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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview
K-0282, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill”
In this interview, Earl and Mattie Bell Cavanaugh, who are joined by family and friends, remember their experiences with Hurricane Floyd. Multiple interviewees may have detracted from this interview's value, as their responses to Thompson's questions are sometimes disjointed and unspecific. But they do offer an on-the-ground perspective on the flood and its aftermath. Like many affected North Carolinians, they are frustrated with inadequate compensation and are facing the prospect of trying to rebuild without help from insurance or the government, a prospect which seems difficult for a pair of octogenarians. Earl also offers some thoughts on the general erosion of moral values, prompted by the ban on school prayer, sex education, and social security among other factors.
Earl and Mattie Bell Cavanaugh, both over 80, express concern with the erosion of more values and discuss their frustrations with the government after Hurricane Floyd.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
Haul it off if you need to.
There's no need to. If you want to.
If you have a trailer to do it with.
Kind of like a stupid idea.
Well, it probably is not a stupid idea as much as it is a problem to get a trailer inside a building.
I'm not taking a trailer inside a building; it's sitting right over there.
Free stuff will do anything to it.
What?
To a freezer.
My mother's daddy, in other words—I mean, my mother was raised right over there across the canal. One mile down here, a half a mile, I reckon, my daddy was raised. And where he was raised was where my granddaddy was raised too. In 1928, I mean in 1908, there came home a flood.
1908.
Yeah. Whenever it crest, got as high as it was going, my granddaddy nailed a light wood post to a pine level to the water. Back in them days there wasn't anything wrong with the woods, anyhow. In 1928, it came another one and the water went right straight just that same, about that high and that's all. In 1962 there came another one, the old people were telling me.
In 1962.
Yeah. The old people were telling me that you had an artesian well, and you could go out there in 1928 and take a glass and get a drink of water right out of that artesian well, overflow. And in 1962, it was the same way. Those three floods were about like four or five inches of being the same thing. My granddaddy said that him and his daddy and nobody else had never seen anything any higher than that. So that dates me back yonder a hundred and fifty years. They had never seen anything, and this time it was four feet higher in my house than it was at that time.
Is that light wood still there?
Not now, I don't think. They cut the timber and everything else by then. From what I can understand, those three dates when it flooded, it wasn't four or five inches different in either way. But this time it came, it was four feet higher than any other that anybody had ever known.
So I didn't say on tape yet your names. You are Mr. Earl Cavenaugh.
That's right.
Is Matt your nickname?
Mattie.
Mattie.
Mattie is her name.
Mattie Bell.
Bell.
She was a Register. Mattie Bell Register was her name.
Mattie Bell, okay. Mattie Bell Register. I heard you say that you were eighty years old when you were talking with Rob a minute ago. So that means that you were born in 1919. March the 26th?
1919.
He has a brother that lives right down the road. He's eighty-two.
He's two years and two months older than I am. Matter of fact, he lives on the old homestead of my granddad.
So you were born here?
Down yonder.
You were born down there. About how far is that?
About a mile.
About a mile. How about you?
It was a little town, Magnolia.
Magnolia. Okay. Do you mind telling me when you were born?
I was born February 25, 1925.
Two, Twenty-five on twenty-five.
She's a little older than I am.
My wife is a year older than I am.
She's about six years younger than I am.
Wait now. Did I get the date wrong here?
She's 1925, and I'm 1919.
I was seventy-five in February.
I wrote it down. I've got it now. Six years. My wife is one year older than I am, and I tease her about that all the time. Tell me a little bit about this place and when you built it, and something about your farm experiences here. I know we're sitting here in the Northeast community. You have a memory far back and people driving through here wouldn't know all the stories that are here. I was hoping you would tell some about that and how you ended up here, and what you've done here with your place.
When I came out of the Army—this is not the original homestead. That's my mother's homestead over there, where she was born and raised, and her daddy was raised about a mile down the road. Where my brother lives is where my father was raised. When I came out—my daddy had bought this place when I was in the service.
What years were you in the service?
Forty to Forty-four.
You were in World War Two.
Yeah.
And when you came back your daddy had bought this place. Did it have a house on it then?
No.
It was a farm, or was it in timber or scrub?
Well, grew up and run down there. It had been used for a farm a long time ago.
