which is, of course,
the only way they could get anywhere in those days.
I suppose she could take a bus.
I probably would have been as expensive
and maybe not even it certainly would've been as fast.
So she took the train up and once she got there,
she moved again into a boarding house.
And the folks she lived with there
almost became a part of our family as I
was growing up because they talked all the time about
Ma and Pa Ostrander in Battle Creek, Michigan.
They just loved these folks.
And apparently they love them too.
Now you can picture in those days,
there was nobody in the South who didn't have
the world's worst Southern accent.
It want to say best Southern accent.
And my parents were from the country.
So probably, they were a novelty in Battle Creek,
and they're going, how cute
cute little couple this is thing.
She worked there in the Kellogg plant,
which had been converted to making rations.
They may have still made
corn flakes for the general public somewhere,
but of course, those were all rationed.
So I don't know how much of
that actually was still going on,
but I do know that the particular plant she
worked in made rations for the Army.
On a conveyor belt,
really high level work.
Let's put some corn flakes in
a box and it wouldn't have been corn flakes,
would have been beef jerky or something.
>> Did your mother tell you anything about
her first impressions of Michigan?
>> No, not really.
That's odd.
I think because it was cold and snowy.
Of course, that was the main thing, the weather.
But I think later on,
she was so impressed by California.
I'm getting ahead of myself there.
She talked more about California than she did Michigan.
>> So working at the Kellogg Plant in Battle Creek.
Did she have to join a union to do that work?
>> She did. There was the,
I think it was called the American
Federation of Grain Processors.
She had to be a member of the union.
And I have since learned from doing
my work with Rosie the Riveter that it was
actually required in a lot
of cases of women and sometimes
even withheld that they
especially in the early part of the war,
they were not allowed to join the union,
but they had to do the work.
I'm sure as more men went to the front and
were killed and they needed the ships,
they needed the k rations.
They loosened the rules
probably for being a union member,
maybe even the cost because I
think that was a big part of it.
>> Did she share any memories of her work
at the K plant, what it is like?
>> Not really. Again, I just can't remember
anything other than the people
they stayed with, which is cool.
At least she thought of
the good side of things, as opposed.
I'm sure that work was not all that thrilling.
Now, that is where she met
her best friend of later years.
And that is because the men trained over here at
Fort Custer and the women lived in
these rooming houses, the ones who came up.
So there was B Whittington from Warner Robbins,
Georgia, Matzuma in fact,
a metropolis outside Warner Ruffins B who again
had the broadest Southern accent
I have ever heard in my life,
and she and mother became lifelong friends.
So I know that's where they met.
They had great times and then B came back to
Georgia when mother went out to California.
So I've seen some of their letters that are really cute.
And of course, we remain friends.
We would go to Warner Robbins
to see them when I was a kid.
I was like, Wow. We're going to Warner Robbins.
It was like a vacation.
>> What was their social life like with these friends?
>> I think mostly movies from what
I have heard because I know
there's a story about
because that was a big deal in
those days, going to a movie.
It wasn't like everybody could even afford it.
And of course, these guys are getting army
pay so they could afford it.
But there's a story about my father
and mother in California.
So I think that was the main thing.
I'm sure they got together with
the people at the rooming houses
and probably played cards, perches.
Dominoes, that thing.
But I don't really think that they were mobile.
I don't believe they would
maybe the Ostranders would have taken them somewhere,
but I don't think they would have had access to a car.
>> Do you know much about what they what they would have
eaten or anything like that? Do they have?
>> Well, Remember mother talking
about the fact that the food was so different because,
of course, grew up on what we now call soul food.
I ate more beans when I was a kid than I ever
want to think about greens,
turnip greens, of course,
every vegetable that could be grown and corn bread,
biscuits in the morning,
usually corn bread in the evening.
I'm sure that's not what they were
eating in Battle Creek,
and probably didn't grow much of their own stuff.
I've in fact I did this just the other day.
I tried to find the street that mother lived on because I
had a letter with the street address 55 Everett Street.
I go in and Google and the only thing that
comes up is 55 Everett Avenue.
Now suppose they could have changed it
from Street to Avenue in those days.
But you picture the Philadelphia Row houses.
And I'm sure that's what this was like,
except that Battle Creek was smaller,
and the house was not connected to another house.
So I'm thinking once again,
these they were masons.
I remember the picture of him and his masonic robe It was
a town and they may have been pillars of the community,
but I'm sure they weren't wealthy thing.
Probably just traditional Michigan food,
whatever that is. [LAUGHTER].
>> That feels very good.
>> That's good. Mother probably
made them a few cakes of cornbread,
as she would call it in her iron skillet.
>> So where did your mother and father go next?
>> The unit to the battalion,
my son is a retired military and he says,
mommy, you call everything a unit.
He's tried to teach me platoon, company,
battalion division and I promptly forget it.
But the battalion was
transferred to Wilmington, California.
Because they were going to embark to the Pacific.
This is interesting,
makes you wonder how organized
the army was in those days by
comparison with now because they went out there to train.
They were very near the coast.
My mother worked at Wilmington shipyards,
which was on Wilmington Island just off the coast of LA.
So we know they were at the water
and here they're not Navy,
they're military police and
they're going to end up in Europe.
But here they are training on the ocean.
So that was maybe six months
or something and then apparently
they needed further training.
So they took them inland to a place called Camp Anza,
A-N-Z-A which I view
as being in probably the high desert,
but not really the death valley kind of thing.
It was probably a little bit lower
and further down in California.
They would come back to Wilmington every once in a while.
So mother did get to see them.
That's where the story about the movie comes in.
Because not every guy would get leave at the same time.
And so mother told me that
my father was always so charming that
the girls wanted him to escort them to the movie.
And so he would take a gaggle of girls to the movie.
And my father was good looking,
but looking back, I'm thinking,
charming, girls,
my father is not extremely outgoing,
I'd have to say, but he was younger then.
>> What work did your mother do at the shipyard?
>> Well, at the shipyard,
she became a welder, and of course,
that has to be an intensive training course.
I was married to a welding engineer.
I know it is a complicated process.
It's not something that you do in five minutes.
But of course they were putting women through
very quick intensive training in
those days because they needed them to be welders.
They needed them to be riveters on airplanes,
on the ships, they needed welders.
So she took the course and did it.
And I don't know how long this lasted,
but she told me not long before she died, I guess,
the story of one of the supervisors coming into her and
telling her that she looked
as if she had good organizational skills,
and I'm thinking, how do you look as if you do?
But he hired her to come over into
the office and do
office work and filing and that kind of thing,
which she would never have done it before in her life.
