Mrs. Peggy Baker (Part IV)

(Born 1927) 

Parents: Eva Jane Norris and Fletcher Ellington Maffett

Siblings: Phillip Wayne Maffett, and Norris and Jane, deceased

Husband: Lovic Pierce Baker (Married on February 26, 1949)

Children: Jane Norris, “Buck” (Leonard Pierce), and Julie Mani, deceased

 (Continued from Part III…)

Your daughter had horses?

Yeah, it was like living in the country, and it was right there in Hapeville, Georgia, even when I-85 came by. That’s why we put up the sign because it was going to face right on I-85. This was right before the Olympics, and we figured we were going to make a lot of money.

Were you selling something [during the Olympics]?

No, we had a signboard. A company took it and ran it for us; they leased it out. I’ve still got it. When we sold our property to Hertz, the four sisters sold theirs, too. We took a little bit less for ours on condition that we could have the right of way to have that sign. We didn’t have to pay anything; it was our sign. The people that took it over were going to pay us a $1,000 a month for it whether there was anything on it or not. Then, we would get 10% interest on whatever revenue came from the boards.

So, everybody else now is gone, and I still have the signboard. I’m still getting some money, but not as much money as they used to because sign boards—they’re on an expressway that can’t move any closer than 500 yards together. They can’t be any closer than so far beyond the right of way. The right of way is probably 50 feet.

The outdoor sign association has been fighting to get permission to go in and cut trees up to the right of way because so many of them (particularly when it rains so much) have grown up so tall that a lot of signs can’t be seen. Something that was worth $2,000 a month now is worth about $200. Now they want to take a quarter of my base of a $1,000, and I’m probably going to have to agree to it.

My friend that put up the first sign moved in and got with Hertz. I guess it’s going to work out okay; it’s about the best I can do. If it hadn’t been for a lot of my friends in advertising including Ted Turner’s company… His father started an outdoor company, and they were the first ones that got contracts on my brother-in-law here, us, and a neighbor down the way. But the neighbor down the way never did get a sign. When we sold it all to Hertz, my brother-in-law just threw in the signboard. He didn’t care, but we did, and we kept it. They’re money is gone, and they’re gone, and I’ve still got my signboard. That was smart. My husband was a pretty smart cookie.

Can I ask about your traveling a little bit?  You said that you’ve been to Normandy.

I had and still have the best CPA. The CPA’s name is Jim Roy. A CPA is a certified accountant. So, he came in one day and said, “You know what? I have been taking out pay roll tax on you, and because you’re married to the owner of the business, you don’t have to pay that.” He said, “I’m going to start filing one week at a time to get the money back for you.” I had already decided that at I was going to take mine at sixty-two; I wasn’t going to wait till sixty-five because I wanted to travel.

He started [getting the money back], and there were three girls that worked for us. Every week, when I’d go and get the mail, I’d come back, and there would be an envelope and a check for three or four hundred dollars or something. It got be just ridiculous. Everybody would say, “How much do you have, now?”  “Oh, I don’t know… about $2,000.” So, what did I do? I went to Paris all by myself. Then, I went south of France and saw them, and then I went north of France and saw our French relatives.

Was most of your travel after you retired?

No, before. We still had the agency in the beginning, but I had been back to Paris and all over France. Then, after we had retired, I said, “Buddy, you have got some cousins that you don’t even know, so let’s go and do a little roaming around.” We got some Euro passes, and then, I said, “Do you want me to get a travel agent to plan it?” He said, “No you can do it. You can figure it out yourself.” We went and spent a lot of time in France, and then we went over to Waterloo because I had a niece and nephew that were living over there. Then, we started using our Euro passes and went all over Switzerland. We got kidnapped and taken to a golf course up on top of a glacier, which was very exciting. Wait, what?!

You just have to open up. These two ladies were on the train, and they heard Buddy saying, “I’ll be kind of glad when I get home. I want to play some golf.” This woman leaned over and said, “I know where there’s a golf course.” She said, “Get off at the next stop with us.” So we stopped, and we went into this wonderful apartment that they had. Then, we got on this lift that went up all the way. It was on the backside of the Jungfrau. Her husband was an architect, and he had designed this golf course. My husband was over there with them, and they gave him a golf club and some balls. He was hitting balls, and they would just *whooshing imitation* disappear.

I don’t know where they putted, so I went off with the lady. There were a lot of nice shops there, but of course, all of that closed down in the wintertime, and [the shop owners] were skiing instead. When we got back, that was Buddy’s favorite story. He said, “You’re not going to believe this, but we got kidnapped and taken up on the top of a glacier and saw a golf course.” That’s a really cool story—so spontaneous!

Well, I’m going to tell you just very briefly the things in my career that were most important as it worked out. After I retired from Ivan Allen Company, I ended up going back for him when he was mayor, and I did a lot of speech writing for him. He went into office in 1961, and a guy named Carl Sanders from Augusta ran for governor, and he was elected. It was the first time Atlanta had had a progressive mayor and a progressive governor at the same time.

He called me one day, and he said, “You have to go down to the Ansley Hotel and meet this lawyer named Carl Sanders because he’s going to run for governor against so-and-so. We have to get rid of him. The guy that’s going to be doing a lot of the speeches is editor of the paper in Gainesville, but he needs somebody/ his alter ego…”

The next thing I know is that I have a reformed drunk and another guy and a gal, and we were up there just turning out speeches like you wouldn’t believe it, and darn if he didn’t get elected! That went on and on and on, and then, I got a part-time job working for Ivan Allen at City Hall. I did a lot of speech writing. When he was ready to retire after his second term was over, guess who got to write his last speech? Did you? (Nods her head…) Wow.  

I think he’s crazy. He called me one day, and he said, “The truck’s going to be out there,” and I said, “What? What truck?” He said, “I’m sending you a desk and a typewriter and a chair and some paper. I want you to write my last speech.” He said, “You can call on anybody in City Hall. They’ll give you all the information you want.” I still have a copy of it. Wow, what an accomplishment! That is so cool.

People would say [to him], “What about that woman that used to work for you? What’s she doing?” One day, he said to me, “I want you to meet the guy that’s the head of Fulton County Medical Society.” I said, “What for?” He said, “There is a pharmaceutical company who has a vaccine for polio.” There was one [vaccine] that you had to have an injection, and nobody wanted to take [a vaccine] with that. This was one, though, they would pour little bit on a little salt cube, and you would take it. Then, six months later you would come back and get another one. Then, you were immune from polio for your life. Fifteen counties were going to be involved, and we had the fire departments; we had everybody. [Ivan Allen] said, “You’ve got to put together a group that can get enough volunteers—people out of Georgia Tech, high schools, and this, that, and the other.” And it worked; it worked like a dog for a while. Then, we had to put it all to bed, and then, six months later, we had to do it again.