And then it had grown and no one had used it for a farm. Had he bought it for you for when you returned?
No, he had just bought it when it had come for sale.
Oh, okay.
I wish he hadn't have.
So you came home in 1944 and here was this farm, and is that what you started doing right away, is building a house on it?
I was actually gone four years, five; four years and a half. You don't know what in the world to do when you've turned loose in a different world. That's what it was. We came here, going to stay one year.
Were you all married at that point?
Yeah.
Where y'all married before you left?
When I got back from overseas, I got married.
When you got back. Had y'all been courting any before you got back?
Not a whole lot.
He was in service.
You started writing to each other, maybe?
I got a—I decided I needed me a place to live, so I built a
little place on that hill over yonder beside the road over there, about
as big as this—about like from here back. We stayed in that
thing until we had three children, two children. I wanted a house worse
than anything in this world. I had never drove a nail and didn't no
anything about it. I didn't have any money, so I got me a cross-cut saw
and went to the woods, went to sawing logs and dragging them out and
bringing them up here and having them sawed, racking them up and let
them dry. When they dried, the next day I took them down and had them
dressed and then had them out there in a pile. You couldn't hire anybody
right
The one that's sitting there now.
I built it by myself.
It was in '50.
So that was when y'all were living in your little house. Now, where was that little house?
It's gone. It was sitting over yonder right next to the road.
Just about fifty feet from the other one.
A little old tiny thing.
Was the house the size it is now, the one we're looking at across the way, when you first built?
No, we added those back room yonder a year or two ago. Believe it or not, we worked on it from '45 to—from the time we sawed the logs, until '50. It was then ready to move in it. I did all the work. It's crude. You can go in yonder and look now. It still looks crude.
It's good just from here.
When I moved in that house, of course, I built that room on it and it had
a five inch tin on it. That's the only thing I could buy, and I had to
buy that from my neighbor that had bought it to put on his pack house.
And he seen that I needed it worse
It was probably hard to find metal at that point.
Well, you couldn't find anything. Metal, asphalt, you couldn't even find no asphalt shingles. So when I got through—this is the part you aren't going to believe—I owed ninety dollars when I moved in that house.
That ninety dollars was for the tin. You cut your own logs.
The tin didn't cost but about four or five dollars a square—that wasn't nothing—and you could buy a two by four for thirty dollars a thousand. Now, you won't even sell it by the thousand; they sell it by the piece because you could get more that way. It won't sound as big. When I moved in it, I owed ninety dollars and I had thirty-five hundred dollars in it.
You couldn't built the back room for that now.
Now, when I go up there to pay my taxes, they have it valued at $175,000 with this ten acres it's sitting on, this tract. That is outrageous with anybody's money. I've been up there. That's what the appraiser said. They stood out there on the side of the road and looked and wrote.
So you made a life for yourselves here. What were you doing? Were you farming poultry that whole time, starting in the 1940s?
You just wouldn't believe it, how tight we were. We didn't even own a car until 1950 after we moved in here.
How were you making your money?
Farming, and mustering out pay, I think, was about ninety dollars a month or something, and that we got for a year. That was to get you started or something.
You had to go to school to get that.
The GI bill.
There was a farm thing out yonder.
Is that what it was from the Army?
And that really was what we built the house with.
Okay. Were you growing what, soybeans, corn?
Tobacco, corn and hogs.
Tobacco.
In 1950 after I moved in here I built that chicken house out there, one.
You built the chicken house in what year?
'55.
Okay. So you were raising hogs. They were out on the pasture or what?
Down there in the swamp eating acorns and whatever.
In the swamp. Then you decided to start raising chickens. Were you selling them as early as that? Were you selling to somebody?
I had them on consignment, just like the turkeys are today.
With Watson's by any chance?
It was Ramsey to start with.
Ramsey.
I was one of his first growers.
How many chickens did they put in a flock back then?
In this house right there, they put four thousand.
That's small by today's standards.
Then after a while, they insulated the houses and put five thousand in it. But you know, the chickens were better then than they are now.
In what way?
Eating, tasting. The first bunch I raised in 1956, I believe it was, '57, something like that. I forgot now. I sold them nine weeks even and they weighed four pounds. He come down here bragging on them, they were so pretty. They were the prettiest ones you've ever seen. Four pounds in nine weeks. Now they're five pounds in six weeks.
