George Waller Interview 6/15/02

Interviewer: James S [JS], grandson
Interviewee: George Waller [GW]
Also present: Lisa S [LS] and Jenn M [JM], daughters;
Becky H [BH], sister

PART 3

[tape to side 2]

JS: If you could live your life over again, would you do anything differently.?

GW: No!!

LS: Not that you would admit to.

JS: What advice would you give to me?

GW: Enjoy life.

BH: Stay away from credit cards.

JS: Don't set fire to your own head.

JM: Stop drop and roll.

GW: Try hard at whatever you do. GNOTIES SEAUTON which is Greek and it means "know thyself".

[James' school interview is over]

LS: What was the name of the monkey?

BH: Something like Dinero, but that means money. I don't know.

LS: Where did you acquire the monkey?

BH: I got it for my birthday. It was a really sad situation, we could never train it. Then we went through the rainy season, and dad made a bit wire cage that sat outside and there was a house inside but it stayed so wet and rainy that it just got wet One time it got out and the lady that was helping us - the maid - climbed up on the roof and caught it. It had a wild streak.

BH: I remember you named the cat Princess Anne, remember that?

[ordering of pizza]

LS: So what do you remember about your mom's mom, because you don't remember her dad right?

GW: That's Mamaw. I have a picture of my grandfather holding me, but he died in 1947.

LS: So just after the diary, because he's in all of the diary entries, they have him as B.

GW: Yes I was a year old, less than a year. He died March 5 1947. So I don't remember him. I remember Mamaw as being ... quite literate.

LS: She was like reading in the diary all the time, Moby Dick, then Main Street, I don't remember the name of the other two.

GW: She was very religious.

BH: She had the golden book. She knew what was right and wrong.

GW: She was quite the gossip. Knew everybody and everything. She was politically active. She was in the 1920s she took the census for the district that she lived in. So when I read the census for that year I can see on every page she signed her name.

LS: Her mark on history.

GW: She wrote to Al Gore Sr.

LS: What was the OAS she wrote about?

GW: The OES, order of the eastern star, Masons.

JM: I'm in it.

LS: Is that like a female mason?

JM: There are both it runs along side the masons.

LS: So people who do good things for the community?

JM: Yup.

GW: And worship devils.

JM: Yup the upside down pointed star thing.

GW: She was very much against drinking, so when she came to visit the house, my parents would hide all the liquor up on the refrigerator.

BH: And they used to have beer delivered when we lived in Westport, it was kind of like soft drinks and beer that they delivered, and she told the guy don't you DARE come over here and say beer man. He showed up one day and said "soft drinks!"

GW: I remember when Elvis Presley - Haley and the Comets - Rock around the Clock, she knocked down several priceless lamps in her living room dancing to it.

BH: No!

GW: No, that's a lie. A complete lie. That was the Devil's Music.

LS: Did she ever talk about what it was like for her growing up?

GW: I didn't really see her that much in my life, maybe 10 times when I was old enough to remember. She probably did but I didn't remember.

BH: She taught me about doodle bugs. They're little bugs that bore down into that silky soft dirt, and when she lived in Fayeville the last place she lived, she had a garage out there and they had it. You would see a swirl go down, and you would take a piece of straw, and kind of keep going around and I don't remember this ever happening but we would spent hours doing it, the bug would grab of the straw and you would pull it out, and you would say 'doodle bug, doodle bug, something ...'

BH: Remember Aunt Lucille had that really cool room upstairs that she had all redone, that green one?

GW: I remember my mother telling me that if it was raining and sunshine at the same time, that that meant the devil was arguing with his wife, and if you took a straight pin and put your head down to the ground you could actually hear what they were saying.

BH: I swear he's lying like a dog!

GW: That's true!

BH: That's true? I never heard that one.

BH: My mother told me, I swear, I swear, that any time you eat a piece of pie, that you cut the tip off, and you move it to the side, and eat the rest of the pie, and then you eat that first piece, and it's a wish pie. That's what it's called. So I did that for years and years and years. I moved to the north, and proceeded to educate the entire north about this. Now they never heard of this.

JM: With reason.

BH: Never heard of it. Every time we sat down to eat pie "No no!" and I'd explain the whole thing. And a year before mom died I said something about the wish pie and she said, 'what are you talking about?'

GW: I remember cutting off the tip of the pie and saving it for the last bite.

BH: That was the wish pie!