Did you spread the word to get people to come and take the vaccine?

Yes, and then, there was absolutely no polio. There were other cities around the country that were doing the same thing. I guess ours was kind of a model. Fifteen counties [in Georgia].

Anyway, my old doctor went to Emory, and after he graduated, he was teaching out there. He had a class. There was a young couple in there; they weren’t married yet, named Sam Bo and Helen. When they were still in medical school, it was Sam Bo and Helen Sams who started medicals in Fayette County. When Frank Harris (he was our old doctor) retired, he said, “When you get down there to Fayette County, you just look up Sam Bo and Helen. Let them be your doctors.” Both of them passed away this year, but then, Jim Sams, one of the sons of Helen, became our doctor and our dear friend.

His wife and two other women all had little Down syndrome boys, like I had a little girl with Down syndrome. They had gotten a state grant to start a little school, and they did across from where the Sams lived. They loaned them this little house. They were going to start a school for little boys or little girls that were disabled.

Sarah Goza was Sam Bo’s sister. My daughter moved to Woodward Academy for her last four years in high school. She and Sally Goza, Sarah’s daughter, got be good friends, and then, we moved down here and got to know all of them. Anyway, the school started, and it got so big. Sarah Goza called me one day, and she said, “Come over to Helen’s house at ten o’clock Tuesday morning.” I said, “What for?” She said, “She’s going to have a breakfast, and we’re going to try to get some publicity to get some money for the school because it needs to grow.” So we did, and then, we ended up moving to a place over near the courthouse that was almost as crowded as that little house.

I thought, “Well I can write, and I know something about publicity. I’ll just start doing stuff for the little newspapers and whatever.” So that worked pretty well. Then, when the high school got a new high school in Fayette County, we moved into the old high school.

When little Joe, who was their boy, was fourteen, he got Leukemia, which is not unusual for Downs boys when they get to puberty. He died. The funeral was down in Inman, Georgia by the old Baptist Church. We were all sitting around the table afterwards, and somebody said, “We have got to build our own school and name it after Joe,” and that’s what happened. One sunny day, there were three hundred people that came and there was all this stuff and food and everything. Everybody got a 2×4 and you’d write your name on it; you didn’t know where it was going, but you’d know it was in that building. That’s so sweet; I’ve never heard that story.

We didn’t really have much money, but we had a lot of people in the construction business. The guys all got together, and they got [the school] up. Then, years went by, and we had to figure out how to raise money. So, we just really got into it.

My husband and Jim Sams started having this dinner dance and auction. We didn’t have this auction to begin with; now, we have it every year in the spring out in front of the Sam’s house down there on Antioch. It’s third generation, and they lived there. My husband and Jim Sams would get down there by the barn, and they would cook. They would rent a cooker, and they would cook a lot of backbone. They called it “Buddy’s Backbone.” Then, we would have this wonderful dinner, and we would cook all the food. Now, the wives—we’d get together and decide what we were going to have, and we’d cook it.

I remember one year, my daughter Jane was up in the house folding napkins, and she said, “I think I’ll go down the barn and see if my daddy’s backbone is ready.” So she started down there, and Jim Sams yells out, “Don’t come down here, Jane; this is a man thing. Don’t come down here; just go back to house.” And she said, “You crazy old man! Don’t you know that I went to the University of Georgia, and I’ve heard it all!” (Laughs…)

So, I was on the Board of Directors for eleven years, and I’ve got a plaque to prove it. We began to get grants from the Coca-Cola Company and here there and beyond. We got to be pretty well known. We got kids there from probably six or seven counties around.

But, after my husband passed away in September 2010—he had renal failure… Not too long after that (they had already planned to do this), they had cocktails and cupcakes down at somebody’s home, a nice home. They came to get me and took me down there. I was initiated to be an Honorary Board Member of the Joseph Sams School. I have one of those gold things; it’s a circle of hope. I wear it on something a lot of times. We had 23 years that Buddy and I were involved with that little school, and we had fun. But then, Buddy yelled one day, when they were putting up the sides of the house, and he said, “I am so glad that we don’t have to move anymore. I am so damn glad because I am just worn out.” (Laughs…) We never moved again. That’s the end of my story. I had a Down’s baby, so I got to work for a whole lot of other little babies.

What advice do you have for younger people?

Well, if there’s something that you’re interested in, but you don’t think [that you can do it] either because you’re a woman or because you don’t have the money to go to the college you might like to go to [that is] far away from home or because you’re not sure that you’d get accepted in the first place, don’t give up. Point it in another direction that might take you out even in a better place, and go to even a better school. You just don’t know. If you go somewhere and that ain’t right, you can always change. If you have to work, and go to school, it’s not going to kill you.

Just take advantage of everybody that you meet. You’d be surprised how handy they come in. I mean, really, not just boyfriends or husbands, but everything. Jim and Marie Sams are probably the dearest things in my life. When Buddy was on dialysis and he was just going down really, Jim came over one night. He said, “Buddy, Peggy can’t keep running the show and taking you to dialysis and back everyday, and you’ve got to go somewhere. I think you ought to go out to Wesley Woods because you’re Methodist, and that’s the best place to go.” (That’s over near Newnan.) So that’s what he decided to do. That’s where he lived until he just got sick and tired of dialysis; he was taking it over there instead of over by the hospital.

One day, we had been to see our last new doctor, and we were outside waiting on the bus to take us back to Wesley Woods. He said, “You know what? I think I’ve shot more quail than any man in the world, and I’ve probably caught more big fish, and I know I’ve played more good golf games than anybody in the world.” He was like his father; he wasn’t too modest. Then he looked at me, and he said, “and I’ve had the best wife in the world for about sixty-two years.” I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “I’m going to tell the nurse, ‘don’t wake me up in the morning; I’m not going to get on that trolley to go to that damn dialysis place. I’m not going anymore. That’s it.’”

So, Jim Sams came out there, and he brought his brother Ferrol, who is head of a new hospice company called Advantage. The next day, they brought all their people and everything, and they said, “You can eat anything you want; you can have all the company you want; you can’t have any liquor to drink.” (Like he cared one way or the other.) He lived for three weeks, and then, he died at Wesley Woods.

We belonged to North Fayette Methodist, but it was too small, so we just had [the funeral] at Morehouse, and there were two hundred people. We looked out in the crowd, and my son looked out there and saw his old scoutmaster. He was going to tell one story, and then he decided to tell one about camping because my husband never had an official role in the scout troop, but he went on every single camping trip every month for all those years. He went to the Boy Scout camp and stayed as much of a week as he could leave his business.