But then she also told me that this same guy who
was there when she would
walk maybe into work or into the office,
who would sing here she comes,
miss America, which of
course it was a big deal in those days,
Bert Parks and the theme song.
And so I'm wondering,
was she moved into the office because she was
a good organizer or because she was
pretty? We don't know.
>> And she was pretty?
>> Very. Although as I said,
I'm involved with the Rosie the Riveter association,
and I look at pictures of those women with
those gorgeous hair dos.
There was so much going on with hair in those days.
They actually did a lot more makeup than to me,
any generation afterward,
a lot more attention to their makeup.
But there were so many pretty women.
We'll have pictures at the Rosie Convention.
Here's my mother when she was in the war,
Age 20. Just beautiful faces.
And of course, they stayed pretty later too.
But yes, she was quite quite attractive,
very slim, which helped.
So always very slim.
>> So when then was your father sent overseas?
>> That would have been in
early '45 or let us say December '44, early 45.
And of course, I was born in April.
So mother was obviously already pregnant
at the time when he
left and they knew there would be a baby,
he wouldn't see or at least he thought he wouldn't.
So when they were shipped out,
they came back to,
I'm going to have to remember this.
I think they shipped out from Boston.
So they've trained two places.
They're here. They apparently
don't need them in the Pacific yet.
So that comes later.
So they send them to France.
But he left from Boston,
that would have been early '45.
My son told me yesterday that he
was in the Rhine campaign.
He was with the attached to
the Third Army under General Patton,
and I didn't know until yesterday.
I'm sitting in the nail salon holding my phone,
waiting to go in and
my son is talking to me about World War II.
So I said to the other ladies, I'm sorry that,
I'm had to do this,
[LAUGHTER] but I have to listen to him.
He's on his way back to Washington because he
teaches and was preparing lessons,
and I'm listening to this.
A story I had never heard is that my father
was so proud that he saw Patton.
You can imagine there are
thousands and thousands of people working for
this guy and he's a legend and then,
not just now, but an absolute total legend
and he was so thrilled.
Had to tell Mark about this.
So they went into France.
They were there as the war was ending,
actually, which is interesting after all this training.
So they were in the cleanup campaign for I think
it was called Central Europe and the Rhineland campaign,
and both of those were with the Third Army.
They came in through England,
went down into France,
then into Germany, and as
the war was ending, he was in Germany.
My son also told me yesterday that he remembered passing
a concentration camp on
their way somewhere and this is a terrible thing,
of course, you do
Holocaust education and you've heard it all.
But my father said he remembered the smell.
That was a cry.
[LAUGHTER] That's what struck him.
And they were just passing,
they were not liberating it.
They didn't have that sort of thing going on.
There were a lot of obviously surrenders.
My father brought back a something that's
a family relic shotgun and rifle combination
that is apparently extremely unusual,
but it was a German weapon.
So they were able to get one of
those they got the munitions from the soldiers.
And also have to keep
saying my son told me yesterday that
this military police battalion was
involved in going to
and I would have to look it up again,
I believe it's Merkers,
M-E-R-K-E-R-S in Germany, which is salt mines.
I know you know what the Nazis
did with the gold and the art.
We've been to Austria a few times and the
salt mines in Northern Austria,
they took them up there.
They threw gold bars into deep mountain lakes so
that they could abscond with
them after they ruled the world.
So the military police battalion
goes up to Merkers and he
was able to help escort some of the things back.
So I said to Mark,
I was like monuments, man.
Mark, my son, he said mom,
that movie was not authentic.
So it was not exactly.
[LAUGHTER] He's big into
authentic military movies. I have to say that.
>> The officer's in a list and the ones he's approved.
>> Yes, absolutely.
I think he liked the big red one.
[LAUGHTER] But that's about all I remember.
>> How did your mother and father stay
in touch during this time?
Did your mother return to Georgia while your father was?
>> Right. She did,
and I think lived with Granny Spriggs,
letters, lots of letters.
But over the years,
they were lost or destroyed by mistake.
We had a relative who threw away a lot of
things that mother had kept and after mother died,
looking at what was in her attic.
I can tell you she probably had every letter he wrote.
Because she had every letter I wrote her
from California when I lived there.
So what a shame that they're gone.
But we do have
two v-mails and my son has them because again,
he's the military historian
and obviously for our family as well.
And we have a small diary.
It's about that thick that we later learned
was given to him by my grandparents when he left.
But again, seventh grade education,
he wrote pretty well,
he read a lot in his later years,
but there are hardly any entries in
it, which is interesting.
Mostly when he was in the Pacific, in fact,
and I guess in Europe,
they were too busy cleaning up the war.
But then you know people who wrote
diaries in great detail.
So I'm not sure why he didn't.
But I do know he wrote her fairly voluminous letters.
I've just heard her talk about it
that a lot of detail in those.
I just wish we had them.
>> Did your father stay in Europe the whole time?
>> No. When when
that part of the war was over, of course,
I forgotten when VE Day was,
May, something or other of 45.
We thought we were going to invade Japan apparently.
That was a, you know,
let's go send over a million people
and invade a country with
4 million people or whatever it was, great idea.
As my grandson would say,
good idea, Dan Mom,
to go over there,
but they sent thousands and thousands
of people to the Pacific.
So here's this guy from Georgia.
He's been walking around behind a mule part of his life,
and he's now gone across the ocean to Europe and now he
comes back across the country and goes
across the ocean to the Pacific.
So it had to be quite a big event in these guys lives,
even being on a ship,
probably never been on a boat at that point,
I know he was later.
But so they send them to this island,
I believe it is called Mogmog.
He later went to,
forgotten the name of the,
there's another island obviously,
they're all small Pacific islands,
but he ended up in Okinawa.
That was the place where he stayed
the longest after they were sent there.
So a couple of one interesting thing I always have to
mention because I want this to be like part
of the family thing because it was for us.
He was a sergeant and he had another sergeant friend.
I'm thinking, I don't believe this guy worked for him,
but his name was Sergeant Nutt.
We heard about him all of our childhood.
We even had a picture of
his little girl a five by seven of his little girl.
I don't know why we had it.
They had mobilized into Okinawa and I guess had
maybe built some buildings
because there wouldn't have been anything
to take over there,
the way there was in Europe.
Built some buildings. Sergeant Nutt went into
a building to do something.
They were repairing jeeps,
repairing the military police jeeps.
I didn't mention he had gone into the motor pool later on
after he was strictly a military policeman,
then he went into the motor pool side of it.
He went into this building, came out.
No backwards.
My father went into the building, came out.