GW: I don't remember it being called a wish pie.

BH: So why would you do it? I mean, what would you do it with?

GW: Saved it until the end.

LS: See, you can corrupt the minds of children by telling them things and they think that it's normal.

JM: I taught my children to take the Bonita sticker off of bananas and stick it on their foreheads!

BH: They stand themselves out. Scanners are something else new.

LS: People had to type numbers in by hand, and get them all wrong.

BH: Yeah they'd type in the amounts, 59 cents.

LS: Right but if they got it wrong, you'd never tell, because you'd just have a long line of numbers and who went back and compared all the numbers to the actual items.

BH: I do remember my mother teaching me a lesson in a grocery store which has been really valuable to me. Back then you would get cokes in glass bottles so you would just bring them in and put them in a big cart. And then when you got your groceries you would come back and say I brought in an 8 pack or 6 pack or something. I was pretty young and I can remember asking my mother how do they know - you came in, you went shopping ... and she said, well it's about trust. Are your willing to sell your soul for 10 cents worth of bottles? Is your soul worth that much, to lie about it? And it was pretty impactful to me and every time I decide I'm going to tell a lie to somebody or cheat on something I decide, is my soul worth THAT amount? But it hit me at a pretty fine time.

BH: But we're talking Mamaw right?

LS: One of the things that hit me when reading the stuff from Mamaw is that they made everything that they had, that she was talking about in the spring they finally got to have some fresh greens because the first greens had finally come up, and she was sitting there canning all summer long, canning and shelling and stuff so they'd have stuff for the following winter, do you know when they were able to buy food? it seemed like everything they were doing at the time was they were buying chicks and then eating chicks all summer ..it didn't sound like she'd ever gone out and bought anything. And when I was asking Aunt Nancy about where did you get the fried chicken, she said they never bought food because they didn't have enough money to buy food everything that we ate we had to grow ourselves. So you guys had a cook, did you grow all the stuff you ate?

BH: No, and that was only in Brazil that we had that cook stuff. We had cans when we were growing up?

GW: Yes.

BH: We didn't grow any of our food when we were growing up. Except when dad had his big garden out back, he decided he'd grow a bunch of vegetables. And mom had this mean, funny streak, and every night dad would come home from work and check his garden, he had some sort of cucumber coming in! So mom goes to the grocery store and buys a huge cucumber and goes up to the vine with a straight pin and puts it through the vine and the cucumber, so when he picks it up it looks like it came off the vine. So the next night he comes in he goes "OH MY GOD!" Mom really did have quite a neat sense of humor.

LS: She was being nice to him!

BH: Yeah and he says "SEE look at this look at this!" and she's grinning from ear to ear she'd been tired of hearing that little cucumber growing ... So no, we didn't. In Brazil they went to the market every day but .. I don't think early on I remember, but I don't ever remember us having a garden other than what you might have out back.

GW: And do you know why, we might not use them, but do you know why we know our proper table manners?

BH: Because Mother was a fanatic about it!

GW: You're exactly right, but why was she a fanatic about it?

BH: I don't remember, now who's the woman who she just quoted night and day and day and night?

GW: Emily Post.

BH: Emily Post!

GW: But it's more than that. I didn't realize it until a year ago but she went to school at the University of Tennessee and graduated in Home Economics where they teach you - put the spoon and fork HERE - and all that kind of stuff - so she was really using her education.

BH: Except Mom DIDN'T want to do that, back when Mom went to college her mother told her the only thing she could be was a teacher, or go into Home Ec, or go into Nursing. Those were her only options. But you know Mamaw got a college education. She went to Belmont which was really unheard of, but her father really believed in education, and she got a college degree.

GW: Her brother went to Vanderbilt.

BH: Really? Uncle Hud? Is that who it was, the dentist?

GW: Yes.

BH: Uncle Doc?

GW: Yes.

LS: Ah, Doc was the uncle! Because she writes about Uncle Doc.

BH: And HE had ... wasn't uncle Doc that had the really cool place ... who was married to Aunt Virginia?

GW: Uncle Hub.

BH: They didn't have any kids I don't think.

GW: No.

BH: He had this game room with pinball machines and everything, I mean this was unheard of - maybe people had a TV set but that was it. And we'd go down there and he'd say "just have a good time", and we just loved him.

BH: I have a lot of Mom memories. She said when she was in college that she was a little bit of a hellion.

