Cravero
Today is Thursday, January 28th, 2016. My name’s Geoffrey Cravero and I’m speaking with Warren McFarland at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Thanks for speaking with us today, Mr. McFarland. Let’s, uh, begin with some of your biography. Could you, uh, tell us a little bit about where you’re originally from and your upbringing?
McFarland
Well, I was—I was born in Ohio, but we moved to Orlando when I was a year and a half old, so I count myself as a Floridian, and my father worked for the railroad here in Or—Orlando, and eventually went to Avon Park and was Railroad Agent there for many years, and that’s where I grew up, went to high school and—and, uh, where I went—learned from him—I learned the telegraph, I learned railroad work, and eventually went to work for the railroad after I graduated from high school in 1941. Um, had—had planned to go to college, but 1941 was not a good year to college, uh [coughs] and, uh, I wound up working on another railroad division, rather than the one that went through Avon Park, w—working out of Ocala, and I worked there, uh, for like 25 years, and then I was offered a position with the Interstate Commerce Commission, and I went, um—went with them, and uh, we—we lived in different places: uh, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C, and I eventually retired as Director of the Office of Compliance for the Interstate Commerce Commission out of Washington, and I moved—we moved back to Florida after I retired, and been living here ever since.
Cravero
That’s neat. Um, so—what, uh—could you tell us a little bit more about your, uh, your parents? And did you have any siblings, or...
McFarland
Yes. [clears throat] Uh, well, I had, uh, two brothers and three sisters. Uh, the three—the three sisters and one of the brothers were half—half-brothers and sisters, but I didn’t know the difference. Um, they were—they were all older than I, and, uh, so—uh, they were my brothers and sisters, and still are. Al—although they’re not living anymore. I’m the only one of the six that’s still alive, but, uh, my parents were both from Southeastern Ohio, and my father worked for the railroad there, uh, for like 18 years, I think it was, and then he decided to come to Florida and get rich in the Florida Boom in the 1920s. Uh, that didn’t work, so he went back to the railroad and worked for the railroad until he retired [clears throat], and, um, my mother, uh, she was just a farm girl, but she—she worked for a doctor as a receptionist, and she later worked, um, at—in the express office with my father, and then, she—when he retired, she retired, and so, uh, they lived—live—they lived in Avon Park until—until she could no longer take care of herself, and my—my brothers and sisters, um, they—they all—lived all over the place. One in—one in Virginia, one in, uh, Ohio, and—and Chi—and Chicago, and one in Dallas, and my—my brother lived in Avon Park his entire life. He said, “There’s no reason for—for anybody to live anywhere but Avon Park.”
Cravero
[laughs].
McFarland
[laughs] So that’s where he stayed.
Cravero
Were any of them, uh—did they follow in the family business of the railroad?
McFarland
No, none of them. I’m the only one out of—out of, uh—out of six, I’m the only one that went into the railroad business, um, and my—my youngest sister’s husband did go into the railroad business, and his son also went into the railroad business, and I had an uncle that was a railroad man. So it—railroading has—has always been pretty much a—a family, uh, affair in many—in many families. You know, one—one person gets started and then—then others go in, but—but none of my brothers and sisters, uh, were interested.
Cravero
Well, you mentioned, uh—that you—your father, uh, was a station agent and telegrapher in Avon Park. Um, could you tell us a little bit about growing up in the depot? What sort of, uh—what sort of skills and knowledge did you kind of acquire as a young man?
McFarland
Well, [clears throat] uh, I—I was always—I was not a, uh— crazy about trains, but I was interested in trains and—and—and the railroading, and I can remember when I could barely, uh, reach—stand up and—and reach the tabletop like this, and my dad had me doing things that I could do in the—like stamping—taking the rubber stamp and stamping it on a piece of paper on—on what’s called a waybill, which is a—a ship—a shipment, uh, document that you fill out when you have a shipment to make, and, uh, I would st—stamp the—the Avon Park’s stamp on there that showed this, that, where it started from, but, that had to have been about about—5-6 years old when I did that, and I—off and on, all—all during my school years, I just hung around there, and I—I didn’t—I wasn’t consciously preparing for a career in railroading. A matter of fact: my older brothers and sisters all went to college and—and—and it was planned for me to go also, but, as I said earlier, I graduated in 1941, and—and they were already drafting people out of—out of my class, and, um, so I—I knew it was a matter of time. So I didn’t think there was much point in going to college at that time.