He may have been going in to get
gasoline or to fill up a can or something.
Sergeant Nutt goes into
the building after him and it blows up.
So his best friend has died.
And Mark reminded me yesterday that one of
the entries in the diary
says he wasn't able to go to the funeral.
And that's all it says.
Sergeant Nutt died yesterday,
I wasn't able to go to the funeral.
So we don't know why.
I mean, I know from Mark being in
Afghanistan that military funerals are
generally or at least memorial services attended by
the whole company and they put
the rifle up and the helmet and the boots are down here.
So I don't know why he wouldn't have been able to go.
And then we had the long picture of the battalion on
our wall in the den
and the smaller picture of the company,
200 people, underneath it on the wall.
And we would say there's Sergeant Nutt.
I think he was in both pictures.
So it was like just part of the family
lore that my father had lost his best friend.
Other than that, there were not any,
and again, this is my son telling me,
there were not other instances.
Of course, they weren't at the front.
They were military police.
They were not out there in the infantry area,
but there was a time when he was
shot at in Germany when he was
over trying to retrieve an axle to repair a Jeep.
He was trying to retrieve it from a bunch of
mangled vehicles over here.
Was shot at and he never knew if it
was a German partisan who was
still fighting the war
or a civilian who didn't like Americans,
but he looked up and the bullet had
creased the car over his head.
Then the story,
when he got the shotgun rifle combination, apparently,
his company commander at that point was
a not really revered guy.
Mark describes him as an old army.
Very tough.
Guys didn't like him much.
He and my father are both out,
they're getting these German weapons
and what would they call him.
I guess he was a captain.
He was a captain,
if he was in charge of a company,
he shot himself in the foot with
the gun that he retrieved and he had to go home.
So my father was here.
There were two rifles and shotguns.
It could have been him who shot.
So he escaped being injured three times.
And of course you would think
that being in the military police,
he would maybe never have even been shot at.
But you don't know, when that's going to happen.
>> So let's see. So did your mother share any stories of
how she learned about what was
happening in the world during that time?
You mentioned that she wasn't huddled around the radio.
>> No. I really don't know.
And my father came home when I was eight months old.
So that would have been January '46.
And of course eight months. I didn't know him.
They said I crawled over to see him,
or crawled to the door to
where they were having excitement, I guess,
in the process, I creased my head on a rocking chair.
So had that scar forever.
And they've told me that I was afraid of
him for a long time because I had never seen him.
But I just can imagine that there was
general excitement and she's
probably then knowing she's going to be able to move.
She's a little bit under my grandmother's thumb.
And I have to say this laughingly because
Granny Spriggs was my favorite person growing up.
So stern as she was never smiled,
I spent so many days with that woman.
Listen to so much country music.
So it wasn't that she was mean or hard to get along with.
It's mother in law thing.
>> So you mentioned you were born
shortly before the end of the war.
What support did your mother have when you were born?
So she was living with your grandparent.
>> And at that point, my grandfather was still alive.
I don't know how healthy he was.
I've never really known what he died from,
but he died early because my brother was born in
'47 and mother was
pregnant with him when my grandfather died.
Now, he was a lot older than
my grandmother when they were married,
but he may have been in poor health.
I just know about Granny Spriggs was
the hardest working person you've ever
seen in the house and the fields and whatever,
they had a garden, the size
of four or five subdivision house tracks.
It just huge garden,
which is now across the street from my house.
But I can imagine that mother helped with the food,
but granny always made
a 1 o'clock meal that was the table was full,
vegetables and fried chicken, biscuits, always.
And I don't really
think my grandfather would have been a whole lot of
help because I'm sure he was fairly sick at that point.
I know he was very thin from the pictures
I've seen but somehow I remember him.
They always said that I was his favorite and I was not
the oldest grandchild by
far because my father was the baby in the family.
So I was not anywhere near the oldest grandchild,
but they just said he really had taken a liking
to me and I can almost remember sitting on his knee.
Now, I would have been two years old,
so do I really remember it?
I'm thinking that mother would have continued working
in probably a sewing plant or maybe the shoe plant.
Although in those days,
women stayed home when they had babies,
and maybe it was frowned upon.
I hadn't really thought about
whether she went back right away or not.
>> What are some of
your earliest memories of your parents?
>> Starting, I guess,
when we lived in Quinette.
I had mentioned to you
earlier they bought this little house.
They were building them for GIs all over the country,
little cracker box houses on a tiny lot
about that much bigger than the house in Gainesville.
That's where I actually was born.
Now this is interesting.
I was born in Hall County.
Thinking back, that doesn't seem right.
I guess they took me to Hall County.
Maybe there was no nearer hospital.
At any rate, they bought this house after the war
and lived there so that would have been '46 to something.
And I can remember living there then,
not too well, but I remember
living on a farm in the country.
Again, my father had built
probably two more houses by then.
There's the house on the hill
and the house at the bottom of the hill.
Rented to relatives or sometimes
relatives just occupied them without paying us.
It's always building houses.
So my earliest memories then would not be of Gainesville,
but of rutted country roads, mud, red clay,
12,000 chickens, a couple of cows,
a couple of hogs,
two or three, I guess,
playing outside all the time,
riding bicycles all over.
And then this is interesting,
though, when I was in fourth grade,
I suppose they had been renting the house
in Gainesville early years.
They decided to move back when I was in fourth grade.
And we're all going,
we don't like this milk, for example,
because the milkman would come
and bring homogenized milk,
and we had been drinking milk from a cow all those years.
And then mother would churn butter milk.
And we thought butter milk from
the milkman was an abomination.
There was nothing worse
tasting than buttermilk in a carton,
as we had the real thing over here.
I got roller skates.
I was able to skate on the sidewalk.
It was a little subdivision houses.
We had friends in the house
next door and the house next door,
whereas our farm was 25,
30 acres without any neighbors.
The neighbors were all very far away.
And so that was one year.
I went to walk
to little low elementary school called Miller Park,
same architecture as all the other schools in Georgia.
And it was just weird.
My brother had a bicycle,
he rode on the sidewalk,
someone stole it and threw it into
a gutter, covert thing.
And so we lived the city life for maybe a year,
a year and a half, and then I guess
maybe they just missed the farm.
So maybe the second house had not been built yet,
so he built another house. That's what happened.
>> And so how many folks lived then in this farm complex?
You home, your siblings.
>> Oh, goodness. Well,
it's probably a mile and a half
between us and Highway 20,
which goes by the mall of Georgia,
probably a mile and a half.
There were three very big farms,
which were ours and the two other best friends of ours,
the Chesters and the Baloos.