He told them one time—he had this little bunk, and he had a mattress on it. He said, “Boys, I told you I would go with you on those ten mile walks, but I didn’t tell you I was going to sleep on the ground.” So one time, Tech was playing a really important game, and [my husband] had a little radio or a little TV or something. He said, “Alright boys, somebody else is going to take you for a walk; I’ve got a ball game I got to watch or listen to or whatever.” Buck said that he had a little cooler, and I mean he’s talking to two hundred people [at the funeral]! He said, “I think my dad had a couple beers in there, but that’s not against the Boy Scouts as long as the Boy Scouts aren’t there drinking beer.” (Laughs…) Of course, by the time Buck got to the end of that story, tears were just falling down his face, but there were a lot of Boy Scouts in the audience, and they were just clapping. He never slept on the ground! (Laughs…)

But he loved the Boy Scouts… I have Buck’s Eagle Scout thing and all that stuff hanging in my apartment. I said, “Buck, don’t you want to take it?” He’s funny because once he has done something, he leaves it behind and moves onto something else. He said, “Mom, you and dad worked harder than I did.” Guess one thing that he did? He had a badge that you had to go all the way out in Decatur to some church to go on Saturday for more than one Saturday. Buck and his best friend wanted to go to it, and who was one of the speakers? Governor Carl Sanders. He remembered Buck; he remembered the name because I took him up there and introduced Buck to him one time when he was running.

So see? Everything happens. It all goes around. You just never know where it’s going to take you—Scouts or Georgia State or mechanical drawing or whatever. I don’t know what happened to my drawing board; I probably gave it away to some other kid. I hope they do well with it. Also, now, the Ivan Allen Company is gone. [My family] all got into baseball. We had great tickets; we took our kids; and we lived at the stadium. I mean we had a ball! People would say, “Oh, I’ve heard about when Henry Aaron right socked that home run,” and Buck says, “Yeah, I was there. I saw it.” He just loved to do that. He was kind of immodest like his father and his grandfather. As mayor for eight years, my old boss, Ivan Allen, was the force that brought the Braves and the Falcons to the new Stadium.

Mrs. Peggy Baker (Part III)

(Born 1927) 

Parents: Eva Jane Norris and Fletcher Ellington Maffett

Siblings: Phillip Wayne Maffett, and Norris and Jane, deceased

Husband: Lovic Pierce Baker (Married on February 26, 1949)

Children: Jane Norris, “Buck” (Leonard Pierce), and Julie Mani, deceased

 (Continued from Part II…)

Was The Rampway the school newspaper?

No, it was The Signal. The Rampway was the annual. So, I did that; I thought it was going to take me two years to do it. It was a very good thing because I learned a whole lot of things about printing and photography and all that stuff. But the college was just Georgia State College. Then, later on, it became Georgia State University, which is what it is, now.

Then, my friend came to work for me at Ivan Allen Company and took my place when I retired to be with my kids. [My friend] lives at St. Simons, now, but she was the first woman to be the head of the Board of Regents. She, more than anybody else, founded the Law School at Georgia State University. I hired her when she was barely twenty years old, and I had no idea that she was a darn genius! (We all laugh…) She and I talk everyday on the phone; she’s my dearest friend—and smart, whoa! She is surely smart.

My father had married his wife after WWII was over, and she was from Brittany. Have you ever heard of Brittany? I’ve heard of it. It is a marvelous part of France. I’ve been there a hundred times, and I love it. Anyway, they came home, and they stayed with one of his sisters, and his mother didn’t know anything about cooking because she worked. She worked for what was left of the American Forces. My father-in-law and his brothers had built a tennis court on their farm out in Ben Hill. The officers found out he knew how to build tennis courts, so after the war, he stayed over there, going around the officer’s clubs building tennis courts. Later on, he built one of the best dirt tennis courts anywhere around Atlanta. Bitsy Grant and a lot of them used to play there.

When my son Buck was seventeen, his mother said, “Buddy, why don’t you go ahead and join the Navy. You know all of your ancestors in France were sea-faring people, not great big ships, but boats that carried stuff over to England and this, that, and the other. Why don’t you go ahead and join?”

Well his father didn’t want him to join because he was just going to be an enlisted man; he was seventeen years old. His father said, “If you promise me that when you get out, you’ll go to Georgia Tech, then I’ll sign for you.” So he did, but he never put a foot on a boat; he was with the airplanes.

Was this during WWII, or was it before?

This was going on before I ever knew anything about [my husband’s family]. I had a boyfriend that lived out in Hapeville. I didn’t know the Baker family, anyway. We met with that blind date, but he had a girlfriend in the Navy, and I had a whole bunch of guys I dated when I was going to Georgia State. Then, we kind of narrowed it down to just the two of us, and we got engaged.

We were going to get married at the end of his senior year, but at the beginning of his senior year, his father was getting ready to go and meet a friend down at St. Simons and go fishing. Then, he had a heart attack, and he was in the hospital. He had the best heart man around, and the heart man was standing right there beside him two weeks later when he died, and he was fifty-eight years old.

So, Buddy had to give up Georgia Tech, and he went up to Hartford and stayed for a month and a half learning the insurance business. Then, he took over the LP Baker Agency, and he had it longer than his father did. My father in law was a real daring… he was a pistol ball. (Laughs…) He didn’t like to lose anything. He loved to hunt quail, and he had some real pedigree English Spaniels. He used them for finding quail. He loved to play golf, and he loved to fish.

Now, all that is heredity because my husband liked to shoot quail. He liked to fish; he liked to play golf, and he was good at all of them. My father-in-law did not like to lose at anything. Buddy would take him out to play golf, and he knew he better lose, or he’d take him fishing, and he would handle the little boat. They had a little boat out of a private club that his uncle owned.

I knew how to poker; you’re not going to believe how I learned to play poker, but anyway, I knew how to play poker. I knew how to play checkers, too. I knew that if you get in the corner and stay in the corner, nobody could ever beat you. So sometimes, the four of us would play poker for pennies or matchsticks or whatever, and I was pretty good, you know. He did not like that; I mean he didn’t want to lose, but he sure didn’t want to lose in poker to a woman. (We laugh…)

Finally, my sister-in-law said, “You better quit winning if you want to be in this family because it’s not going to work out.” (We all laugh together…) Well, it did [work out]; it did.

What day did you marry him?

We married in 1949 on February the 26^th, but we didn’t have the big wedding that we were going to have at Peachtree Christian Church, where everybody in my family got married. Guess what we did? We eloped down to Jonesboro. You kept it exciting!