So I didn’t go until much later, but, uh, it—it—when—when I was in my senior year in high school, uh, that’s when you could see what was happening: the world was in turmoil, and, um—and, as I said, members of my class had—had been called up, and—so I began to learn telegraphy, and my father taught me and I practiced, and then after I graduated from—from, uh, school, he, um, told the—the railroad that I was, uh, sufficiently knowledgeable to go to work, and, uh—I—I didn’t—As I said, I didn’t—wasn’t consciously, um, aware that I was absorbing everything that I did absorb during those years, uh, hanging around the depot, but I learned an awful lot that I didn’t know I’d learned, until I went out on my own and was working.
Cravero
What, uh—did you notice, uh, any, uh, major differences between the—the time of your father and yours when it c—comes to the, you know—the telegraphing and the—the depots?
McFarland
Oh, yeah. Well…
Cravero
[clears throat].
McFarland
When—when my father started, telegraphing was just about—I mean, that was like the major—major, uh, means of internal communication on the rail—on nearly every railroad, and—and when I started, it still was, but it—it began to fade away the—the longer I stayed, and I—and I—I stayed until 1965, and by that time, uh, they still required, uh, uh, people to know how to telegraph to go to work, but—but—at least—as—as—as, uh, operators and agents, but they did not, uh—did not use—use it, because they—everybody had telephones and—and things of that nature. So it was not as—as use—used as much then, and—and probably—well, I left the rail—railroad for the ICC[1] in 1965, and by the early 70s, there was[sic] hardly any railroads anywhere using t—the telegraph. It was all teletype and—and telephones and things of that nature. So that—it was[sic] tremendous difference there, and now, of course, it’s gone even beyond that. It’s all computerized—email and everything else like that. Even train dispatching, which I did for—for 18 years, um—that’s become computer-assisted train dispatching and—and the computer does it. When—when—when I was working, it was—it was all in your head. You had to do it all in your head, but, now the computer—they have what they call “computer-assisted dispatching.”
Cravero
So was, uh—I guess the depot was your very first job you had, or…
McFarland
Well, actually, no [laughs]. The very first paying job I—I worked as a clerk in the A&P[2] grocery store on Saturdays, uh, which—that—in—in a small town like Avon Park, that was about the only job that—kind of job that was available to a—to a high school kid, and there were three of four, uh, grocery stores in town, and the A&P, which was a chain, the re—others were all independent, but everybody—all the kids that I knew worked at one—one of the grocery stores. That’s where you got your first job.
Cravero
[laughs] Um, so I understand you ended up in Ocala, right? But, uh—but you kind of went from—where you were needed, um…
McFarland
Yes, you—when—when you begin railroading as—as a telegraph operator, you—you are put on what they call “the extra board.” Uh, um, you—you—your first day, you establish the date of your seniority, and that means that anybody that’s hired after you—you—you have rights over them on—on—if you want to claim a job or something like that, and—and the same thing hold—anybody that[sic] hired ahead of you can claim a job that’s—whether you want—whether you want it or not, and so, you—as—on the extra board, you just went where you were needed. Uh, somebody needed to be off sick, uh—there were no vacation—no paid vacation at the time, so that—uh, there was not much of that. Although some—some people did take vacations, and you went and worked for them, or they put on extra jobs because of seasonal problems—uh, season—seasonable increases in—in business, they’d put on an extra job somewhere to help the dispatchers handle trains, and so, you worked all over. I worked, uh, I don’t know how many different places. I could probably count it up. Not worth it.
