Family's social mobility and goal to educate daughters
Young briefly explains how the Reconstruction era affected her father's work as a farmer and how he was able to rise above hard times to prosper later on. Emphasizing his confidence and perseverance, she explains how by the turn of the twentieth century, his business acumen had allowed him to attain the kind of social mobility that he sought for his children. As earlier in the interview, she again emphasizes that her parents worked hard to send their children to college; however, here she recalls that her father believed it was more important for his daughters to attend college than it was for his sons. She connects his attitude and his encouragement to her success at Vanderbilt in assuming leadership roles, specifically in helping to establish the first sorority on campus.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Louise Young, February 14, 1972. Interview G-0066. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
But I was going to tell you about my father. Then his father
died and he had to look after, as a young teenager, a late teenager, he
was to look after his mother and his young brother and young sister with
nothing to go on. Everything had disappeared one way and another. And so
an old friend lent him enough money to rent a farm on the edge of
Memphis. And father and an old Negro man who helped with it and so
forth, but father would take things to the market, to the wholesale
market in Memphis. And he, at one time, cut timber. There was a lot of
wood fire burning done you see. And in the long days he was able to take
two loads of wood to Memphis in one day. And the short days he couldn't
do that, but he could take the first load and come back and load the
second load and get it part of the way in and then make three loads in
two days. And that was the difference, my father used to tell us,
between getting ahead and not getting ahead. He was a very good story
teller. But he would tell about going to market and how there were a
great many Italian farm market people there. He would tell us about
them. And how some of the people at the market, after market time, at
six or seven o'clock and they hadn't had any breakfast, they would spend
50¢ for their breakfast. And father would get 5¢,
some big thing, I don't remember what he called it, and it seemed so sad
to me that I began to weep. Poor father so hungry and just couldn't have
anything but this 5¢ thing you know. And he at once realized
he'd made it too vivid. So he said, "why child that was nothing
to that. I knew it wouldn't last." And you see that really is
the key to a man with security in his background and in his
constitution. And a man with that security he never
doubted that he would make it. That's really human nature.
- ROBERT HALL:
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So by the time you were growing up . . .
- LOUISE YOUNG:
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Well, we all of us got to college, several of us to graduate school, and
two brothers went to Yale for law and so forth. And my father bought
more land you see. And farmed it. Father used his head, so he kept
records as few farmers did on each of his plots of land. How much
fertilizer was put in it. And when he planted it, what the return was.
So the next year he would check on that you see. He and my uncle, his
younger brother farmed together. And uncle Will operated the farm and my
father did the business end of selling and so forth, and then my father
was the county tax assessor for Shelby County, the county in which
Memphis is, for two terms I believe. And the extra money was important
to get us ready for college and through college. And then for a time he
was chairman of the . . . county chairman for the Democratic Party, so
he had great interest in politics and religion and the church and so did
my mother but their chief interest as I was thinking it through today
really, was their big enterprise of keeping heads above water for a
family with eight children. And getting us all educated.
My father said that if he had to choose between sending his sons to
college and his daughters to college he would send his daughters.
- ROBERT HALL:
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Why?
- LOUISE YOUNG:
-
Because his sons would have contacts that would give them a broad view of
life without college, but his daughters would have a very narrow life if
they didn't have a good education. Which I think was . . .
- ROBERT HALL:
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That was good. That's really something.
- LOUISE YOUNG:
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That's really something. He really believed that. If he had
to choose between sending his daughters to college and his
sons to college he would send his daughters, I heard him say.
- ROBERT HALL:
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So you went to Vanderbilt?
- LOUISE YOUNG:
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So I went to Vanderbilt and maybe the most interesting thing I did, I
belonged to Kappa Alpha Beta, and we were the oldest national
fraternity. And you see there were just two, Tri Delta and Kappa Alpha
Beta. And we had our chapter house which was half of a servant's house
for one of the professors on the campus. And we became very ambitious
and decided that we should have our own chapter houses as the men had
for their fraternities, though it was to be just a lodge, not a place to
live. So a friend of mine wrote up the letters for the alumni to send us
five dollars or ten dollars or some such monies. We bought the lot and
back where the Vanderbilt Theatre is now, and then were told that if we
owned our lot, by this time I was president of the chapter, we could get
it built for us with a mortgage on the land. So I went back to Memphis
with everything all in mind for summer before I was a senior. And lo
here came a letter from the contractor folks that, though that was
usually done that the record of the Vanderbilt men was so poor, the
Vanderbilt fraternities, in paying all these mortgages that they
wouldn't risk a fraternity with that sort of proposition. And we'd have
to put up some cash. So I was distressed and I just asked my father if
he wouldn't lend us the money. And mother didn't think that was very
good. Your father likes to have his own investments under his own eyes
to lend money for something in Nashville. But father thought it was a
very good idea, so he did lend us the money. And we built the house and
had it all ready for the Fall. And we proudly said
that we paid our father back exactly on time, I think a little ahead of
time. You see it's just the things one remembers are the success
stories.