We knew somebody that had done that, so Buddy called down there and told them we were going to come down there on a Saturday night and get married. Maybe it was a Friday night… So we got down there, and he had two kids, and there was no door between the living room and dining room. The TV was in the dining room. The kids were in there watching some cowboy movie, and they never turned it down during the reception, which was not a reception. It only took about five minutes to get married, and years went by, and I had no idea where the marriage certificate was.

Then, I guess it was after my husband passed away a few years ago—I could not find that marriage license, and I had to have it for the VA. So my lawyer called the correct person down in Jonesboro and got this nice woman, and she said, “Send me two checks, each one for $16, and I’ll send you two copies of your marriage license.” So I got them both. It was very exciting.

We had a two-day, two-night [honeymoon]. (Now, this was winter; it was cold.) We went up to Chattanooga, stayed in a nice hotel, stayed two days and two nights, and came back. I didn’t know where I was going to live because my other half-sister had married, and my father was still alive. We had a two-bedroom apartment, and I thought, “Where am I going to live?” [My husband’s] mother said, “Why don’t you just come and live with me because I don’t want to be by myself with just the two young girls.”

We lived [in that apartment] for a while, but then after a while, I thought, “I need to have my own space.”  So one of [my father’s] uncles, who did a lot of building and what have you—he and somebody were building apartments down on the street where we lived on Springdale Road. When the apartments were finished, Buddy signed up for one [of the apartments] for us.

Guess what? My friend Sally that had the blind date with him; she had married earlier, a real good friend of mine, and there we were living in the projects together! (Laughs…) We didn’t have any recreation much—not a lot of money to do it. We had two favorite things that we liked to play. At the back of the apartments, there was a walkway that went down. It was so far, and there were a couple of steps, so the guys drank a little bit of beer; I never did. They had cans—beer in cans. They would start way up here, and they’d turn the thing lose so that it would roll. The contest was that whoever’s beer can stayed on the path the longest won. What did he win? He won another beer! (We all laugh…)

Then, they decided they wanted to play football, but they didn’t have a football, so guess what I got for Valentine’s Day? A football. (Laughs…) How romantic. Somebody would raise the window to their apartment, and they had a couple of lights they would hook up on the outside of the building. They would take my football out there and play football. Nobody had any money, you know?

So, the important thing that happened to me in my career was when I took that course in drawing (because I learned how to use a T-square and a triangle, and a typewriter, and what have you). When I was working for the advertising agency, I had to come up with $25 to go to school, so [the company] started paying for that, which was very nice.

I never was going to make a whole lot of money, so I was looking in the newspaper one day, and it said they wanted somebody to do a catalog about office supplies and so forth. So I went down, and I answered. My old boss, Ivan, really wasn’t running the company. His father was retired, but he had an office. He wasn’t really running the company; another guy named Harry Bice was running it. He knew a lot about printing, but he was kind of a pain. I didn’t want to work for him, but I liked everybody else.

There weren’t too many women in the business at that time; there was one woman. I remember I did get interviewed. They hired me, so I just had to leave the advertising agency, but you know where I was? They had a sort of a catalog once, and it was on those boards with the metal thing on it, and the rats were up there. I was on the second floor. It was just me and a drawing board and a file cabinet and a table and a chair… and the rats. Ohh… How did you put up with that?

It took me about a year and half to get that catalog done, but I made a lot of friends up there while I did… Of course, I wasn’t going to school anymore; you know, I couldn’t do that.

By this time Ivan was running the company. He had gotten rid of that other guy. [Ivan] called me in his office one day, and he said, “You’ve learned a lot about this business, and you’ve even crawled up in the windows and put displays in the windows. Nobody even asked you to, but you just said, ‘You know I’d like to that.'” Anyway, he said, “So, the person who’s been the advertising manager is going to take over contract furniture after the war (which was very profitable).” He said, “Do you think you could be an advertising manager?” I said, “I think I could be very good because I haven’t noticed that y’all have been doing any advertising.”

All they had was my catalog, so he said, “All right, let’s just sit down here on the floor and see what we can figure up.” So we decided we were going to start doing newspaper advertising; we were going to start doing direct mail. Direct mail was the only way you could address things with an addressograph. You think that’s not a problem; it’s a problem.

Then, we were going to do displays because we had several branch stores by that time. We needed to find a way to send them stuff to make displays in their windows. We even got a little bit [of advertising] in television. Not much because we didn’t know what it was all about. So, I got to be the advertising manager because we created it.

The first year that we really did it, we won an award called the Gregg Award that was given by the National Stationary Association, and I got to go to Chicago to receive it. Wow—for the whole company! I was all of about twenty-three years old. That was cool.

Did you get to explore Chicago a little bit while you were there?

Oh, I love Chicago. I’m not going to tell you one of the stories; you’re too young to hear it. (We all laugh…) Anyway, I was up there with all the guys (some of the sales department heads), and I was the only woman. We went down to the stockyards and had the most wonderful steak I ever had. By that time, the guys had been drinking a little bit. In fact, one of them who was head of the furniture department, he was out there hanging onto a pole of some kind to keep from falling down. Afterwards, because Ivan had—I guess his wife was there and they were off somewhere—and he said, “Were they behaving themselves?” I hated telling that they insisted that we go to a strip joint. I had never been to strip joint, but I could not be down there by the stockyards by myself. I wouldn’t tell him because he would have fired all of them. So I had a lot of good friends because I holding that over their heads… (Chuckles…) I’m telling you… You were a pioneer in business for women!

Anyway, we started doing a lot of these things, and things started clicking. We had more branch stores that we opened up, and every time I turned around, I was doing another catalog. We had a printing plant, too, so I could go out to the printing plant. I had my own little printing plant. I was really flying high, and then I met a couple of people who were in the Atlanta Advertising Club, which was not real big, but it had started for something that happened after the Depression (or maybe right before at the Booster’s Club). It was an outgrowth of that, and my father was in the Booster’s Club—another connection.

So, I got real active in the Advertising Club. I ended up as the program chairman, and I got to invite people from advertising agencies in New York and Chicago and all over. I got to know a lot of people. Then, I got to be the secretary, and then I got to be the first woman president of the advertising club. Really? Yeah.

A good friend of mine who was killed in the airplane crash that crashed at Paris—it perished years ago and killed a lot of people from Atlanta, from the High Museum and everything. My friend and his wife were over there and killed on that plane. I remember he had told me, “Remember, you’re the first woman president, but you’re going to just have to draw back a little bit. Don’t be trying to be so uppity and so full of it.” I thought, “Well I’m just going to be me, and that’s all.” I had good programs, and I just did the best I could do. The company was behind me, and it was such a well-known company.

