stories you may enjoy

eastern shore stories:

This project is sponsored by a partnership between the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the PNC Foundation. Blog entries are excerpts from interviews conducted for the Farm Life Oral History project. Photographs are family photos or memorabilia shared with me for the project.

check it out. looks like they've been posting since last october. here's a snippet of a story posted in january:

Richard: it’s just mind-boggling to see how far $100 goes now. I mean it’s weekly [now] …

We lived on a farm. We got our mail from Pastoria. … Dad let us go to the store most nights. The men always talked around the old country stove, and I’m talking during the ’30′s now, during the Depression, and us boys played Dead Mule and Lost Track and Hide and Seek and all the other games boys and girls play. So, it was a good life.

We didn’t have any money. Nobody had money.

Nora Lee: Nobody, so everybody was poor.

Richard: The store was two miles through the woods. I made many a trip out there with a dozen or two dozen eggs or a piece of fat meat to get mamma’s groceries, and if it was 15 cents leftover, you got what you’d call a due bill. The store master, the storekeeper, gave you this little piece of paper that – owed you 15 cents for a
side of meat or a dozen eggs.

That was the hub, yeah. That’s how you – well, you bought everything you needed. You bartered for most of it with eggs or a side of fat meat.

On Saturday night [when we went into Parksley] … we got a quarter. Fifteen cents for the movie. And ten cents for an ice cream cone. Ice cream cone was about a nickel or a Coke or whatever, but it was ten cents to throw away. That was what we got. We got 25 cents Saturday night.

Nora Lee: That was the highlight of your week.