I think you might have a guest here.
That's my brother.
Oh, your brother.
Hey, come in the house.
Well, he's taking off, too.
He can sit down here, too, if he wants to. You know, I was wanting to find out about you all's life here and then of course we want to talk about the flood. How are you sir? We're having a recording session right here. You can get in on it. We're going to start talking about the flood. We're going to start talking about—you weren't involved in the flood right? Maybe you don't have anything to say about it. Nah. I'm just joking with you.
Sit right there.
You sit down too Ms. Matt.
He was involved more than the most.
Hi. My name is Charlie Thompson and I'm from the University of North Carolina up in Chapel Hill. We're recording some of the histories and we were just now to the 1950s and chickens and so forth. I know you're a Cavenaugh. What is your first name?
Thomas.
Thomas Cavenaugh. You're Mr. Earl's brother. And y'all came up. Were you in the army the same time he was? We were just talking about that.
I didn't go. I was twenty-six and they said they'd let the twenty-six and on up go and stay home.
Right. You stayed home and farmed, I guess.
Yeah.
So we were talking about the chickens. They took longer to grow and they were—
Lighter.
A whole lot better.
They tasted better.
To eat.
Now they puff them up with chemicals and hormones and whatever; make them put on a lot of weight.
And then they kill them and if they're over a day or two old their bones are so black you can't eat it.
They do turn dark.
So anyway, y'all kept on farming. Did you farm poultry all the way through the sixties and seventies and grow for Ramsey?
I had poultry right on up until about six months ago. I got—the man, Watson, went out of business.
Right, I remember that.
I went and couldn't get no one else to take them right then I went to working for a building contractor for a year or so. I saw that punching a clock—and wasn't for this chicken. So I went to see Prestage about some turkeys. He put me some in right away.
How do you spell that, Pest—.
Prestage.
Prestage, oh, okay. I got it.
I raised them until about fifteen years ago. Over about six months ago, I turned them over to my son. I said, 'Take them. I can't do it no more.'
Are the houses on your land still? How far away are they? Are they where you can see them? Oh, over across the road?
A hunk of land.
Over there, or over there?
Right straight across.
There's some right there, okay.
Anyway, he had a bunch as pretty as you've ever seen in your entire life. I thought we were going to do right good with them.
Growing them for Thanksgiving, I guess.
And they flooded out. He hasn't sold any turkeys yet. He's been in it six months and been working himself to death getting the houses cleaned out.
What is his name, your son?
Artis.
Artis Cavenaugh. I don't know if we have an interview set up with him or not. I'll have to put that down. Well, if you'd like to we could talk some about the flood, since y'all are here together and that's of course why we came. I wanted to find out a little bit about the place that did flood because on a tape it's hard to picture anything unless you have a little bit of context. So here we are on a farm you started in the 1940s, raising chickens and tobacco and cornere. Both of y'all farmed right in this community. Did you also raise turkeys?
Yeah. I had chickens in 1960, I believe it was.
Do y'alls farms adjoin one another?
No.
You live down the road aways.
I live about half a mile down that way.
Who has the homeplace?
Me.
Oh, you're in the home place. So there's a half a mile distance where he bought this new land so you both ended up with farms. Are there other children in the family? Just the two of you.
Just the two of us.
Just the two of you. That's good that y'all are close together.
Actually, there weren't [but] three of us—us and my dad. From the time I was seven years old, my mom passed.
So he took care of y'all and y'all cooked your meals.
She died in '26.
In '26. Y'all took care of your housekeeping and the three of you.
We moved in with my grandmama and my granddaddy and stayed there awhile. All them begin to come back in and we left.
So, we had three different floods in this community—one in 1908, one in 1928, one in 1962. We already talked about that. You've already said it was four or five feet higher this time than any of those previous three floods.
Any human living has never heard tell.
So as far as y'all knew you were not living in a flood plain. Those other three floods had not affected your houses at all.
It came in that house.
It came in that house.
In 1962, I mean.
It came in there nine inches deep.
And what did you think at that point? Did you think that that was just not going to happen again?
Well, I went in there and swept the earthworms out and mopped up the floor a little bit.
We had everything on cinder blocks.
Oh, you had it jacked up at that point. The house or every thing inside?