My friend Marie, when she came to work for me, I saw to it that she got in the Ad Club. Then, when I retired, she moved on up the ladder just like I did. Then, she got to be the second woman president of the Atlanta Ad Club. She was probably better than I was. But you set the path. I guess, but I learned something, and she did the same thing. I said, “When a woman gets somewhere, the best thing she can do is to reach back and pull another woman up.” That’s a great philosophy. Yeah, so you remember that. That doesn’t mean leave the men out, but until we’re not outnumbered anymore, you have to do that. You really do. That’s good advice.

So, all these things came together. Our first child Buck came, and we kind of wanted to have another one about two or three years later. I told Buddy, I said, “We can’t have another child; we’ve only got two bedrooms.” When I grew up, I shared a room with my brother. That’d be hard. Yeah! Until he had gone in the Navy, you know?

I said, “Each one of my kids is going to have their own room from the day they get here. They’re not going to be squeezed together. We’ve got to have a bigger house.” There was plenty of land there she had given us originally, so we ended up adding a wing. We added two bedrooms and a bath, took in the screen porch, and made a den and then a patio out in the back. So, guess who designed the wing on the house? You! Did you design it? Yes! I had the plan that showed the original house, and a friend of ours had built the original one. My husband did a lot of work on it. He loved to do stuff like that.

So, I would stay after the sales meeting that I had every Saturday morning, and I would sit down at my drawing board with my T-square. Guess where I got my first little drawing board of my own and a T-square and a triangle? Ivan Allen Company! It was the only place to go and buy any engineering supplies like that. My sister took me down there when I was just a kid in junior high school.

I got my own stuff out and I’d stay after work because Buddy was home taking care of Buck, anyway. I designed it; I even figured out the roof and everything. My friend that was going to build the house said, “How did you figure out how to do that?” I said, “Because it was my dream. I just decided I could do it, and I had something to go by.”

So we had a big house; we had two bedrooms here, two bedrooms there, a bathroom here, and a bathroom there… the whole shooting match. Years later, we sold the whole business to Hertz, and now, there’s an outdoor sign that we put on the back of the property. We had five acres, and my husband built a two-story barn for my daughter’s horses.

(To Be Continued in Part IV…)

Mrs. Peggy Baker (Part II)

(Born 1927) 

Parents: Eva Jane Norris and Fletcher Ellington Maffett

Siblings: Phillip Wayne Maffett, and Norris and Jane, deceased

Husband: Lovic Pierce Baker (Married on February 26, 1949)

Children: Jane Norris, “Buck” (Leonard Pierce), and Julie Mani, deceased

 (Continued from Part I…)

Alright, now, let’s see—we moved around. My brother said that we must have moved a dozen times when the Depression came because times were tough; they were very tough. The last house we had was the one in Buckhead, and after that, we moved into an apartment. I hated apartments. This is another part of my dream: I always said that I was going to design or build a house, and it was going to be my house. That’d be so cool. And I did. You did? I did, I did it.

I thought, as I was older, that I wanted to be an architect. I didn’t know what one was, but they had something to with building houses. Of course, as I got older, I found out that Georgia Tech didn’t take women. I didn’t have any money to go anywhere that did [take women], so that dream went downhill. But, there’s another part of that story…

Anyway, I went to a wonderful high school; there were only four high schools in Atlanta. The girls’ high school was out near Grant Park, and you had to go on a streetcar. They came from all parts of town, and they would cross and go out to the school. Here’s the funny part: there was a big bakery right down the corner by Rich’s Department Store, and it had a back door and a front door. You’d be on the streetcar. It would come into town, and it would shift this way to go out to the school. Somebody would collect nickels or dimes from whoever wanted one, and they’d get off back here. Then, when [the streetcar] went up to Five Points and came back, then they’d get back on it, and they’d have donuts. (We laugh…) Every once in a while, when my friend Sally was the one that had to go in and get [the donuts], she didn’t get back on the right trolley! She left her books. Oh no! I had to take care of them, and she had all the donuts. Did she ever get to school? (We all laugh…)

We had a wonderful time riding those trolleys. We talked about our boyfriends, and back in those days, in the drugstore, you could get a little paper-book-quarter-thing, and it had the words to all the popular music. It didn’t have the music; it just had the words, but we knew all the words. This is back in the 40’s, and we sang all the way to school. That sounds like fun. Some people were stupid enough to want to study, but we just sang and ate our donuts; we had a good time. (Laughs…)

Anyway, so when we graduated from high school, I thought, “Well, I don’t think I can go to Tech and be an architect.” But I heard from somebody that they had drafting courses where you could just learn how to do mechanical or architectural stuff.

Now, this goes back to when I was in junior high school out by Little Five Points. They were asking for volunteers that wanted to be in the band. I thought, “That sounds like fun!” I remember that my brother (and I don’t know where he got it or what he was doing with it) had a little snare drum about this big, about that high and that big (showing me with her hands). So I said, “I’ve got a drum!” But when you were in a band, you had to have one of those big drums. So I started playing the drum, and then, by the time we got to the second year, the drum director taught me lessons. I got to be a pretty darn good thing! I had a uniform, but then, when I got to high school, they didn’t have a band. They had an orchestra with violins and everything.

So, it happened that my music teacher in high school had studied under a man named Henry Sopkin, and Henry Sopkin ended up being the first director of the Atlanta Symphony. [My music teacher] persuaded him to come down twice in January and in June during my junior and senior years in high school. At the old city auditorium, we would have a big concert, and it was her job to go to the girls’ high school, Commercial High School, which was downtown and co-op. She would recruit the best musicians from there and from two boys’ schools that were next door to each other near Piedmont Park. They had a lot of fights, too, but they both had bands because they played at the football games.

So, [my music teacher] picked out the best musicians from those four schools [to play in the big concert], and we would have big crowds. [The concert] started with the Star Spangled Banner. Here’s a little article about it (shows me). Since I played the drum, I had to play a long roll for the Star Spangled Banner, so everybody would get up and sing the Star Spangled Banner. You would play a solo? Yeah, and everybody else was sitting, and I was standing up back here. I was playing that drum. It was only about 10 or 15 seconds, but I thought it was about 5 minutes. I just knew that my drumhead was going to bust, or I was going to drop a drumstick, and I was going to be in a lot of trouble. But all four times, [Sopkin] came after me, and he said, “It was perfect.”

He came down here and was director, and that was the beginning of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra. So, that’s my musical career, but I learned to love music. I never did care too much about the opera, but I like symphony. I even liked a little rock-n-roll! (Laughs…) I liked forties music because my husband learned how to dance in the Navy, and every Saturday night, we went dancing somewhere. Before we got married and afterwards—everything.  I got to go to a lot of dances, anyway.  So what else do you want to know?