And then there were little houses
where for some reason they didn't have the land.
I think the only reason we got the land
is it probably cost 25 cents an acre.
And my grandfather might have had some money
from the blacksmithing and moonshining days.
So they were able to buy a lot of land.
For what it was worth,
it really was not all that fertile in
those days because cotton
had farmed it out, kind of thing.
I can remember red clay for miles,
not even much vegetation.
So the three neighbors,
they were our best buddies.
We were baseball playing fiends.
When I grew up, played baseball every
day out on our little field thing.
And other than that,
I would say maybe four other houses.
There was a crazy guy who walked up and down the road.
There was Miss Johnson,
the nice old lady up on the hill and a old white house.
And then someone who had built a newer house,
apparently, again, just on a small tract of land.
And then there was our church,
which was between there and the road.
So we didn't know
many people because there weren't many people to know.
And then my uncle had land about another half a mile from
us and we went there through the woods over to his house.
So I think I've mentioned to you and
maybe you had seen the article about my family reunion,
the Spriggs Reunion that has been held at
his farm for 72 years.
It began in '45 on his land.
And so that was over there,
and of course, we visit them kind of thing.
There weren't many people.
>> So you mentioned that your parents
had kids over two years or something.
So can you tell me about your siblings, their names?
>> My brother is named Samuel for my father,
but again, goes by Charles.
That seems to be an affliction in our family.
So his name is Charles Spriggs.
And we would never call him Chaz.
We just when he went to work for DuPont,
people started calling him Chaz and we thought
this is something wrong with that. He's Charles.
Then I have a sister named Virginia Elaine,
who's two years younger than he is and Rita Fay,
you had to have a Fay in the family,
if you're in the South so Rita Fay two years later.
We were two separate camps
because of that age difference.
My brother and I, we rode the bicycles.
I was a Tom boy and the word go.
We did baseball all day.
Jenny and that was her nickname and Rita,
we're not old enough to play baseball.
So we had the older siblings, the younger siblings.
If they ever played with us, for example,
we would do Tarzan.
And my youngest sister Rita is still
mortified by the fact that she got to be Cheetah.
[LAUGHTER] She was not
enough in the group to be a person.
So we had the friends who were, again,
the Baloos and Chesters, the older kids in that family
would come out and join us in
all our games and bicycle riding.
You may remember Rin Tin Tin. Do you remember that?
We did Rin Tin Tin,
and I always say this with a little bit of pride.
I was elected the lieutenant,
woman's lib in 1952,
Dennis Bellu who was a little older than I was,
was the sergeant, and
my brother was private whatever he was.
And we had a dog who was Rin Tin Tin.
So those were the kinds
of things that my brother and I did,
but my younger sisters,
I think I got left out a little bit.
They didn't get to be tomboys as much as I did,
because in '59,
we moved to a subdivision in Doraville.
At that point, Rita was only eight.
Jenny was only 10.
They had not really been able to get out with us and do
the rough and tumble things and I regret that for them.
They were not country children as much as we were.
And I think that was a good lifestyle.
A little dangerous sometimes, stepped on nails.
I cut my foot on a piece of ball jar about that big,
I fell, scar,
playing baseball on a rock,
cut it all the way to the bone.
They are dangerous. There were snakes.
There were copperheads at the creek where we picked
blackberries, good many of them.
There were no boundaries sort of thing.
>> Was there someone in the family that knew first aid
or did you ever go to the doctor for these [OVERLAPPING]
>> Oh, no, there's a doctor in Lawrenceville.
I hate to tell you about the knee because my sister,
the older of the younger two,
always says she remembers
going in the car because I guess they
piled us all in the car to go to
Lawrenceville and have my knee sewn up.
And she said she remembered my father pouring
alcohol in it. Now, this was a cut.
I could see the bone there
and put alcohol because he
thought that's what he was supposed to do.
You were cured in those days by having
iodine put on things, and of course,
that would kill you or mercurochrome, the other iodine.
So that's what they used for first aid in general.
But we did we did go to get stitches for that.
I don't know if I remember any other stitches,
but brother fell on a rock when he was
a young kid under our old oak tree.
I remember him hurting his mouth, doing that.
So there were some hazards.
But if you stepped on a nail,
you just pulled it out,
what are you going to do? [LAUGHTER].
>> Did they a tetanus shot back then?
>> I'm not sure when they started even.
Not sure. We did have smallpox vaccinations.
So there were some shots going on.
There may have been a DPT shot
when Jenny and Rita were little,
but I don't think when I was.
>> And then there was one more sibling, right?
>> Right. She was born when I was a freshman in college.
And so this is the family anomaly
or weirdness or whatever.
I went to college early,
in fact, that's why I was only 18.
Since I started school when I was
five because I could read.
So then I graduated when I was 17 and
went to college when I was like
17 years and two or three months,
which is pretty early.
And so I'm sure there are a lot of my friends who
thought in those days,
is this Jane's baby or is it her mother's?
Because that did happen.
There were girls who
went other places and had their babies,
but there were some who kept them.
But such an attraction,
I can't tell you
[LAUGHTER] how many times I thought, gee,
I'm glad I have a baby sister because then all the boys
would come into the dorm seating area.
I went to Reinhardt, which is a small mountain school,
and so there's not much there.
But there's seating area,
and the boys would come over and
talk to the baby and then she got to
be cuter when she walked and all of this.
Today she is, what is she doing today?
She's teaching at Georgia Highlands College,
teaching computer science.
>> What's her name?
>> Melanie Lynn. Named by me.
I keep thinking of all these things I wouldn't have
thought foregone with the wind.
For Melanie and gone with the wind.
And people would say,
why didn't you name her Scarlet she'd be
tougher and maybe more outgoing or whatever.
But somehow I just thought of her as
a Melanie when she was
born and she's really been that way.
She is brilliant.
She majored in math at tech she's smarter than
the rest of us and yet still quiet and assuming,
so she's a Melanie.
>> So where did she attend high school in Doraville?
>> Went to West Gwinnett High School,
which later became Norcross.
And so in Doraville
those were the years when they
were consolidating the schools,
and Gwinnett is growing,
we had the big water tower for
a long time that said growing Gwinnett.
So they started consolidating Suwanee,
Duluth Buford,
all the schools into Central Gwinnett, South Gwinnett,
West Gwinnett and it didn't take too
well in some cases because people
really wanted to be in their own cities.
So eventually Duluth left West Gwinnett,
[LAUGHTER] and went back to their own school system.
Of course, Buford still has their own even these days.
They didn't willingly go into North Gwinnett.