Everything inside.
So you knew the flood was coming and you'd prepared for it.
It came slow. This time it came so fast you couldn't think of it.
Tell me about that. What was the date of the flood? How did you start knowing it was going to happen? First of all, we had Hurricane Dennis come through and saturate the land, right?
I don't know anything about the dates. I just know the days of the week. My house, my son-in-law went out there and looked at the water and it began to come up. They could see it coming up.
Was this after the hurricane had already passed?
Yeah.
How many days after that? We knew the Hurricane was coming, the Floyd hurricane, and we saw it on the news and it passed on out. We got up the next morning—did y'all get up thinking there wasn't that much damage? How did it seem?
I don't know.
() had gone to bed and they had to get boats and wake them up.
I don't know just how that came around. Seem like I didn't realize nothing was coming up. I didn't know it was going to come that quick. Whenever it started coming up, I mean, it went up. It went up that night to that rest home out yonder, stayed there and the next morning it was in the yard. They put us [in a] big truck and carried us to the high ground.
Where was that?
Out yonder at the rest home.
There's a rest home out yonder at () City. And my children, five of them is all in this rest home down there. They built that one together. They got it going good, [then] they decided to go and build them another one. They built this Dayspring out yonder.
This one's just right across the road.
When the water come up in this one they had to transfer the resident out yonder to that one. And they were having a time out there—sleeping in the halls and anywhere else you could get a place to sleep.
But that other one never flooded. So you were saying Ms. Matt that the flood came and some people had to be taken out in boats?
That's at night, because they didn't know the water was up to their beds.
That boy that lives down there in a trailer. He went to bed that night and he woke up and there was water in the trailer. His feet were in the water when he put them down. He said, 'I can't swim.' He called that boy that lives on the island right there, got a house on the hill where it didn't come, called him and told him the situation. He come up there with a boat and got them both, and carried them back and put them at his house until the morning.
But you knew the water was going to come up, and you'd experienced this other flood.
We could watch it down here. It got back in the woods, it come from the river.
And how far away was the river from here?
Not that far.
Quarter of a mile.
This canal goes down to that river, and it was full. I went out that afternoon and it was full. I told them, I said, 'I didn't know it was coming in that fast.' It kept going back and forth in the day. Earl always is measuring out here. He'd be sticking (). You could tell how fast it was coming. And he would keep it watched.
And how did you keep it watched, with sticks?
Watched it coming.
General rainstorm has been known through our generation as general rain. It's going to get out of the banks. It will rise by the time it quits raining, five days. Sometimes it depends on whether it rains more there or here, whether or not it would go four or five. We were looking for it to rise five, but it was up here about the second day after it quit raining. More than it had been being as high as the flood.
After that second day, did y'all start knowing that it was different right away?
Always when it rains—I kind of wanted to know how high it was, so I got me an aluminum yardstick and I go stick it down in the ground to ten. Then I go back and read it and see how many inches it goes an hour. I've been doing that know since 1962 when it come into my house. So I know kind of how to prepare; see how fast it coming. So I took that one this time and went down to check it, [and] I lost the thing. It was gone. Usually two inches an hour at the very peak is all it would rise. This time it was coming a foot an hour or something.
A foot an hour.
It just depends on—generally the water goes that way. Whenever it was rising so fast—we were fixing to try to get out, [and] I tried to walk across that cement out there and the water was about that deep running that way. What was happening, it was filling up a low place back here or something. It came up and [was] running over and filling up those low places. Because it was running across that cement so hard, you could hardly walk in it.
And this was before you left and you knew the water was running around your yard and the concrete.
And I knew it was going to rain about two more days, and rise about two more days after that. That's what worried me.
So at what point did you leave? Where was the water?
Had the pickup backed to the door at twelve o'clock that night. Wouldn't cut the pickup off because the water was running back up the tailpipe. You could hear it just blubbering. I had it parked right there so Matt could get in it [and] get to the rest home. That was about twelve o'clock. We thought we were safe when we got down there, because we went to bed fast asleep and my son came up there and woke me up about five o'clock and said, 'Get up, get up you've got to leave here. The water's coming in this house.' I said, 'No, it ain't coming in here.' He said, 'Yes it is. You look out that window.'
Ms. Willis, she's the preacher's wife.
That was who?