So, after high school—?

Well, I’ve got to back up just a little bit. In the 7th grade, when I first started junior high school, all the girls had to take Home Ec., and the only thing we ever learned in cooking was French rarebit. Have you ever had French rarebit? It’s nothing but melted cheese. I hated it; it was terrible! I didn’t even like cheese.

Then, the next [part of the class] was sewing. I remember I made a pink shirt with a Peter Pan collar. I messed with it so long; it was so dirty that before the end of the year when we took it home, I stuffed it in the garbage can. (We all laugh…) But, I made a blue bag to put my gym suit in, and I had that for a long time.

When I moved to another school for the next year, I went to my homeroom teacher and I said, “I do not want to take Home Ec. I want to take mechanical drawing.” She said, “You mean you want to be in there with the boys?” And I said, “No, that’s not why I want to be there. I want to learn how to design things because I’m going to design myself a house.” You were forward thinking. So she got me permission, and two of my friends decided to do the same thing, and I learned about isometrics—you know, perspective and all that stuff.

Then, when I got to high school, I had two wonderful art teachers. That’s where my love for art came from. I had [a love for] music, and then [a love for] art. During my senior year, the art teacher came up to me one day, and she said, “I see on your record that you took two years of mechanical drawing in junior high school. How would you like to take a course in mechanical and architectural design?” Did you take [the course]?

Yeah, I did, and this was right near my senior year. [My art teacher] came, and she said, “What are you going to do when you get out?” And I said, “I don’t know; I thought maybe I could find a way to go to Georgia Tech at night.” She said, “I want you to talk to a man named Charlie Young.” He was with the company called Foot & Davies, and they published most of the high school and college annual books around. She said, “He has a good friend who’s with a publishing company, and I bet he could probably find you a job.”

So I did [ask him], and he did [have a job for me], and that summer, I worked in downtown Atlanta (not the best part). Way back in those days, in printing, they would make these metal plates, and they would nail them to woodblocks. Then, they’d put them down on a printing press and put the paper on top of it. Then, later on, they made offset, which was a rotary thing.

Anyway, then, when summer was over, I had learned how to scale; I could do a scale from one corner to the other, and then, if it had to be reduced (we’re talking about photographs, now), you would measure down four inches. Then, you would measure over here, and wherever that diagonal line came down, that’s how tall it was going to be. If you were going to reduce a picture down to fit in a certain space, you didn’t have to be a genius; you could just do a diagonal. You’d be surprised how much good that did me.

So, I went to work for the company that did the publishing. By that time, they were into doing annuals of various divisions of the Armed Forces, like the boat that the Japanese surrendered on, the 81st infantry, and the ones that jumped in Normandy (where I’ve been).

You’ve been to Normandy?

Yeah, I’ve been to Normandy. And, why I never got a hold of one of those things that I could save, I don’t know! I guess it never occurred to me, but that was a wonderful place to work. It was right there on Peachtree Street right across from JP Allen; I didn’t have the money to do much shopping over there, but it was nice anyway.

Was [JP Allen] a department store?

Yeah, but then guess what happened? They had a printing company way out on Prior Street in the worst part of town. That’s where I was going to have to go and work. I had already started at Georgia State at night, and I thought, “How on Earth am I going to get to and from there and then get home out in Sylvan Hills?”

Charlie Young knew what would happen, so he came out there one day and said, “I’ve got a couple of friends that have a little advertising agency in Atlanta, and I want you to go talk to them because you’ve got no business going to and from and catching the bus out in front of a beer joint with a bunch of drunks.” I was scared to death because in the wintertime, it was dark, and I said, “I can’t do this.”

So I got the job with the little advertising agency, and they were right in downtown Atlanta. Then, later… do you know where Pershing Point is? A guy had built a real nice restaurant, and then there was a little one right next to it that was kind of a coffee place. [The advertising company] rented the second floor there; that was a cool place to work! But, it was a pretty good ride into Five Points where I got out to go down to Georgia State. Then, it was another ride to go to Sylvan Hills on the bus afterwards, after school.

So you went to college at Georgia State?

Yeah, before it was Georgia State, it started out as the night school of Georgia Tech, and it was a commercial course. In fact, my old boss, Ivan Allen, went there. He wasn’t admitted, but he did [that course]. He went to Georgia Tech, but he had to go to the commercial school because his father thought he needed to have a business background.

Did Ivan Allen have that business before he became mayor?

Well, his father started that business.

Now, here’s something else: my mother learned how to use a typewriter. Ivan’s father was born in Dalton, Georgia. His father either died or took off or something. His mother was a widow. Well, she raised him. He was educated but not with college, just high school.

[Ivan Allen] came to Atlanta, and somewhere, he got into selling typewriters. How about that? I mean, that was a pioneer, you know? I think it’s so cool that you grew up with all this history of Atlanta. I did! I think that’s amazing.

Atlanta was my town, and it still damn is. I don’t care how crazy it is sometimes; I love it. I love Georgia State, too, because it started off and was down right next to the YMCA. This was right around the corner from the place that was my job where I learned how to do [drafting]. So I did not want to go there, but by the time it was 1945, I graduated— From Georgia State? Yeah, and by the time I was out of high school and wanted to go to college, guess where Georgia State was? Where?

It had moved down to the first building where it is now. It didn’t have stairs; it had ramps because it had been a garage where rich people working downtown could park indoors. Do you know what they named the [annual/ newspaper]? “The Rampway.” (We all laugh…) Because we didn’t have any stairs; we had ramps. The last year that I was in school, I edited The Rampway. Funny, huh? How things come together.  It’s amazing; I’ve still got that annual.

As I went on in the advertising business, I thought I was the best proofreader that ever lived. With the first job I had at the Ivan Allen Company, I saw an ad in the paper, and they wanted somebody to come and do a catalog. I’d never done a catalog, but one of the partners of the little advertising agency had the Southeastern China Glass and Gift Show at the auditorium twice a year, so I got to know a lot of people. They had a monthly magazine that they ran stories, and people would run ads because gift shops were everywhere. Everywhere the streetcar stopped, there was a gift shop and a little place to eat—a little café.

Anyway, I got in a sorority; my brother was also down there.  He stayed to finish, which took him about six years, because he got married and had a couple kids before he ever got out [of college]. Anyway, I got in a sorority, which was just a local sorority; there were two of them.

Georgia State started out as part of Georgia Tech, and then it became part of Georgia. They didn’t quite know what to do with it, but there was a man named Dr. George Sparks. The year I got to be editor of The Rampway, he called me in his office one day because down there, everybody knew everybody. (You called all the teachers by their first names.)

