| Summary: | (5:48) Mr. Crouch describes going to church and dating, Christmas day and a bakery shop in Florence, Alabama in the early 1900s. 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 Carroll Crouch July 10, 2009 Florence, Alabama Conducted by Juliann Losey and Rhonda Haygood
Clip 9 of 14
Carroll Crouch: You had a lot of respect for the girls or whatever, you just didn’t go, you didn’t go and jump into anything. The first dating I ever done, I went to most of the churches in Florence at one time or another: Mars Hill, Sherrod Avenue, North Wood, and the Highland Baptist Church, had a dirt floor back then. I went to those churches, because the girls that you dated, the first thing you done is you went to church with them, you carried them to church. And you might not have been interested in the church or anything like that, but that’s, that’s the way it was. So, you had a lot of respect for the girls and the families, you know. But after I come back from overseas, I had been corresponding with Maxine a whole lot, and really missed her. And so I got on the bus and went to Birmingham eventually, and visited with her, you know. And that’s, like I told you, about the tale about getting my marriage set up and everything.
Christmas was a big day. Used to, Christmas started about nine o’clock at night on Christmas Day. You didn’t see people milling around, going to stores and all like that. They didn’t go to the stores until about late at night, after dark. Well they had firecracker stands all up and down Court Street and Seminary Street and so forth; there was a lot of people, milling around town. See the stores didn’t close, ordinarily, till about eleven o’clock at night. They stayed open from maybe six- thirty or seven o’clock till eleven o’clock, that was before you had to pay people overtime and all that kind of stuff. But it was amazing to come to town and see people buying things, you know. And it might be people bought gifts or something like that, or made gifts before that, but most of it went on at nine o’clock on Christmas Day, Christmas Night. And I’ve always thought that, thinking back, that that was a little bit neat or whatever you want to call it, you know.
The bakeries, there was a bakery on the corner of Seminary Street and Tennessee Street, big bakery, big building, and there was a rooming house up above it. They called it The Hook’s House, the rooming house. It was like a little café or a, or a boarding house, and, but the bakery down in the corner of it, you know, it was a Greek that run it. It was always a good, good thing to go down there and buy some cookies or buy something that he baked up, you know. And I frequented that place. And then there was another one on, on Wood Avenue, I mean Court Street, about the middle of the Court Street block, let’s see, I don’t think, things have changed so much, but it’d be the between Mobile Street and Tombigbee Street, in the middle of that block. Well, Mrs. Kern run that bakery. And they, her and her husband, they lived on Lelia, close to North Florence, but they worked all the time in that store. They had their delivery, they made bread and delivered it. There wasn’t too much bread made like, what we’d call, I’d call that light bread, you know. But she made cookies on a particular night in the week, like brownies and what you call a fruit bar cookie, and I loved them. And I’d go in there to buy a nickels worth and she had a sack about this big and about that high, she’d fill that thing up with those things for a nickel. Well, I didn’t catch on for years, that that was the night that she made those things, I knew that, and she made cherry pies, little cherry pie about that big around, delicious. She called me at the store one day and told me to bring something down there from the store, you know. Which, I was often delivering things like that to people. And I got down there, she’d just turned out these big pies, you know and she had one that was still warm and everything there for me, you know. But they was looking after me and I didn’t know it, you know. And of course this was maybe nine or nine- thirty or ten o’clock I’d go in there to get these cookies, you know.
And then another thing that happened, up on the Trowbridges used to have a place on- that faced the park here [ gestures in the direction of Wilson Park]. They had sundaes. And I could buy things like that, I mean I had change. And there’s two big ice cream places, that one, the Trowbridge place and the one they called the Blue Bird that was on Tennessee Street here. And I really went there a lot of times. But anyway, I’d buy sundaes and she had a big, old sundae about this big, and she had big three dips of ice cream and then she’d put something like a walnut syrup on it, you know, and then she’d put whipping cream and a cherry on top of it and bananas of course was in that, banana split. Well, I loved those things. They didn’t cost very much, maybe ten or fifteen cents. But, then she made a sundae, a butterscotch sundae I called it, and when they built the place on, facing the park on Seminary Street, she could see me coming around the curve on my bicycle up there about, about the, the tavern. Well, she’d be looking out her window and she’d see me, and by the time I got there she had one set up, set it up right there. They were really looking after me, you know, back then.
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