| Summary: | (6:02) Mr. Ingram discusses the Great Depression, his first job, going to church and building a canoe in Florence, Alabama.This interview 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 B.M. Ingram
July 7, 2009
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Clint Alley and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 2 of 9
Clint Alley: Well, what did your dad do for a living?
B.M. Ingram: Dad, Dad was a cotton broker, um, basically, in my early years there. And one of the examples was that he had bought about 200 bales of cotton, paying fifty cents a pound for the cotton and then the, when the Depression hit, it dropped from fifty cents to forty cents a pound, and he decided to hold on because he knew it was going back up. And then it dropped to thirty, and down to twenty, and finally he sold it at five cents a pound, so that’s what happened to everybody in business during the Depression.
CA: But he did stay in business through the Depression, though?
BI: Well, we had, we had nothing else to do, I mean you tried, tried to stay in business, but, uh, he, uh, later was hired by a farm-land bank and he, uh, for the land bank he’d leant money to some of the other farmers, and tried to get by. But it was, if you look at it now, I was very fortunate to grow up in the Depression. Everything’s been uphill since. To give you an idea of the Depression, just think of, if you go out on a date right now, that you take no telling how much to get by, just as a minimum, where we would take a quarter, and take our dates to the movie—now that was black-and-white movies, with no sound—and, ah, we’d take them to the movies at ten cents apiece and take them, take them home and then we’d go out and buy us a hamburger for a nickel. We didn’t buy them a hamburger. [laughter] Save the money!
CA: And you do that, you could do all that on a quarter, huh?
BI: Oh yeah, but a quarter was hard to get.
[laughter]
CA: Well, what was your first job?
BI: Well, of course growing up I raised things, vegetables and things, and sell them, and I had that cow and I milked the cow and sold a little of the milk on Walnut Street and that type thing. They, ah, I guess the first job that you might have that was a real job was, I went to Georgia Tech as a co-op student. And I went to Elizabethton, Tennessee to work at a Rayon mill. This was a job that the school had, and I would work there three months and come back to school for three months, and another boy would alternate back and forth with me. North American Rayon, Elizabethton, Tennessee.
CA: Well, did your, did your family go to church when you were young?
BI: We, ah, went to the First Methodist Church. And it had been the church that our family had gone to for years before I did, and my mother was the first organist there. And she was the organist for twenty-five years.
CA: So she was musical, then?
BI: Oh, very much.
CA: Did she play any other instruments?
BI: No. Piano and organ. She looked at me and thought I was gonna be an expert on music, but turned out wrong.
[laughter]
BI: She exposed me to— exposed but it didn’t take.
[laughter]
CA: You said y’all went to the movies when you were out on your dates, did y’all do anything else for entertainment when you were younger?
BI: Well, we’d go swimming at—they had a swimming pool, it was an actual pool, it was out at the, ah, on the creek that the fairgrounds, the Florence fairgrounds was on. Ah, we would also go to what we called Barbar. That’s a place on Cypress Creek where they built the new, ah, bridge. And it’s, it’s on the side of Wildwood Park. And we would go down there and we’d built a little canoe and a trailer that we could pull behind a bicycle. So you could tell that was a big canoe! And so we would pull it down there and when, the first time that we pulled it down there it would throw us off and we kept taking it back home and adding more and more of a keel; a keel is something underwater to try to help us balance it. And finally we got enough on there to where we could paddle. And once we learned to paddle, we started taking the keel off. And it made us feel so good that we, there we could get in it and go around fine and finally we would have these big, tough football players that want to try the canoe, and they’d get in there and it’d throw them out. And so it made us feel so superior! One of the few times we could outdo the football stars!
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