Carolyn Tanner Oral History Project
Interview with Carolyn Tanner
Date of Interview: March 16, 2008; Provo, Utah
Interviewer: Cabrina Minson
Transcriber: Cabrina Minson
Begin tape 1, Side 1
Cabrina: This is a phone interview with Carolyn Tanner. She is in Nashville, Tennessee right now, while I am in Provo, UT. The date is March 16, 2008.
Cabrina: To start the questions off, Miss Carolyn, where were you born?
Carolyn: I was born in West Tennessee, in a little town called Ripley.
Cabrina: What day were you born?
Carolyn: September the 24th , 1936.
Cabrina: Oh your birthday is close to mine. I’m the 20th
Carolyn: Oh Good, Good.
Cabrina: Alright, so what was life like growing up as a child in the Deep South?
Carolyn: Well, of course, in 1936 we were just sort of getting over the big depression. And people were still very conservative. And very humbled, I think, by the sever depression we had. But I grew up in a small town. Most of the homes in the small town had gardens in their backyard. A lot of people had their own chickens and cow, even in town. Everybody had a black maid, unless they were terribly poor. What else do you need to know? I could tell you an awful lot.
Cabrina: Oh keep going this is interesting.
Carolyn: Keep going? Okay. We did have movies to attend on Saturday. We did not have television. I was about 13 years old when I saw TV for the first time.
Cabrina: Really? What were your first thoughts when you first saw a television?
Carolyn: I couldn’t believe it. Although, the first TV was so scrambled. It was really hard to get a good, clear picture. Of course, it was black and white. But it was wonderful to stay at home.
The auto Buick dealer in our small town had the first television. And every body in town went to the dealership to see the first TV.
Cabrina: Really?
Carolyn: Yes, and I was probably 11 then. When I was 12, I think, my father bought one. We would sit around the TV at night and watch good clean television. It was not educational at that time. It was strictly an entertainment medium. Really good, clean entertainment. And the only other entertainment was the public entertainment of movies. We did have a theater in town.
Our telephones at the time, we had a number, my number was 412. We would pick up the phone and the operator would say, “Number please” and we would give her the number we needed. Or we would call the telephone operator, who happened to be our Sunday school teacher, Miss. Rosa. And we would say “Miss. Rosa, what is playing at the theater today”. And she would tell us. She would give us the name of the movie and tell us all about it. We would go to the Saturday movies for $.25.
Cabrina: $.25? Oh wow!
Carolyn: Uh huh. Well, the movie only costs $.12. The earliest I remember, the movie was $.12, then we had another $.5 for popcorn, and $.5 for a coke.
Cabrina: Oh wow!
Carolyn: We’d come home, and the rest of the week, we would act out the movies.
Cabrina: Do you have any special memories of certain movies?
Carolyn: On Saturday’s the movies were westerns. And I hated Western movies. Nobody liked them except for the boys. We would sit and chitchat during the movies and wait for the serial. The serial was sort of like a short movie that ran from week to week. Tarzan was my favorite. It would last for about 15 or 20 minutes. And they would leave him at the edge of a cliff. So you had to go back the next Saturday to see whether he made it or not. We would go home, and there were woods behind my house. We’d go home and swing on the grape vines. And do all those fun things.
Cabrina: Oh that is so fun. How old were you when you would go to the movies?
Carolyn: Well, course back then, it was safe to go anywhere we wanted to. We could ride our bicycles, and leave them parked outside. Probably, 9 or 10 years old. I don’t think we would ride our bikes on that side of town that early. Our mother or dad would take us there and drop us off. But we had a good time. We had a great time. I grew up about 10 miles from the Mississippi River. So we did a lot of water skiing in the little back lakes that jetted off the Mississippi. We had fishing and people had lake houses and we would go down in the night and go waterskiing the next day, or fish or whatever. The Mississippi River’s banks were sandy. Very sandy. But the sand was dark brown. I didn’t know beaches were white until I went to Florida. I think I was 9 years old on our first trip to Florida. Well, I could go on and on… ask me another question.
Cabrina: That is good stuff. Well, I’ll ask you a question about radios. Did you have a radio in your home when you were younger?
Carolyn: Oh yes, we did. It was about 4 ft tall and 3 ft wide. All radios were big then. Yes, we would gather around the radio and listen to the news, mostly WWII news. My sister, who was a year older than I was, and I would, on Saturday mornings help mom clean house and wax floors and do all those things. We would turn on our favorite program called “Let’s pretend”. It was always a pretend story that was fun. We would listen to that while we were working. We also had a car radio too. I think most cars did have radios. And my dad liked to listen to some of the funny shows. Amos and Andy was one of his favorite shows.
Cabrina: Okay, I’ve heard of that one
Carolyn: Yes, Of course we always went to church on Sunday morning and Sunday night, but Sunday afternoon, people visited family. You might drive an hour to visit family. So we were in the car a lot of Sunday afternoons, so we would listen to the radio then. There was never any rock music or anything like that. It was usually something funny or news worthy.