LS: She was a wild person in high school! I'm reading this diary and I'm thinking she must be 18 or 19 ... going out to these dances every night, staying out until 1 am, her parents are staying up worried sick because she's not home and where could she be, and she kind of wanders in with Lester, and I get to "she turns 17" and I'm thinking Good God, she's only 16! So I can imagine when she took off for college she must have been even worse!

JM: Do you remember your 16th year?

LS: Well, but you think that far back they were so sweet and innocent, it's only the current generation that's bad, and then you saw well, they're all like that! All the parents have these worries!

BH: I think Mom started out ... I ran into, believe it or not, when we went to Mom's funeral, I ran into the guy that happened to be the principle of the elementary school, I don't know how that guy was still around, But anyway, and he was talking about Pop Blake - Mom's dad. Mom would get in trouble all the time and so they'd call and Pop Blake would go down there to see what was going on, and that he was saying Pop Blake would come in and say 'what's the problem' or something and he'd say that Pop Blake would kind of shake his head - I don't remember what he said but the whole point was he just thought she was pretty cool, She had such spirit, he got a kick out of it.

BH: But I do know in high school one time she HATED her Home Ec teacher, just hated her, and she said she carried this BIG wad of keys everywhere, and one day she was going down the hall and she saw this wad of keys stuck in some door and she thought ... she took them out - this was in the middle of winter - she took them out and froze them in one of the freezers ice trays and it was the middle of winter, they weren't using ice ever - and finally I think they found out.

BH: And one of the things in college was - she said it was really sad - the war started and all these guys and everything was fun - she had this boyfriend and one time they had to be in the dorm at 8:00 and in fact I went to the same college she went to, the University of Tennessee of Martin, and the first time (I'm going all over the place) but the first time she came to visit me was Thanksgiving after I started and she was driving on campus and this screen that this happened to was still there all these years later, but she told me the story that they had to be in at 8 and this was when the guys were on campus - they hadn't been pulled for the war - and she called her boyfriend and said we are just starving. We're about to die. Bring us some food. and so he went somewhere and got a pie for them And he came and just cut the screen and gave them the pie. So when mom came to visit me, that screen hadn't been replaced, after all of those years. it was still cut from that pie.

BH: But one time they got a cow and got it into the president's office. And one of the things, they always had these blackouts during the war so they did all the shenanigans ... mom said when they would have those blackouts that they would go kind of crazy. Everybody dumped their garbage in these big garbage cans at the tops of the stairs, and I guess the janitors would come and get them. This is while she was in school. So she said this one time it was too tempting, so she decided to just push the whole can. But at that millisecond the lights came on and the dorm mother was standing right at the bottom of the stairs and she said she picked up garbage All Night Long.

BH: But her biggest shenanigan was you were NOT to cook in the room. Period. So they got really ingenious and my mother had an iron and she had one of those little tiny flat skillets. And she would stand up books - and they had a trunk and I guess they opened the trunk and it was empty, and they would stack up books so it would hold the iron upside down and they would cook bacon - I mean of all things, bacon - I mean what smells more in the whole world than cooking bacon. So they'd be frying bacon and someone would yell down the hall that the dorm mother was coming, so they'd unplug the iron and throw the cord in there and put the top on it and sit on it and she'd come in and say "what's going on" and they'd go "We just don't know what you're talking about. Cooking in here? We're not cooking in here."

BH: She was pretty feisty. Pretty gutsy.

BH: Mamaw was always really sweet. I mean, she was pretty hard nosed on everybody, but for her grand kids she really was kind of sweet. I think she told each one of us that we were her favorite.

JM: Until you all got together ...

BH: I think we just knew better than to ask. We kind of knew that she might be doing that. But she was really sweet. She was hard on everybody else in the world.

LS: I guess in a way it was sort of depressing, I only went through the '41 stuff, she had this woman that she called "E" that would come and do her ironing once a week. Sunday was always SS and church and they didn't do anything else, and Monday was washing, and then I think E came by Tuesday to do the ironing and they used to get into these giant fights apparently, and she'd write about oh, she showed up late and I had this giant row with her, oh this week she showed up late, oh I fired her I told her never come back again, and she'd come back again.

BH: You'll have to ask Nancy who E is, she would know.

LS: I only started looking at the diary pretty recently, and have to ask her, but Nancy was already out of the house by then, she writes about being unhappy that Nancy didn't write her a letter.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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