Ms. Willis, that was here last night. Her and her husband, he has
Parkinson's Disease and she said that men were going around, firemen
mostly, with the
Nobody was expecting anything like that. They go to the door and knocking on the door and saying get out we got to leave here. You could hardly get them out. They said, 'Pshaw, I'm staying here. I'm not going anywhere.' They didn't realize it was going to flood up there like that.
It was dark, see, and it came up so fast. We have another lady right down the road, and she's ninety-three. They got her about two o'clock that morning. They thought about her and they got her. I don't know how many they didn't do. That's all that saved them. They didn't realize () Ms. Willis did that they haven't come, there was no way for her to have gotten him out. She said it was a good bit.
Who?
Ms. Willis. It just messed up their trailer. She said that you couldn't hardly walk out. The floor was sopping up that material that it's made out of. She said he could hardly walk out of it.
Particleboard.
I worship to the Lord that they had to build trailers with the same
electrical, plumbing, foundation, code there is when you build a house.
That's not right to let them have a house out yonder on a hill, a
trailer house. They're sewed together, cement blocks with no mortar in
them, just to hold them up. And then if you have to build a house the
So after you went to the nursing home—do you also go to the same place?
Yeah.
All three of you were there. How long did you say?
His wife has been an invalid, a vegetable for eight or ten years. His daughter is staying there waiting on her.
In your house?
And they had to move her to the rest home because it was coming in the house. Then they had to move her from the rest home in an army truck. The water was that deep.
Four feet deep.
And then they got her to the rest home at Wallace.
At Wallace. How long did y'all stay there, all four of you?
A couple of weeks. Something like that.
Jennie and Maurice stayed there about two weeks or maybe a little longer. But got where he could get out. He went to Randy's house, his son. After a few days I went to my son that stays over there. He got back in his house. I stayed up there.
When did you get back to see your houses the first time? How long was that?
Two weeks when I got back out here.
Everybody had started pulling out the carpet.
I don't know about how long before I come back. I went out there and had no way in the world to drive, and you couldn't stay () the rest home. The water got down so I could come back and get my truck.
Your truck was at your house.
It was at the rest home up there parked up against the building.
All of them flooded, all the cars.
When you came back to your houses, what did you find?
It looked like my house had been sealed up—sealed full of water and picked up and shook and then set back down. That's exactly the way it was. Deep freezes, refrigerators over on top of each other. Floated all over to the other side of the house.
Ms. Matt has put up food probably every year since y'all were married hasn't she? You said earlier you had food in those freezers. What kind of food did you have in there?
She had, I reckon, a hundred or two dollars, more than that, of meat that she had bought from the grocery stores. Keeping it there just in case somebody came in. Happens down there pretty often. You see all these tables here.
There are places for twenty people to sit right here.
She wants to have a place for them. That's mostly what she had in there, was vegetables, peas, beans, whatever.
I think this wire is making that microphone pick up that sound. That's fine if you want to hit the flies. That tapping might get on there and be hard to hear. So the freezers were laying out in the yard. Is that what you said?
We had an icebox sitting right there where that one is. It was turned bottom upwards and the doors of it were out there in the yard. I don't know how they got off or how they got out there.
How about at your house, what did you find?
You couldn't even get in the houses. That was the problem.
The doors were blocked.
The doors were blocked by furniture.
Yeah. All floated around.
Was water standing in the house?
Yeah, about thirty inches deep.
You couldn't open the door for the water in there.
You couldn't really go when the water was in there. You couldn't get out here. At home, the freezer was just like he said. Turned like you took a stick and turned around.
Had to throw it all away.
All that went down the drain. We had a freezer full. I don't know how many—counted up pints of tomatoes to last I believe until next year. Most every can, they threw them away. Throw them away, they throw them away.
Now, who are they? Who came in and told you to throw them away?
One—they sent out a lot of stuff for you to use to spray and use for all kind of infection.
Disinfectant.
To use on everything.
These people were with FEMA?
I don't know who they were.
Red Cross maybe?
I believe the Red Cross.
They were mighty good to us.
The Red Cross came into each house? How did they do this?
I don't know. There wasn't anybody in our house until we moved back out there.
A lot of days they sent food out to the houses in their vans. They really helped a lot, I tell you.
The Red Cross.
