| Summary: | Mrs. Frances Warren talks about growing up in Alabama and marrying George Warren right before he was shipped overseas during WWII.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Library
Interview with Frances Warren
October 12, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Rhonda Haygood and Patti Hannah
Clip 1
Rhonda Haygood: Today is October 12, 2011. I’m Rhonda Haygood with Patti Hannah. We’re at the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library interviewing Mrs. Frances Warren on her experience as the wife of a man who went to war during World War II. His name is George Warren and we’re gonna find out a little bit about what her life was like growing up and during the years that her husband was away at war. Mrs. Warren, we’re so glad to have you here. And, first off, if we could ask you to tell us when and where you were born.
Frances Warren: I was born in Rock Run, Alabama. That’s in Cherokee County and Rock Run was five miles from the Georgia line at Cave Springs, Georgia. And I was born June 1, 1924. And this little town of Rock Run was a very unusual area because it was a, a little town really, but it was a farming area and our farms were, oh, five miles from our home because the people used to work in that mining company that was in Rock Run. It was an iron ore—they made pig iron. And there was a big plant there during the Civil War and Sherman, on his way to Atlanta to destroy Atlanta came through Rock Run and destroyed the pig iron factory. So it never was in full operation again, but it stayed in operation until about 1926. And the men who owned it at that time, it was the sons of the original owners, gave everybody the opportunity to buy the homes and land where they lived there. So my dad who was a farmer bought a hundred acre farm and our house. And I only had one sister and no brothers and my sister was eight years older than me and she married at the early age of sixteen so I was by myself a lot of the time. In fact, I have a niece that’s, oh, about nine, ten years younger than me, so she was as much like a sister to me as my own sister. But in this town and in growing up we had no electricity, we did have running water because the people who owned that plant put it into their homes and we just were lucky enough to get one of those houses. So all my life I had running water. But my husband who grew up five miles from me never had running water until he was grown and he tells the tale of how they would heat the water in the tub and put it out in the sunshine to heat to get their bath and so we, at least we didn’t have to do that. But, we raised most of our food. Very little food was bought in the store. In fact, there was only one big store in Rock Run and it was a commissary during the time when the factory was going and you could go there and buy anything you wanted. I know we kids would go upstairs sometimes because they had caskets up there and we’d come downstairs and course they had groceries, they had farm equipment, they had fertilizer, they had a post office in that building, so that was the place where people would gather to sit and talk sometimes. But it was not uncommon as soon as we had even-, our evening meal for the ladies that lived around close together around they’d shell beans or peas and sit and talk and the children would play. And one of the games that I remember playing so much was Knock the Can. You had teams and you’d have a stick. We didn’t, course didn’t have a ball but we’d have a can and we’d knock that can as far as we could and use it similar to a ball. The school that I went to was a three-room school when I started. There was 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade in one room and 4th, 5th and 6th in one room and 7th and 8th if they had enough money in the county or in the state I guess too, to have the 7th and 8th grade, but some years they could not have that. When I finished the 6th grade they had built, they were building a school in Spring Garden which was about five miles from where I lived and they ran buses so I was privileged to get to go through high school in a twelfth grade school. Then when I finished the twelfth grade I was in the field one day, I worked with my dad a lot in the field because he didn’t have any boys to help, so I was in the field with my dad working and Dean Wood, who was the dean of Jacksonville University at that time, it was Jacksonville State then, came, he had been by the school and the principal told him that I would like to go to college but I wasn’t able to afford it. So he came by and he was sitting there when I got home for lunch and he talked with my parents and told them that they would see that I had work at the college if I wanted to go to school and if they would let me go. So it was arranged and I started to Jacksonville. I worked for twenty-five cents an hour; that’s how I paid my way through college. I cleaned the dean’s office. I worked in the library; his wife was the librarian, and so I worked there. And then on Saturday I worked in their home, helped clean house and that kind of thing. Also, Fort McClellan was close by and in the dormitory where I lived it was a three story dormitory and the top story did not have students but they had Army Officers and their wives living there and so I could babysit anytime that I wanted to and sometimes they would be gone like over the weekend and they would leave their children and maybe two or three families at night would, they just wanted to go out for dinner or something, would ask me to stay and they did not want me to go in the room with the children. I would sit in the hall where I could hear them and so at that time I made seventy-five cents an hour which was a lot of money then.
RH: Yeah.
FW: Because I wasn’t accustomed to having money. Nobody in our area had, course we were in a rural area but nobody had money. But I didn’t know we were poor because everybody was in the same boat.
RH: Um-hm.
FW: Then I had one year of college and that was when the war was really drafting; they were really drafting the boys and so most of the men teachers were drafted. And in Cherokee County, I don’t know if it was that way in the whole state or not, but in Cherokee County if you had one year of college you could start teaching and then working on your degree. So I went back to the school where I had finished high school and was teaching and I’d been teaching a week when George had gotten a ten day furlough—oh, I might go back and say that he was in school also where I went to high school –
RH: So, you knew him—
FW: I knew him.
RH: ―during those years.
FW: Yes, and we had been dating for quite a while and we had planned to get married but we were going to wait until the war was over but on that ninth day of a ten day furlough we changed our mind and we got married on the ninth, ninth day of his furlough. So we only had that night. That was on a Saturday, we had that Saturday night and then he had to go back to camp on Sunday and he was in Camp Forrest, Tennessee. So the next weekend he had not been shipped out and I went to Camp Forrest and we had that Saturday night together and then that week he was shipped out. So it was a very, very lonely time.
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