He said, “We’ve got a problem. I know you worked on the newspaper, and I understand that you’ve been the publication business a little bit, but the guy that was supposed to be the editor of The Rampway quit. He ain’t gonna do it, and you’re the only person I know that knows anything about printing.”  I said, “I can’t do that!” I guess I was just about engaged to my boyfriend at that point.

(To Be Continued in Part III…)

Mrs. Peggy Baker (Part I)

(Born 1927) 

Parents: Eva Jane Norris and Fletcher Ellington Maffett

Siblings: Phillip Wayne Maffett, and Norris and Jane, deceased

Husband: Lovic Pierce Baker (Married on February 26, 1949)

Children: Jane Norris, “Buck” (Leonard Pierce), and Julie Mani, deceased

 

Where were you born?

I was born in Atlanta, GA in the old Piedmont hospital where the baseball stadium was built. I was born in 1927 on November 7^th, and I was named after nobody (We laugh…) because there were a bunch of us in the family, and I was the last one.  So somebody picked the name Peggy Elaine, and then I ended up with a guy named Baker.

Did you parents ever tell you anything about that day?

I don’t remember if they did; I was very young. (Laughs…) My mother died from pneumonia when I was hardly six years old, so we never got to talk too much about anything.

What are your parents’ names?

My father was born on a big farm up in Gwinnett County; they had a cotton gin and everything. They had a Scottish gentleman who taught the small school. His name was Fletcher Ellington—very Scottish, so my [father] was named Fletcher Ellington Maffett. I have a great nephew named Fletcher; I have a brother whose middle name was Ellington, so the family names (which didn’t sound terrible like some family names) got everybody, but I didn’t get any of that. I just got “Peggy Elaine.”  The “Peggy” I don’t mind, but Elaine…

I was married to a guy that, a friend of mine—I was working for a little advertising agency across an old post office in Atlanta, and there was an insurance company there, and an old friend of mine from high school was working there. She had a friend right down the hall, and that friend was the cousin of the guy that I married. A whole bunch of them had graduated from Hapeville High School, and they were going to have a homecoming at the football game. Then, they were going to go down a beer joint down the road where they could dance. (We laugh…) Anyway, some of them had met my husband whose name was Lovic Pierce Baker. It’s an old Methodist name. He was named after a Methodist bishop (don’t ask me why).

Somebody said, “why won’t we get my best friend Sally a date with Pierce?” (That’s what they called him, but most of his family called him Buddy.) So they did, and then a few days after, he started calling me, and I said, “Don’t you have her number? I’ll give it to you.” He said, “No I don’t want her number; I want to know if you want to go out.”

Our first date was to go to the Fox Theater to see a movie. He got all the way up to where he had to pay for the tickets.  And *whispering* he was poking me, “come over here, come over here.”  So I went over there, and he said, “Have you got any money?” I wasn’t making whole lot of money, but I happened to have enough for two tickets.  After that, I always was sure that I had money even after we were married. (We laugh…) Don’t ever go out with Buddy. His nickname was Buddy, because his favorite older sister couldn’t say “Brother.” She was two years older than him; she said something that sounded like “Buddy” instead of “Brother,” so everyone started calling him Buddy.

I have two children. I had a third child; she was a Down syndrome baby. She only lived four months, but my son is going to be fifty-nine years old on July 31^st. My daughter was fifty-five years old on July 7^th; her name is Jane Norris. Jane was my mother’s name, and Norris was her maiden name, so we got Norris and Jane all over the place.

What did you say your son’s name was?

My son is Buck. My father-in-law was named Leonard Pierce, so I asked my little French mother-in-law (she was a World War I French war bride), “Which do you like best: Lovic Pierce or Leonard Pierce?” She said, “I didn’t like either one of them,” but I got to name four daughters, so I figured [my husband] could name one son. So he named his son (because he was just sure it was going to be a boy) Leonard Pierce. Oh boy, as my son grew up, that really thrilled him… But, he never got called Leonard anywhere because he got his grandfather’s nickname, Buck. One time, when we were down in Florida, my father looked in the St. Petersburg telephone book, and he was listed as L. Buck Baker. (We all laugh…) Nobody but his bank and IRS know what his real name is.

Before we go on, I didn’t catch what your father and mother’s names were.  Did you say your father’s name was Fletcher?

My father’s name was Fletcher Ellington Maffett. Maffett is an old Scottish name from the family name Moffett. But our name was Maffett.

My mother’s name was Eva Jane Norris. She was from a little town with a dirt road, southeast of Athens, GA, on a big farm, in fact. It was a huge farm, and her father was a self-made engineer, and he worked for this guy whose name was John Smith. He had a huge farm, and he had a train with a small track. He would take all of his crops to the nearest place to get on the train.

Anyway, as I grew up, the Great Depression was just getting started in 1927, but at that time, my father had come down to Atlanta to get a job when he was a grown man ’cause he didn’t want to be a farmer. So, he ended up being the first Dodge automobile dealer in the state of GA, and he was quite wealthy. But when the Great Depression came, he lost his business. We lived in a big two-story, yellow brick house in one of the entrances into Piedmont Park, and I had my first boyfriend next door, and we were three years old. (We laugh…)

My brother, who is four years older, and I are the only ones of that family that are still alive. He got the beautiful name, and I got the ugly name. They named him Phillip Wayne Maffett, but he’s still alive, and he’s my sweetheart.

Did you have one nephew or niece or more than that?

(Discussing Philip’s children…) Let’s see, the oldest one is Mike, and when he was born I remember the night, I was going to work at Georgia State, and I called home cause I thought that it was about time for the baby to come. My older half-sister who was at home said, “Yeah, you better get on the streetcar because Mike is going to be here pretty soon.”  And he was, and my sister and I were the first babysitters that he had; he was so cute. He just retired after a long career as an anesthesiologist down at Northside Hospital.

Alright, now he was the oldest, and then the next was named after my mother and me. Her name is Melissa Jane, and she married a man named Anderson who was up in Tennessee. Then, the next one was a boy; his name was Clint, Clinton Maffett. They all grew up out around Sandy Springs, and Mike went to Tech and then went to Tulane to Medical College.  The rest of them went to Georgia. UGA? UGA, yeah. Oh cool! Go Dawgs. My daughter went to UGA, but my husband and son went to Georgia Tech.  We had a few awkward moments about that, but not much. (All of us laugh…)

We had enough kids that we pretty much had our own activities.  We had our chores I guess, but I remember in the beginning we had a wonderful woman who took care of us.  I can remember that.

For summer vacation, a friend of my father’s had a place near Indian Springs, I think. Since we always had automobiles, we could go somewhere. We would get piled into the car, and then, there was another car with the luggage and everything. When times were still good, my mother would get on the train and take my brother and me down to Indian Springs, and we would stay in the old hotel down there. That was a cool place—I remember that.