They would bring lunch out, the Red Cross.
After y'all had moved back, are you living in your house over there now?
No.
You right now are in—what do you call this little building?
Mattie's Diner.
Mattie's Diner [Laughs]
That's about all I do.
What? Fix food?
That was one that called to see if I was having—
Now, tell me about what do you do?
Was that Buster that just called?
You fix food and give it away to people here?
Most of it's family.
Family. About how many people come for lunch?
In the summertime it's more than there are right now. A lot of times they work it off, but if they're close by they always come. I've had as many as fifteen.
A lot of times there are six to eight men.
Fifteen, six or eight men. Now that you've lost your food, how are you feeding these people?
You have to buy it.
You have to buy it.
They don't as many come now because they know it isn't here.
And how did you start feeding people like that? When did that start? How did you decide to do that?
Whenever we got this building.
Now, do y'all sleep out in this building?
No, our daughter has a home in Wallace that she rents. We live there and come back in the mornings.
This is pretty much your home. You have your Christmas tree set up here, and your living room and your kitchen.
We'll have Christmas dinner here, but can't anybody get in the house.
They haven't started the sheet rock yet.
So is the plumbing working and everything now?
I've got the water all cut off at the house and a separate line running out here. I've got a little water heater back there.
To take a bath you have to [go] back into town.
Um hmm. Don't have any water.
I've been to church, and Arthur's out there painting.
Arthur.
Them () are sticking out in them pews in boxes naked, and they're hot.
But they're cut right off sharp. They're not raggedy ended wise. Who's out there with Arthur?
()
Just the two of them. They worked out there yesterday all day.
() out there today. Eat supper tonight and wanted me to go with them. I wanted to go. I said, 'Yeah, I'll go.'
Have y'all been up here to the Ladies Auxiliary to get some of that food?
It's closed right now.
Ma'am?
We don't have it right now.
Up there at the center there's some food. We just stopped in there. There's still food up there.
I thought you were talking about where the supperhouse is. That's where the Ladies Auxiliary always meets, at the Ruritan building, and we had supper before the flood. We had a supper every Saturday night going on about fifty years.
Every Saturday night. Can you tell me about that? How did it start?
I'd have to tell you () to tell you all that. It started in '48.
And it was for everybody in the community?
Uh huh. It started off years back down here kind of across from Betsy, that's with you all today, where her mother lives. There was a building right in front of her. That's where it started from, and the Ladies Auxiliary just decided to have a supper to make some money to help build up the church.
And what is the church? I'm sorry, I should've asked earlier.
Northeast Pentecostal Holiness Church.
Pentecostal Holiness.
Not Holiness.
Pentecostal Free Will Baptist.
Pentecostal Freewill Baptist. And are y'all members of that?
Yeah.
That is the church that is sitting down there about a mile from here, isn't it?
Yes.
And the church was flooded, too.
Yes.
But the Ladies Auxiliary was fixing food there to raise money for the church for building projects. What else did you use the money for?
Well, when anyone in the community was sick we know anything about [they would] always get a little, from fifty to a hundred. And then we visit hospitals. We reach way out. That's what we're going to do with the money. That's what it goes for.
So it's not for the building fund of the church. It doesn't go to the building.
No.
Okay. So you are still going with that.
We still doing it.
We were doing it until the flood, but now nobody goes.
That's where we got the food that they give out to residents.
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
That's right with the Women's Auxiliary, and you decided you're going to start back?
The building is the Ruritan and we rent it from them.
The building is Ruritan right up here. When do you think you'll start again?
We thought after Christmas we were going to start planning. The Ruritan has a lot to do to the building first. All of our appliances that we've got in there, a lot of them got messed up because the water went in there.
How many people did y'all feed?
On a Saturday night, how many did we have, Thomas, a hundred or two?
A hundred or two, five or six or seven.
How many of y'all are feeding a hundred to two hundred?
You mean working?
Back in the kitchen.
Well, right now, I believe—we never had too many; we have a lot of young girls that waits on tables. Most in the back is the older women that's been there for years.
About what average age would you say the Women's Auxiliary is now?
Well, it's not got too many young members. My daughter is a member. And
the other girls, all my girls worked with it ever since they were
little. I carried them with me and started in the morning times when
they first started. A lot of people donate
What is the menu?
