| Summary: | (5:39) Mrs. Barton discusses her life during WWII and her education and subsequent teaching career. This inteview is part of an oral history project funded by a grant from the Alabama Historical Records Board, managed by the Alabama Department of Archives and History staff, using funds provided by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Martha Barton
May 14, 2009
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 8 of 10
Clint Alley: Okay, so Pearl Harbor, um, and like we said, you were in high school when that happened, I guess.
Martha Barton: Um-hm, um-hm.
CA: Okay. And, did your, did your parents did they—you say they, they—did they take any special jobs during the war or did they, your mother kept teaching?
MB: No, my mother kept teaching and my father was already working, ah, he worked for TVA and he worked for Reynolds, whichever place needed the electricians. I think the union—now I’m thinking this—that the union sent him to TVA or they sent him to Reynolds, whichever place—
CA: Okay, whichever place they needed him?
MB: —they needed the electricians.
CA: Okay. At, at Reynolds they were making airplanes at the time, weren’t they?
MB: Rey—Aluminum.
CA: Aluminum, okay, okay.
MB: Parts for the—they made ingots I think, and sent those to the factories.
CA: Um-hm. Okay, and that’s Wise Alloys now?
MB: Yeah.
CA: Okay. Uh, well do you remember rationing?
MB: Oh yes, yes.
CA: You talked about rationing gas. What were the things they rationed the most?
MB: Shoes; you could have two pairs a year. Sugar was rationed and course gasoline was rationed. But we had ration books and, ah, the one page was little stamps and one page was a little—like postage stamps—had airplanes or tanks or something that separated what you were using them for. And then we had tokens that, ah, you had red and blue tokens. Red, I think, was meat and, ah, if you could buy meat. And, ah, the blue ones were for the rest of the food. And that was sort of like a tax thing, and then they had those aluminum ones with the hole in the middle, and I’ve looked everywhere to see if I could find one of those, or some of those other little hard blue and red ones, but I haven’t found any yet.
CA: I was gonna say, you can still see a lot of those, ah, ration books floating around—
MB: Yeah, I’ve got, I’ve got a lot of them.
CA: —but I’ve never heard of the tokens before.
MB: Got a lot of the books and the tokens wound up being used as washers in things.
CA: Um-hm.
MB: I don’t know, there might be some still there, I, if I dig deep enough.
(laughter)
CA: So the rationing, did you notice any—, was there anything else that just, ah, you noticed everyday about the war, during the war, at home?
MB: Ah, you listened—we listened to the radio. And we knew what they were telling on the radio, ah, trying to think of some of those commentators, but I’m blank right now. Ah, each night, and my father, if he was working daytime and was home at night, he was listening. And at school, when I was in the tenth grade, maybe, we had a big map of the world up on the board. And every day in—we talked about where the fighting was and found the place on the map.
CA: Um-hm. So they made it into a geography lesson?
MB: It was sort of a geography, and a history, and—
CA: Current events?
MB: —current events kind of thing.
CA: Okay. Sounds like you had some pretty good teachers, then.
MB: I did, but they called all this high school curriculum at the time—at this school—Core Curriculum. It was in blocks of two hours. And we didn’t have history, we didn’t have literature, we had to pick all that stuff up from what we were doing.
CA: Oh, okay.
MB: And we’d pick a topic and study it, hope it’d bring in some of the other things, but that made going to college hard—
CA: Oh, yeah.
MB: —because the college had standards and I really wondered how I made it, sometimes.
(laughter)
CA: Now, but you went to Florence State, you say?
MB: Um-hm.
CA: Okay, and you, you got a teaching degree there?
MB: Yeah.
CA: Ah, what year did you graduate Florence State?
MB: Ah, ‘60—, well I started out in home ec and then after my children came, I went back and got the education block, and I got my education in ’60 and the master in ’80.
CA: Okay, okay. So you went back and got another one twenty years later, then?
MB: Um-hm.
CA: Okay. That’s, that’s pretty good, you don’t hear a lot of people able to do that. So—
MB: Well—
CA: —that’s quite an accomplishment.
MB: —my mother did it, and if she could, I could, I thought!
(laughter)
CA: And was she the main influence on you? Is that why you decided you wanted to be a teacher?
MB: She, or my grandmother. Ah, I guess teaching was just in our blood. Both of my mother’s sisters taught school.
CA: Um-hm.
MB: Ah, I don’t really know of any of my cousins that ever taught school. I didn’t have that many, but.
CA: So you had a lot of family in education?
MB: Yeah. From way back.
CA: And what was the first teaching job that you had?
MB: Here in the city of Florence, at Weeden School.
CA: Weeden School, okay. And what year was that?
MB: Sixty.
CA: Nineteen sixty.
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