It didn’t always go that well, because [my father] lost his business; he lost that beautiful house, but [my father and mother] moved into another house. They got a smaller house out near Buckhead on Piedmont Road. So was that your stepmother? No that was my mother—my mother and my father. But he was married one time before and had two children—a son and another boy. His wife died in childbirth and so did the baby. They are buried in Marietta City cemetery, and that’s a weird place to have people from Atlanta buried.

One reason he lost his automobile business was that dealers financed cars. If people bought a car on credit and then they couldn’t pay for, then he was just out of it. He had a car that nobody else wanted ’cause they didn’t have any money, so once a man said, “All I have is a cemetery lot for five people up in the Marietta City cemetery.” So I can remember all my life, on Saturday or Sunday, we’d be going up riding in a car to my mother’s grave and my father’s grave after he died. But, there was a streetcar—do you know what a streetcar is? They ran with a thing that hooked onto a wire. I’ve heard of them at least.

This is strange because the place I worked (that advertising agency) was right around the corner from where the streetcars started—around Atlanta, but one of them went up all the way to Marietta out of the old highway. People would have these nice, little sheds they built so that their family could go down and be away from the weather and everything ([for them] to go down to Atlanta to work or go to school or whatever).

I can remember during the war, we didn’t have a car. My older half-sister and I would go—I don’t know where we got the flowers; we probably stole them. (We laugh…) Anyway, we would get the bus or something, and we’d ride down and get on the train going to Marietta. Then, after we did that—put the flowers out and everything—we would usually just walk up to Marietta, which was on a square. There was a drug store, and we’d go in there and get something to drink—a Cherry Smash. Do you remember Cherry Smash? (Asking my mom.) No, but it sounds wonderful. Is that a soda? That was a soda boss. Yeah, you’ve got to be old to remember. (We laugh…) We’d get one of those in a paper cup, I guess, and we’d wait for the next train to come back down to Atlanta. That sounds like fun. For me, that was exciting—I can tell you that.

My father was the youngest of fifteen children. Some of them didn’t live to maturity. A typhoid fever would hit them, and they’d die. Then, sometimes, the mother would die, too, and then he’d remarry and have some more kids. Because they grew up on a farm, right? Yes, he was the last one in the family.

You know what they named one of them? Ulysses Grant Maffett. Now, you know that boy had a lot of fights at school. This was not too long after the Civil War. None of the kids ever ask, “Why did you name him that?” They wouldn’t dare ask; you didn’t ask your father anything like that.

Were they on the side of the North and the Union [during the Civil War]?

Oh no, they were Confederates. So they just respected Ulysses Grant? I don’t know because a lot of them were old enough to be my great-grandparents, and they were dead before I was born. I’ve got a picture of the house they lived in, which was pretty nice for those times. The father and the mother and the daughter slept downstairs, and the boys slept up in the attic. They went up on a ladder—probably thought it was pretty cool.

But, this is a long time before the Great Depression in the 1920s and 30s. Cotton sort of went downhill because the cotton bowl was killing all the crops. This was before they had discovered a way to get rid of the weevils. The cotton mill wasn’t doing any good because no one was bringing any cotton over there, so several of the older boys (including my father) came down to Atlanta, which was not very far, and found jobs doing this, that, and the other. None of them went college. If they got to finish high school, they were lucky.

My mother and her sister Margaret were born on that great big farm that I was talking about. Near Athens? Yeah, but the train went either to Cornelia or to Athens. This guy was a self-made engineer, so he slept pretty well. But anyway, I think that there were two boys and two girls in the family. My mother and her sister got to go to up to South Carolina somewhere around Spartanburg. They went to what they called a “normal college.” If you went to a normal college for a year, you could teach school in most places out in the rural area.

[My mother and her sister] decided they wanted to go to the big city of Atlanta, so they came down here and they heard about a lady that had a boarding house where they could sleep and do their laundry and eat breakfast. I don’t know what my Aunt Margaret did; she didn’t stay too long. I think she had a sweetheart [somewhere]. She wanted to go back home, and then, they got married. My mother decided that she was going to stay, and somewhere (this is strange) she had learned how to use a typewriter, which was new.

This is the crazy part: I eventually, when I got started in my advertising career, was advertising manager of a company called Ivan Allen company. Ivan Allen was mayor. He bought the Braves and the Falcons and built the first stadium. (See, one thing just goes to another.)

Somewhere or another, my mother, after my father’s first wife died (he had those two little kids, and he was living out of an area called Sylvan Hills, not in Buckhead)—somehow or another, my mother went to work at a company that my father was running, which is called Elly Austellee.

Back in those days in Atlanta, bicycles were a big deal. There weren’t any streetcars; there were just buggies. A lot of people had motorcycles, and then, automobiles were beginning to make their place.

Anyway, she worked there. I’ve got a picture, and up on this side (showing me the pictures) are the men, and they’ve all got on overalls, and they were just greasy. They not only sold parts, but they repaired bicycles. Then, they started handling automobiles parts too, which weren’t very many. Over here, were the guys in the suits and their white shirts and their ties. There was my father, and he had on a coat, but my mother was not in that picture, so that must have been taken before.

The story goes that the first time he saw her, he said, “She’s going to be my wife.” I don’t remember how long he’d been a widow. They were married I think in… I have the thing out of the paper with their engagement, but it didn’t actually say when they married. But I know when she died because I got that off the tombstone. Anyway, they got married, and as his business got good and he got in the automobile business, they bought that house over on a boulevard near Morningside. In fact, he might have built that house; I don’t know.

Do you know if [the house] is still there?

It is because one of my nephews from up in Hartford, Connecticut was down not too long ago, and he had always heard about how my brother had a tree house and how we had three automobiles. My mother had an automobile, and my father had an automobile. I guess my older half-brother had an automobile. So we had a three-car garage, which is pretty big. So when it rained, you had plenty of room to go out and play something and then to get outside.

One time, for some reason or another, my father was mad with something that my brother did, and he told him to come down out of that “damn tree.” (Pardon the expression.) He probably yelled it from the street. My brother was not about to come down, so when my next brother Norris (his first name was Norris) came home from school, he said, “You go up that ladder and bring that boy down here.” By that time, [my father] probably was not mad anymore, anyway. So, that was a very nice house. It was two-stories, and it had a lot of room for all of us, and I had a boyfriend. (Chuckles…)

Was [your boyfriend] still the one that was your neighbor?

I remember his last name was Austin. I don’t remember his first name. Austin. Wasn’t that cool? (Laughs…) Yeah!

(To Be Continued in Part II…)