So after two years,
the name of the school was changed from
West Gwinnett to Norcross,
and I was therefore the last graduating class
of that school that doesn't exist anymore,
which is very strange.
>> This would have all been before desegregation, right?
>> Yeah. There would not have been
a black person in my school that I can recall.
In fact, when I went to Reinhardt, and of course,
it was a private Methodist school,
it's a little more expensive.
Was a little more expensive than
in those days at any rate,
not a single black student.
My sisters would have been at Norcross,
not the youngest but the two
younger when desegregation came about
and they talk about it really as
being a non event at Norcross.
Not sure if that was true for everybody.
But I can remember growing up.
I didn't mention this, when we lived in the country,
going to Lawrenceville on Saturday was a big deal.
We go to the drug store and buy
comic book and an ice cream cone.
We would go over to see Dr.
Sims if somebody had to go to the doctor.
You didn't have appointments. You dropped
in to see Dr. Sims.
Mother bought groceries because
the grocery store was in Lawrenceville,
not anywhere near where we lived.
And I remember seeing black people walking down
the street and I didn't think these are black people.
It just was not even in our thought process.
I suppose knew that there were
black schools that they weren't attending ours.
I went to the school called Sunny Hill,
which they all burned.
I've often said it was because
the floors were wooden and truly
these floors must have been oiled 1,000
times a year to keep them, I guess pliable.
It was not hard wood.
It was some sort of old pine, I guess.
So if it started burning,
it was going to go up in flames.
Sunny Hill, absolutely no black children.
I didn't know where the black children lived.
I would have had no conception of there's a part
of town where the black kids live.
But growing up, we did not talk about race.
We did not use the words that some people did.
I don't know how my mother and father
managed to escape all of that
without apparently any sort
of feelings of discrimination.
But of course, when my father went to
work at the BOP plant,
the General Motors plant in Doraville,
surely it must have been desegregated
or whatever one would call it in those days.
But he had been in the army.
And of course, I was today looking
at your Tuskegee Airman exhibit and I
realized it was not desegregated either.
But he had been there with people from different places,
and I'm sure he was with some
or around some of the black units.
Did that do it? I don't know.
But they just did not ever instill in
us any sort of prejudice against anybody.
And because we were poor,
we didn't look down on poor people,
because we knew what it was.
Now, I have to say, by the time we moved to Doraville,
my father had sold a whole lot of the land in
Gwinnett County and he built
this house I believe without a mortgage.
I believe I'm right about that.
Although maybe did have to get
a construction loan, at any rate,
it had been paid for for years by the time he died.
So it wasn't as if in
those days we were poverty stricken.
I mean, we went to down on Buford Highway,
bought our groceries kind of thing.
We thought we had nice clothes.
Mother still made a lot of
them as she had back on the farm.
But he had been working at General Motors a long time
and she worked some during those years.
So it wasn't as if
we were really poor by the time I was 13,
14, we had pretty much a
little I guess, suburban lifestyle.
It wasn't as if my father was a professional man,
but still enough money kind of thing.
>> Did he get to make any use of the GI bill?
>> With the house, I'm sure,
the one in Gainesville.
He did not take any courses.
He hadn't even finished high school.
So certainly didn't think and I
don't think in those days
that they would have thought about college.
This is an interesting statistic
if you think about how young I am.
I was the first person in our family to go to college.
And those older brothers and sisters,
Claude, Susie, Veni, Ruby,
all cousins much older than I am,
much older, many of them who have died.
So it was just a culture thing.
They just didn't do it.
I was supposed to go to secretarial school.
That's what I was destined for when I graduated,
but circumstances were better than that.
But I just don't think he would've thought about it.
I think it's a little bit of his lot in life was
maybe just to be a hard working farmer.
But then as I said he went to
General Motors where he worked on the assembly line.
One of his jobs for years was putting on
door handles on the Chevrolets that came by,
I think that there's something in that group of people.
Maybe it's the mountain people,
maybe it's just Southern people in general that said,
if this is your place, this is your place.
And I don't want to say it was
a quashing of the spirit or anything like that,
but it was bloom where you're planted.
I've always liked that saying you've got to go do
something better than where you
were in order to make a living thing.
Mother had a little bit more of that.
I think I had mentioned to you that
this morning I came across again,
she took the civil service courses
to become a government employee and for some reason,
no she didn't work for the government.
Some reason never did.
But she was more ambitious than he was in that sense,
and of course, had high school education,
so she could have started off at a higher level.
My father did not speak exceptionally well,
couldn't spell very well.
Probably a good thing that he could even write
after seventh grade in a country school.
But I know I'm sure the house was on the GI Bill,
the Gainesville house because it was in an area
where you would expect
the newer houses going up being built.
That's why they were building them sort of thing.
I know he got some VA benefit,
but then I think everybody did and he wasn't wounded,
but I think he did get some VA type thing.
>> So can you tell me more about
your graduation and how you went from
being destined for secretarial school
to going to college. [LAUGHTER]
>> Let me take a sip here. We don't have to stop.
So secretarial school because I was a woman.
And again, I think my parents had
not really thought above their station.
This is our station.
We live in Doraville and we have a subdivision house.
Oh, and by the way, there was a lake across the street.
We were in high Cotton
because we could go swimming in the lake.
In later years, I actually insured the dams,
I was the broker for Gwinnett County for a long time.
And we insured the dams.
The dam in that lake had been
deemed unsafe by the insurance company.
So it did not
maintain its character as a lake for a long time,
but we swam in it when we were teenagers.
So that's where we
were and I was going to go off to secretarial school.
I was pretty successful in high school,
very, I guess, Valedictorian.
I won the Atlanta Journal Cup,
which was really weird for somebody.
I was the shiest person you would
ever want to see in your life.
I don't know how I would have,
[LAUGHTER] impressed anybody, probably mostly grades.
But so I'm sitting there and somehow and I guess because
the Atlanta Journal Cup as
Atlanta Journal Constitution in those days,
someone the dean of students from
Reinhardt had seen my name,
and they were recruiting students from Atlanta to
diversify the mountain population of Reinhardt College,
as it had been Adairsville Canton,
LJ all the mountain towns.
Nothing wrong with them.
Some of the greatest people in the world in college,
but they wanted to diversify.
So he came to the place where I was working that summer.
I got a summer job in
a life insurance company
because I was working 9:00-5:00,
he had to come to the thing
and the manager of the company,
I guess, let me go into
a little room to interview with him, and so he said,
if you'll come to Reinhardt,
we'll give you a work study scholarship,
and we'll give you a scholarship
because of your grades and
we'll find some other money
for you if your parents need it.