We had barbecue pork, fried chicken, string beans, slaw and rice. That's what you'll get.
It seemed like everybody liked it. I've never seen such a crowd in my life.
And they just about worry you to death every time they see you. They'll say, 'When you going to open up? I want that rice.'
When it first opened up we wondered how come it opened up. We were building that church out yonder, in the process of building it. The women would cook dinner and carry it out there for the people that were working on the church. They decided they'd barbecue a pig and see if it wouldn't sell, and put the money on the church. Somebody gave them a pig and they barbecued it, and it went just like hotcakes. They did that once a month and finally got two or three or four pigs, all free labor. Nobody got a nickel for anything they were doing. The women would get down there; that's when the auxiliary was formed. They would go down there and work and have the biggest time you've ever seen in your life.
About how many people were helping then?
Oh, a dozen or two women just having the biggest time you've ever seen in
your life. It got so big they wanted to do it every week. They'd
barbecue three or four pigs. Pigs, not hogs like we do these days. It
was something that everybody got to looking forward to. But these old
people that started this thing, they began to get old.
It's a business deal now.
Then you didn't have any social security and all that stuff when everything was free. But now they got it getting into all that junk. It's not like it was. I don't know. This generation is not like the generation we came from.
How is it different?
Huh?
How's it different?
Well, those people, they enjoyed getting together and working and seeing how much money they could make. My aunt was the treasurer and every Christmas they had a big dinner—invite all their husbands and all their friends and what have you and fill that place right full. She'd read out the report that they had done with that money that year, all free labor. It didn't cost a nickel. If tears didn't come in your eyes you were a tough customer.
What were some of the things that they did?
One thing, they adopted an orphanage girl and supplied every need that she had, and falcon and different little things like that; anybody that'd get sick that wasn't able to go to the hospital. It was just amazing. They had so much money, though, they could do these things, because they didn't have to pay out any labor.
Right, but now you're paying people?
Um hmm.
Everybody that goes down there now gets paid. More or less like a business now—social security and all that kind of stuff.
Here comes Rob. We've got Mr. Cavenaugh here; the brother has arrived.
Hi. I'm Rob Amberg, Mr. Cavenaugh. Good to see you.
Good to see you.
Rob is working with me as a photographer. You might hear him snapping a few pictures if y'all don't mind.
I've got to go.
Oh do you?
Have you not ().
Twelve o'clock. It's twelve o'clock.
It's time to eat. Did you not come by here to eat with Ms. Cavenaugh?
No. My wife is an invalid down there and my daughter stays to tend to her, and I went to the church to see what was going on. I come back and stopped here.
He's the mailman's dad. I was telling you.
Oh, okay. We saw him pass by.
So you've got Ms. Marguerite back home.
Yeah. She's home.
How about that.
She went through it going and coming.
Really?
It is time to cook and eat.
It is.
I didn't think about that when we came that it was that close to lunchtime.
And some people have already been calling and asking if she's serving food.
Has she told you what she does?
I have just been talking about that. We've learned about the Women's Auxiliary food, and now her food.
She has her own little restaurant right here for family.
Except it's free, right?
Yes.
And they bring their friends. They do.
Well, I've been thinking since Hudson Church closed down. We did need a central place that we could go and eat.
I wish Lib would open up again.
Or if not even that, if she could get her crew and go down to either open up the firehouse or the fellowship hall. We'd start getting volunteers in there and start cooking up meals.
Well, after Christmas maybe we'll get back into the Ruritan and get started back up.
Well, we don't want to cut into your lunchtime, but there is one other area that we haven't really talked about. You had mentioned on the phone to Betsy about the people being angry with how they've been treated by FEMA. We heard good things about the Red Cross from you a little bit. Then there's also the FEMA story.
My son in law, FEMA gave him about $900, I think, something or another like that.
To cover what?
To cover what he had in the house and lost.
His whole house and belongings.
I had where Marguerite stayed and we had what we had in there, my clothes and stuff. They gave me $670, I believe is what it was. Then he heard the other day, they called and told him he wasn't getting any money—he had to pay back what he got. I told Jennie, I said, 'If they think they're going to get back what they give me, me and him's going to have a time.' I'll go to jail if I've got to turn around and give it back to them like that. They might take it back, but I'm not going to