Cravero
[laughs] Um, let’s see. Before the, uh, Atlantic Coast Line Railroad merged with the Seaboard Air Line [Railroad], um, and absorbed the Tavares & Gulf Railroad in 1969, you’d already moved to California at that point. Could you tell us a little bit about what you did out there with the Interstate Commerce Commission?
McFarland
Well, I—I—I—my first job with the ICC was in Chicago as—as a Railroad Safety and Service Agent, and, uh, in—in that capacity, I—I made what we call “agency checks” and “yard checks,” and we—we had two things: we were looking for compliance with the—with the tariffs, which had the force of law, and we were looking for, um, equipment that was not being used efficiently, and so, the—as the—and—and the other thing that—that in—in ’65, we also were charged with safety, uh, inspections of equipment and things of that nature.
However, in—in ’67 —1967, all of that was transferred into the newly-formed [U.S.] Department of Transportation, and so we no longer had any kind of safety obligation, but we still retained the car service, which was car—car efficiency, and—and the tariff and—and regulation, and so, I would go from—to various agencies along, um—in my territory. I had an—had an assigned territory, and I was supposed to visit these agencies on a periodic basis and ver—verify that they were complying with all of the rules and regulations, and that they were not delaying any equipment—and that was being used, and from there I—I was transferred to Atlanta doing the same thing, but, uh—and I stayed there for, uh, about five years, and then I was, uh, promoted and went back to Chicago as Assistant Regional Director there, and in—in that capacity, I was assisting the Re—Regional Director and overseeing all of the people that were doing the kind of work I was just desc—describing, and then, um, in ’73, I was, uh, promoted again and went to, um, San Francisco as, um, Regional Manager, and I had the, uh, responsibility for the 13 western states, plus Alaska and Hawaii. Uh, now, railroads and—and buses and trucks don’t run to Hawaii from the mainland, but—but—so we didn’t do much there, but what—I still had the responsibility for Hawaii and Alaska, and I was overseeing not only the—the people who were doing the work that I was talking about earlier, but I was also overseeing the—the lawyers, who—who, uh, handled the cases that were made and the—and the accountants that were—were auditing the—the books of the various, uh, carriers—motor and rail and barge lines and pipelines, and part of the—part of—and—and when I was in, um, San Francisco, the, um, uh, [Trans-]Alaska Pipeline [System] was being built and we had to oversee that, and the law required, at that time, that—and people usually don’t know this because a pipeline is a common carrier, and so, in order to know what they could charge, you had to know what their costs were to build and maintain the—the pipeline, and to do that, we had to have auditors go in and verify, and about ha—halfway through construction, everybody woke up that this was a nine billion dollar, uh, enterprise, and if we waited ‘til after the fact to—to, uh, audit it, we’d nev—they’d never know what they—what they could po—possibly charge. So we sent a team of auditors up there, and they stayed there for about three years determining the actual cost so that the pipeline could go into—into operation when it was finished, but then, after—I was—I was in San Francisco until 1981, and, um, the—the new chairman that had been appointed by President [Ronald] Reagan, uh, was—knew me, and he brought me into Washington[, D.C.] as Director of the Office of Compliance and Consumer Assistance, and I stayed there until I retired in ’85, but in—in Washington, I had oversight over the—the entire country for all of the things that I’ve been talking about that we did. Plus, uh, a lot of local stuff and—going up to Congress and taking care of that sort of thing.
Cravero
I read, uh, [clears throat] that the Morse Telegraph Club[, Inc.] used to meet at the [Central Florida] Railroad Museum on [Samuel] Morse’s birthday.[3] Could you tell me a little about, uh, the club and how that all came about?