And so we said fine,
Secretarial school didn't have scholarships.
[LAUGHTER] So let me just go on up here.
And I had the best experience because I worked
my work study scholarship was as
the student secretary to the president.
And so I knew everything that was going on in
the college and the neatest people who worked for him,
this wonderful woman who was his executive secretary.
And then the dean of students was in the same complex,
his secretary was fantastic.
And they just helped me so much.
Great experience at Reinhardt wonderful school.
And they did have a lot of people from
Atlanta that particular year.
I have friends from East Atlanta
in particular for some reason.
They were also recruiting further south.
I remember a girl from Vienna, Georgia.
I ever heard of Vienna
want to talk Southern accent again.
So just a very diverse population.
And then when I graduated from there,
interesting thing was that I went to
Emory and some years before that.
And not too many years before
that from the lower I heard,
Emory had started recruiting in the Northeast.
So here I am going to
two schools that are trying to diversify not to be
so Southern or not to be
so North Georgia Southern anymore.
And so there were tons of people from New York and
New Jersey at Emory at that point.
I guess I lucked out
really getting that kind of diversification
because if I'd gone to say a girls school in the South,
probably very insular. I would have thought.
>> Did your impressions of
your mother's wartime experience
or like the work that she did,
did they shape at all your decision
about going into insurance?
>> I don't know so much that because later on,
of course, she was not able to maintain,
let us say that level that skill level
because she had to work in a sewing factory,
when I was a kid because there wasn't anything else.
And what else was she couldn't work at Boeing
or Kellogg or whatever. They weren't there.
But I think that
there was just something about the experience.
And I have to tell you this,
I probably should have brought a little story.
When I was a kid, they
had it before I was born, a cedar chest.
They used to call them hope chest.
And it's not as if it came with anything, I don't think.
It was her dowry was not
in there because there was no dowry.
But my father had bought it for her,
I guess sometime after they got married,
beautiful cedar chest, the lane thing.
So we would open it and it would be like
a treasure trove of things from the past.
So I wrote this little story later
on for my mother's memory book
because what I remember seeing in there were
these dresses that she used to wear.
They had embroidery and I don't mean like little it
was the layered applique embroidery.
She had one with almost a sequin look
in there and there's suits.
She had a crape suit that was lavender. Oh, my goodness.
But she's going around wearing house dresses.
You would never have worn a crepe suit to
Rock Springs United Methodist Church.
I can tell you that.
She probably wore her house dress
or maybe no, she didn't.
She would have had a Sunday go to
meet thing and they wore hats and all that.
But I remember looking in the Cedar chest and thinking,
my mother must have been really elegant.
And what I said in this story is that I
fantasized that she must have
left that life to come and raise us.
Because there were shoes,
the spike heels with the pointed toes.
She didn't wear those anymore.
She wore sandals.
I just weren't worn out where we lived.
Purses, I remember a couple of purses.
Looking, this is gorgeous.
And so I just thought she had
a glamorous life, before we were there.
I was just another person out there doing things.
But if I was inspired at all,
I think it would have been that mother wanted
me to try new things,
not to be afraid.
And you can probably see that with
the little country girl getting
on a train to go to Michigan.
>> How did you learn about the American
Rosie the Riveter Association?
>> They started in Atlanta Chapter,
so I can't claim any going around looking for it.
I knew that my mother had been a welder.
That is absolutely sure.
I actually took her,
I'd forgotten this sequence.
I took her to Warm Springs
when they were having their convention there.
In the early days,
they always had their conventions in Warm Springs.
I said, "Mother, you were a Rosie the Riveter."
We see there that day a
reenactor who's a wonderful girl
out of LaGrange, Georgia.
Her name is Carol Kane.
She did our Atlanta Convention for us.
I saw this reenactor doing stories and I said,
mother, that sounds like your story.
You went to these places and you did
things that you never
thought you would do and you met people,
you never thought you'd meet town people and you
weren't accustomed to that thing.
We were very interested in it but
then in say three years or so,
a couple of people had started in
Atlanta chapter and then I made her join.
But you couldn't get mother to stand up and tell
her story and when I'm
the president now and when I do the conventions,
I have every Rosie in the room tell her story.
Some of them are this long because they're really shy and
they don't want to stand up to begin with and
some of them are very long.
Mother would never have done that.
She went to a couple of
meetings of the Atlanta Chapter with me,
but she just didn't go to many of them.
She wasn't feeling as well in those days
but certainly it was something
that when I heard
about that I wanted to celebrate what she had done.
>> When was this first one that you went to you?
>> Would have been about 2000, somewhere around there.
>> Are you a mother yourself these days?
>> Yes, those boys.
Three boys.
The 40, whatever he is, I can't believe it,
46 year old Gulp. Yes, he is 46.
When he was young,
wanted to be in the army
and it was not because his father was.
His father had divorced but his father had
a defense deferment because he was working on
the SST during Vietnam,
so wasn't his father.
I don't know if it was his father and
his grandfather who were in
World War II who had inspired him,
but he wanted to be in the army
or he wanted to be in the military from an early age.
He did have a marine uniform
at one point when he was about five.
Well, I've always said though the
Revolutionary War was his first love.
He drew a picture of George Washington when he
was three and won an art contest.
Then he went on from there to
the civil war and
eventually got interested in World War II.
That's how that progressed.
He's still interested in the civil war a little bit,
but definitely I don't know why again,
he's a patriot for sure.
He's hard working.
He cares about the country,
cares an awful lot about the army
very committed to the army,
to the structure and the discipline and all of that.
You might say you'd hate to be a son
, but that's not true.
He's actually has a very playful side as well and so
he's not this strong disciplinarian person.
In fact he's probably one of
the silliest children in
the world when he was growing up.
Middle son is.
>> What's his name?
>> Mark McDonald Turner.
He's named for his great grandmother,
her maiden name and great grandmother?
No, grandmother.
That was her maiden name.
Actually, it's for his great grandmother.
Then there is Matthew Scott Turner,
who Mr. Free Spirit wouldn't have been in the army,
if you had paid him an awful lot of
money could not have even thought of that.
Entrepreneur, developed a patent for
an iPod docking station and that was his living for
a while until they came out with
the next version then he made
backs for the iPhone 4 and
the iPhone 5 and they did fairly well with that,
but eventually, they just couldn't get enough
ahead of the Apple folks
to make it work and so these days,
he had his own company for
a really long time and these days he's doing things like
prototypes for other companies.
He's an idea man.
He does a lot of computer work or
an electronics work for companies on a contract basis,
so very much individualist.
Then there is Stephen,
who is 12 years younger than he is.
