(Born 1921)
Parents: Bass and Madge
Husband: Harry Matthew Warren, married on April 3, 1943
Children: Cheryl and Harriet
*Because of technical difficulties, this interview could not be recorded, so it will be told in the form of a story of a glimpse into Mrs. Warren’s exciting life.
Mrs. Constance Warren was born in January of 1921 during the Roaring Twenties. During her childhood, she loved to dance, especially the flamboyant Charleston.
When she was young, her family moved into a brand new neighborhood, and she decided to have a neighborhood party to introduce herself to her neighbors and to make new friends. After her mom set out delicious cookies and refreshing lemonade, twenty kids came to meet their new neighbors. (Ms. Warren said that it made her want to throw a party every single day.) The neighborhood party is when she made her three best friends: a Chinese little girl, a black little girl, and a little girl the same color as her.
At school, Ms. Warren’s favorite subjects were geography and English, and in sixth grade, she even skipped 6A and went to the harder 6B. Sitting outside under a tree at A.L. Miller High School during her senior year is when she remembers reading her favorite novel Gone with the Wind.
Later on, Ms. Warren went to Western College in Macon, GA and majored in Education and Government. Then, she was hired into a government position and handed out rationing stamps to people throughout World War II.
When she met her husband, Ms. Warren worked at Davison’s, a department store. One day, a charming man who said that he wanted to buy perfume for his mom came up to the counter and asked the saleslady (Ms. Warren) what her favorite kind of perfume was. She gave him her suggestion, and he bought the perfume and left. Later that night, Ms. Warren went on a blind date that her friend had planned for her, and to her surprise, the sweet man with the perfume from earlier in the day (which was actually a gift for her) was her date! Needless to say, the couple fell in love and later got married in St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis, Tennessee during a 3-day pass in World War II. (*As a side fact, Ms. Warren’s friend in Tennessee lived next to Elvis Presley, so Ms. Warren got to meet him and shake his hand!)
Ms. Warren’s husband was in the Air Force and traveled with the Japanese and Dutchmen in the Air Force during World War II. The couple lived in Memphis and then was transferred to Macon, Georgia. Years later, Mr. Warren had eye cancer, passed away, and is now buried in Fayetteville.
While she and her husband lived in Macon, Ms. Warren won the Miss Macon contest, which her mom won, as well, when she was younger. Ms. Warren looked up to her mother very much because her mother was always so funny, and she had never even seen her mother cry. Ms. Warren’s mother owned a dress shop in Macon, and she was the one who gave Ms. Warren away on her wedding day. (*A fun fact about Ms. Warren’s mother is that she actually got to see the premiere of Gone with the Wind and even got to shake hands with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh!)
Two of Ms. Warren’s favorite places that she has been include the pink beaches in Bermuda and the beautiful country of Ireland where her husband played golf. In fact, her husband was an avid golf lover, and for three times he made a hole in one. (For this, he was in the magazines Golf Digest and Delta Digest, and Ms. Warren still has the exact golf ball he used for those lucky shots.) While traveling, she and her husband loved to ride in jet planes, and Ms. Warren even took a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon once on her way out to California.
Ms. Warren’s biggest hobby is reading, and she says that even though her husband loved golf, she has no patience for the sport. Some of her favorite books include Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller. Some of her other hobbies include playing the games Bingo and Bunco and going out to lunch with her lunch bunch group of friends. She loves Italian food, and her favorite restaurant to visit is Olive Garden. Ms. Warren is also a part of a Bridge Club, and she told me that at their annual Halloween party, she dressed up as Dolly Parton. (She laughed and told me that the secret to her costume was buying an extra big bra to stuff!)
Some of Ms. Warren’s accomplishments include learning so much throughout her education, making so many valuable friendships in every place she’s been, and being a Girl Scout leader in both of her daughters’ Brownie troops.
During the 1996 Olympics, Ms. Warren drove around the homemakers who made the athletes comfortable during their stay in Atlanta. She helped plan fun trips for the athletes, including excursions to try line dancing, to tour the CNN Center, to go on behind-the-scenes tours at Fox Theatre, and to open the well-known southern restaurant Pittypat’s Porch. Ms. Warren even got to see all the “big shots” while touring the Centennial Olympic Stadium (which later became Turner Field).
Ms. Warren loves going to the High Museum in Atlanta, and some of her favorite art pieces include Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. To solve the world’s major problems, as she says, the economy needs to go up, and there has to be more peace and fewer wars. To her, some of the most important elements of life are family, ancestry/ heritage, and traveling, and one thing she would love to do would be to go on an African safari because she loves animals. One of her favorite pets she has had is her Boston Terrier “Bubbles.” Ms. Warren mentioned that one of the only days she had to skip work was on a day to take Bubbles to the veterinarian because of his broken paw. Her boss, not knowing that it was her dog that was the sick one, sent flowers and a get-well card, and got pretty upset when he found out that he had done all of that just for a dog. Oh well; it gave Ms. Warren (and me later) a good laugh!
Overall, Ms. Warren says that her life has been quite successful, and her advice to younger generations is to study hard, make something of yourself, go to college, take advantage of everything you can, do unto others as you would have them do to you, and make it so that you never meet a stranger.
Life Legacies 