Cabrina: Now, did you ever listen to the Grand Ole Opry radio station?
Carolyn: I did not like Grand Ole Opry. I don’t like country music, some bluegrass, but no I really didn’t. In fact, nobody in my family listened to it. You know it’s really funny. When I was young, we didn’t care about coming to Nashville. And the Grand Ole Opry would travel through the small towns. They would either perform in the theaters or they would have a tent in town. They would have a tent show. Some of them were a little unsavory. That was the one week out of the whole year that our parents would not let us ride our bicycles downtown, because those people were in town. They were considered unscrupulous, back then. Now of course, it’s so different. It is well respected and it is the great music city here.
Cabrina: Well, that’s very interesting. I didn’t know that. Well, some more questions for you. I’m going to go more towards big world events. You said you listened to the news of WWII. Can you tell me more about that?
Carolyn: Of course, that was the only way we kept up with what was going on. I know when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor that was a real scary time in our lives. It was a surprise attack. Nobody was expecting it. If it could happen there, it could happen to us. We had a small town close to us called Halls, Tennessee. There was an airbase there; there was also an airbase in Memphis close to us. So we lived in fear. Every time I heard planes go over, I would look up to make sure there wasn’t a big orange suns painted on the bottom of the wing like the Japanese planes had. We had civil defense people in our country that would come around about once a week and have air raids. When the sirens would blow, we had to pull all of our shades down in case there was an attack. Theses men would come around with flashlights and knock on your doors to make sure everybody was ok and to make sure that all of the windows were covered, just incase.
Cabrina: Oh wow, that’s scary.
Carolyn: Oh it was. My mother had three brothers who were in the war. So, there was talk of war a lot at my house. The family would get together on the weekends and make cookies and candy and talk about these three suns that were over seas. But it was a good time too. We, of course were always safe, but we just never knew.
Cabrina: Oh wow. Now moving on a little bit, being in the South there were different issues of black supremacy and the desegregation of schools. Did that affect you largely?
Carolyn: Oh absolutely, absolutely. Our schools were segregated. As a matter of fact, many blacks didn’t get to go to school at all. But they did have black schools. It really was a terrible situation. When I look back on it, I think, how in the world could we have lived that way. The blacks, of course, all worked for white people. They were paid. I mean, this is all beyond Slavery thank you. I’m not that old. But everybody, as I said earlier, had a black maid. We had this same black maid, Orally Van, for 25 years. So, we loved her dearly, we really did. Orally was like all blacks, to her everybody in our household was “Miss Carolyn, Mr. John” And even to the infants. It was “Mr. Bill’s crying we need to get him a bottle”. Everybody was Mr. and Miss.
When we would walk to school, which we did a lot back then, if the blacks were on the sidewalk, they would get off the sidewalk and let us go by. They weren’t allowed to use our restrooms; they weren’t allowed to drink from our water fountains. They weren’t allowed to go into our restrooms. They weren’t allowed to go in our front door; they all had to come around to our back door. It was awful. I mean at the time, I didn’t realize it. I just thought that’s the way life was, until I was grown, actually, and saw a movie called “Sounder”. It was about the Deep South and how this one family was so mistreated. The black man had to steal a ham to feed his children. He was sent to prison. We cried through out the whole movie. It was an awakening to all of us. We realized how unjust and unfair life had been for them. But at the same time, they didn’t like to work that much… and probably were not healthy. They were not healthy enough to be energetic. And they had lots of diseases because of their living conditions. This, was one reason why they couldn’t eat or drink, or use our bathrooms. So, some of the behavior was justified.
On our street, Highling Ave., about every quarter of a mile, there was a colored lane. That is, in the residential areas, there would be a gravel lane that would go down to the little shanty shacks where all of the maids lived that worked for people in that area. And I’m not talking about a rich area. I mean my family was middle class. My sister and I would ride our bikes down on Saturday to watch Orally curl her daughters hair. They were good times, but they were also sad times for them, I’m sure.
Cabrina: Oh wow that is very interesting. Okay, moving up in history a little bit. How did you find out about the Kennedy assassination?
Carolyn: I think I was at the office and somebody came in and told us that he had been shot. They were afraid he might have been dead. This was after television of course, and somebody had seen it on TV and then called later to say he had been pronounced dead. It was really a shock for everybody. He was really loved by both parties. Well, it was the first time in Television history, I believe, that we were able to see this dramatic thing happening in history. I mean we all went home and saw… we all went home, because we saw them when they shot Oswald… when the man pulled through the crowd and shot him. I remember that thing, it wasn’t exciting… well it was exciting… but in a bad way. I’d never seen anyone actually be killed.
Cabrina: So you saw a lot of it in television, did you read it in the newspaper?
Carolyn: Oh ya, it was all over. It was big news. It was probably the most pronominal thing that has happened in my life time as far as news worthy.
Cabrina: Oh wow, that is very interesting. Well, those are most of the questions that I have. Is there anything else you would like to talk about?
Carolyn: Oh no, I don’t think so; I probably said more than you needed to know.
Cabrina: Oh no you were great.
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