Stephen Joseph, eight years
younger than the oldest and 12 years younger than
Matthew and Stephen is
a salesman but he wouldn't want me to say that.
This being videotaped.
He actually manages a group
called a Consortium, but he's a salesman.
He's from the word go.
He used to sell us on everything
when he was a kid and he can still do it now,
so very different children.
>> Where did you raise your kids?
>> Well, we moved around a lot for
the first 12 years we were married and
so Mark was born in California,
Matt was born in South Carolina,
but then we moved to New Orleans when they were,
I don't know what age is,
but they lived in New Orleans for 3.5 years,
but then very fortunately,
things happened for the best.
We got a divorce. That's not the fortunate part,
but we did and I came back to Georgia.
They were only nine and six at that point.
Mark was in fourth grade and Matt was
starting first grade and so from then until
they graduated they were into Cab County schools in
the same house even because
we lived in that house for 12 years.
After all that moving before they
were old enough to know what was going on,
they were able to live in one place.
>> You got married again.
>> And that Stephen is mine and Tom's and he's more like
his father than the other two are like their father.
Actually, their father's an engineer,
and I suppose that's one reason
they are somewhat technically oriented.
You have to be technical to be in the army.
To be an officer in the army these days you can't
just go out and do things with your hands
or shoot a rifle very heavy administrative work
and the middle has
all the skills for taking things apart,
putting them back together, making them,
designing them, all of that.
>> What do you think students and
future generations should take away
from your family's World War II experience World War II?
>> Goodness. That's totally unqualified to answer that.
I don't know that there are
experiences like that anymore
because World War II was so, first of all,
the crucible of the Depression that made people afraid,
but made them decide they had to work harder,
made them probably want to hold onto what they had.
I think that's when I said that about my parents,
part of the thing of not reaching above your station.
Some people did steal,
but a bit more of holding on to what you had.
And then the war comes and think how many people died.
How many men did not return?
So you've lost all of that.
And I think that the country,
the cohesiveness part of
it had to carry down to families,
it had to be a model for the way people were.
We hadn't started moving in
those days, we hadn't started,
the reason I moved
about three and a half years
is my husband had a new job,
so we were transferred here,
tried to had pick up our stuff and move it and we went.
That had not happened very much in those days.
Except that I will have to say some of
the Rosies did that, which is pretty cool.
My mother, Jane Tucker,
who went to Savannah with her parents.
But that was over in
a while and they came back and got back
into the family unit and stayed cohesive.
So I think that that could not be replicated, really.
But what we ought to learn from them is that you can come
together when there's a necessity and that you should,
and probably should also,
as a family unit,
be together all the time.
These days, there's too much division.
I think we know in the country,
at any rate, people say in families.
I take exception to the whole thing
and I know you've seen these posted on Facebook,
children aren't what they used to be. Come on.
Let's stop generalizing about
children not being respectful,
about not being hard-working,
talking back to their parents more than they used to.
That's not true.
Maybe it is true a few people
who maybe are different from their parents,
but I really don't think that you
can generalize to any extent about that.
It's what you are in
the family and what the family teaches.
So that part of it,
I think, couldn't be
replicated because let's hope
we don't have another World War.
And look what happened in Vietnam,
division all over the place,
we didn't come together and support the guys over there,
we just didn't do that the right way.
I don't know why, but we didn't.
So will that happen again? I don't know.
And in terms of the way I grew up on
the farm and the freedom and
the desire to go out and do crazy things every day,
there are people in Kansas living like that
right now and I wish we were.
[LAUGHTER] I've always laughed and said that Gwinnett
was like a third-world country when I
grew up because one thing I didn't mention,
and the younger people
in the audience will love this one,
we didn't have an inside bathroom
until I moved to Doraville.
So when I lived on the farm,
we had to, for some reason,
the Chester's pasture backed
up to part of our land where the outhouse was,
so my father had to build concrete steps
going over a barbed wire fence
and that's how we got to the outhouse.
But we had hollyhocks blooming along
the fence line to be pretty decorative.
[LAUGHTER] A southern thing too, I've since learned.
But it was just such a different time.
Again, I don't know if it could be replicated down here,
but I'm sure there are people in Vienna,
Georgia, in Baxley and Valdosta,
whose kids maybe still live that way.
>> What about the Rosies and the Rosebuds,
in your words, is the legacy?
>> I like the thought of the Rosies spunk, I think,
because as I said,
when we have the 20 or 30 of them now at our convention,
they act like they might as well be 60.
There was a woman who
retired from I think it was McDonnell Douglas,
but it was in California two or three years ago,
who was the oldest living riveter.
She was 88 or so when she retired,
still going out and doing
Rosie appearances all over the country.
We have a lady in Philadelphia,
she's emailing me back and forth,
she's the moving spirit behind the Rosie
the Riveter day that we're working
for in Congress right now,
and she was in the New York or is Times Square?
The Veterans Day parade in New York.
I'm not sure what they
call the New York Veterans Day parade.
And she walked the whole thing.
She's 88, 90 years old,
so it's the spunk and the tenaciousness.
And some of them are so flip and
so funny when they're telling their stories.
And there's some of them who have dementia.
And there is the one lady who stood up in Kansas City,
and I said, okay, tell
us your stories and I have the microphone,
but I'm having to give the microphone to
people to go out to the audience and the ladies
first words were I was born in 1922 in Kansas City.
And I thought we are in for a long night here.
[LAUGHTER] Because everybody else
was talking about what they had done during the war.
She says I was born in Kansas City in 1922.
And so there, of course, there were exceptions.
But just if you're going to come to a convention,
and they live in Connecticut,
in Oklahoma, in Texas,
and they fly to Atlanta, Kansas City,
wherever it is to go to
these conventions and meet each other.
So I wouldn't say taught me a
lot because I think my mother
was like that, I really do.
I knew that generation was like that.
And I don't want to even want to say that
because we talked about the greatest generation.
I knew that those women
were like that from that time period,
just from knowing her.
And there were people who weren't Rosie the Riveters,
there were women who didn't go to work
and didn't try hard enough to go do it sort of thing,
or weren't maybe even,
I don't know is that they weren't patriotic enough,
I think a whole lot of it was
you had the husbands in some cases,
but maybe women who just wouldn't even try.
They didn't think they could get a job.
So it was the spunkiest ones who would go
out stand in front of the union boss and say,
I want to join your union.
They had to be pretty outgoing people.
And so learned a whole lot
more about mother's generation from that,
but it's a great group, and of course,
the lady who founded it was a riveter
herself and then became a college professor.
So Dr. Fran Carter. [LAUGHTER]
>> So do we still have further to
go when it comes to women's parity in the world?
>> I'd have to say so.
I think women are still looked at as a little bit
too much of the technical, detail-oriented folks.
I do insurance, which is extremely technical,
boring probably to an awful lot of people, quite boring.
But in that field even,
and there were more women in insurance.
And when I started in '78,
there were more women who were up and
coming and we knew would have
been promoted kind of thing.
But in '84,
when I was promoted to Assistant Vice President,
I was the first female officer in
the Southeast region of
that company and it was a humongous company,
75,000 employees covered the Southeastern region,
covered six states, and I was
the first woman officer in 1984.
So what does it tell you? I'm in a technical field.
We are detail-oriented out
there was people tell me all the time,
I've never seen anybody read
a contract like you do, Gene.
Well, it's probably my English background.
I'm editing it over here somewhere.
But that's the way we are viewed and
yet women even in that company,
in that field, did not advance.
I have to speak for my personal experience.
So I'd say if you went into a profession if you had
the guts when you were
my age to become a doctor or lawyer,
in particular, you probably were viewed as really,
really unusual, but you can
go out and start your own practice.
So as long as people will come to you, now,
I don't know if people came to the women
lawyers the way they flocked to the men,
maybe they didn't get the patients or the clients.
I'm pretty sure the doctors probably didn't get
the patients, they were well-received.
But still, there's a little bit more in that to me,
the independence of it,
whereas if you went to work for a corporation,
and I'm not sure about
say the Arthur Andersen's of the world,
I'm thinking of that technical expertise.
I think I am pretty sure that those women were not
promoted as they should have been either.
I'll tell you that I don't think I
ever had the same salary as a man.
If I had stayed where I was,
I might have eventually in five years or so,
but when I left that company,
I was 59 years old
so I should already have had the same salary.
And I'll tell you, this is cute,
especially my middle son,
always says, "Mom,
you went out and worked so hard
and you came from being a little country girl",
he says this, "to being the vice president",
of course I became a vice president eventually,
"in a really big company.
That is so great."
And of course, it's so great to have your son that
proud of you. He talks about you.
But it was really unusual in those days,
and I think even now, it probably is.
I look around at my company and
yeah women are more highly regarded,
but there are very few highly paid producers
in insurance broking.
Maybe women don't want to go be producers.
I'm not sure, but I think there is
still that stigma a little bit.
Do you want to buy from a woman?
And yet, I have to say the most highly paid,
highly regarded female insurance
broker in Atlanta is a woman.
She has more business than any of the men.
So there are exceptions.
>> So what company did you work for?
>> It's called Marsh McLennan.
And eventually, we bought
the two other competitors
who were not as large as we were.
And so now it's just called Marsh.
>> I'm familiar with it because they
had offices at the World Trade Center.
>> Oh, exactly. I went to World Trade several times to
visit my armored car underwriter
and I was in four World Trade.
Their office was not in one or two,
but went up to the four seasons.
Now and then thing.
But I was in four a lot and stayed across
the street behind the American Express building.
It was across the street.
So we get the word
one day that the well, I didn't get the word.
I walked into my building.
I was going on a business trip to California.
I had not my suitcase because I was parked out here,
but I had my briefcase and there was a bank
downstairs that had a TV monitor,
even though it was really just a little outpatient bank.
It wasn't full service.
I looked up and I saw a plane flying into
a building. It's very weird.
I get upstairs and find out that, of course,
the plane has flown into
the building that Marsh is located in.
So people were not in a great mood that day.
We canceled, of course,
we canceled at the airports were closed.
We didn't go to California.
But yeah, Marsh lost 400 people,
I think in the towers.
And one of them was a guy who was
our local construction loss control guy.
So somebody we knew had been in
my office two weeks before that going said,
hi, Maynard. How are you doing?
And he would say, if I were any better,
I'd have to be twins.
He was the cutest guy in the world, funny,
great, great loss control guy,
safety conscious as he could be.
But he was the only person from Atlanta.
They were having a meeting that day.
But yeah, sad, sad day.
>> Well, is there
anything that you can think about I haven't asked you?
>> Oh, my goodness. No.
[LAUGHTER] Some of the things you asked and
like where did she come up with that? Not really.
I guess the whole thing of
the war being the center of what we were talking about,
maybe I didn't give enough attention to
my father and what must have been
his bravery and the bravery of all of these people.
In our Rosie group,
I will say, we had a rivet.
That's an associate member who
was married to one of our rosies.
He was a German prisoner of war and came to talk
to us a few times bringing along the drawings
that he made along his prison cell there.
He was a parachutist,
and of course, wasn't everybody?
The planes, everybody had to parachute in.
He parachuted into Germany and it
was the first time he had had a parachute on.
Because they had to run people through so quickly,
they didn't have time to train them and
they pull the cord and it'll all work out.
And of course, he parachuted into
a German field somewhere and they captured him.
So I have to be grateful that
my father had great training.
That's one thing that I think about.
But the fact that they were all so brave.
And another thing I wanted to mention about that guy.
He was one of four sons,
I'm thinking it's four who went.
And you probably have seen The Star in the Window.
At least one of his brothers was
killed and I think maybe two of them,
and he was a prisoner,
so he came back.
Just so much bravery.
But then when they came back,
did they talk about it?
Probably almost never.
And my son I told you about him before.
When he was 12,
he started going around interviewing soldiers.
I can remember sitting outside
people's houses until the wee hours of the morning,
I'm going, Mark, there were no cell phones
in those days, where are you?
He's still in there because he
knew what to ask and he was so interested.
He still does this today
when he can find people to interview.
So interested they would sit there and talk to him for
hours and hours about
their service and give him their metals,
their letters, their helmets, all of these things.
And yet in the family,
people didn't talk about it.
I guess it was just too close, probably afraid.
For my father, for example,
he started talking about Sergeant Nutt,
he might cry and he didn't
want the family to see him cry.
But if you're talking to somebody who's
interviewing you as Mark was with these guys,
they just go on all hours.
And I will tell you,
and I'm so thrilled about this.
In the course of getting ready for this interview,
I talked to Mark on the phone.
He remembered that he interviewed
my mother and recorded it.
He did not remember this before.
He has, can't even tell you how many thousands
of hours of veterans talking to him.
But he just didn't remember he had done that.
So of course, now, I'm going to have to go get
it and reproduce it for the rest of the family.
So it would probably never have even come up.
>> Well, I'm so glad that this helped facilitate that.
>> Absolutely.
>> And thank you so much for your time today.
>> Well, thank you for letting me talk so long.