McFarland
Well, it’s—it—it started, actually, back in the 1930s. Uh, some people that were telegraphers decided that they—that it would be a good idea to make—to have a club, and it was more or less a fraternal organization, at the time. I say “fraternal,” although there are a lot of women telegraphers. Uh, throughout the—the whole history of telegraphy, there—there have been a lot of women telegraphers, and probably, on the railroad, was—may have well have been the first industry that paid women the same wage as men for doing the same job, which was not true in—in—not true even today in many—many cases, but, uh, anyhow, these people got together and—and, as I said, it was just sort of a—I won’t say a drinking club, because it wasn’t that, but it was—it was a social club more than anything else, and then it—it sort of faded away a little bit, uh, and just hanging on by its teeth, you might say, and—and then, um, uh—I’m not sure of the exact dates, but sometime after World War II, when—when telegraphy began to fade away, as I had mentioned earlier on [inaudible] on the railroad, Western Union [Company] had al—already almost gone completely to—to teletype, uh, by that time, and, um, so the—the organization transformed itself into, uh, an historical preservation organization, and the goal of—of the, um—of the organization today is to preserve the knowledge and history and the technology that existed, uh, when the telegraph was in use, and, um, we organize in chapters.
Uh, we used to have a chapter in every state and some states had—had, uh, two chapters, but, uh, time has taken its toll and—and, um, now we’re down, uh—for example, the Florida chapter, of which I’m a member, um, encompasses Georgia and—and South Carolina and Tennessee, and—and Alabama. Uh, and so, the membership—the membership hasn’t really declined that much, but the membership of people who actually worked as telegraphers has obviously gone down—way down. Somebody made an estimate, and I don’t know the truth of it or not, but said there were only about 150 of us left in the organization that actually earned a living as—as telegraphers. Um, that may be true, it may not be true. I don’t know, but at the present time, we have probably around 3,000 members and we have around 30 chapters in the United States and Canada, and we—we do demonstrations at—at just about any place that will invite us to do a demonstration, but mostly to local historical societies that have an annual affair and they want something, uh, of, um—that—that has some historical significance, and so they’ll ask us to come and do—do a demonstration [clears throat], and many of these members that we have now have taught themselves to telegraph.
They’ve never worked as telegraphers, but they’ve taught themselves to telegraph, and some of the—some of the members are ham radio[4] operators, which uses a—a different code, but it’s still Morse Code. It’s an international code, known as International [Morse] Code, as opposed to American Morse [Code], which was the kind that was used on railroads and Western Union and stock markets and, uh, all of that sort of thing.
Cravero
[clears throat] I understand that it— somehow you, uh—you acquired a piece of the very first telegraph line that stretched all the way out to California.
McFarland
Yes.
Cravero
And how’d that—how’d that—how’d you end up acquiring that?
McFarland
I didn’t think…
Cravero
[clears throat].
McFarland
To bring that today, uh, but we—we have a website that’s—the Florida chapter has a website, and, uh, an outfit in Utah was setting up, um, an exhibit in a museum,[5] uh, where at a—at a—at a former Army camp. Uh, when I say former, I’m talking about [American] Civil War-era Army camp [laughs] that was one of the first stations on the Transcontinental Tre—Telegraph Line, and so they wanted some historical reference to the telegraph in their museum there, and, uh, they found our website on the internet and contacted us, and we were able to get them some telegraph instruments and assist them, and some months later, they, uh, contacted us again and said they had come into possession of a link of the original Transcontinental Telegraph Wire—came from Northeastern, uh, Nevada—just across the Utah line in Northeastern Nevada, and a man had found it and had donated, uh, a length of it—I don’t know how much—but had donated a length of it to this museum, and they wanted to know if we would like to have a piece of it, and so they sent us about two and a half feet: about 30 inches of it—a piece about that long, and it’s—it’s—it was a nine gauge, which is heavy, heavy wire. I mean, it’s—it’s almost a quarter, uh—not—not a quarter. Maybe, uh—it’s over an eighth of an inch thick—uh, the—the wire is, and it’s almost impossible to bend it with your bare hands.
It’s—it’s that thick, and it’d been laying out in the, uh—in the open in the desert out there near—near the old, uh, Pony Express route and the, um, stagecoach route that went west through there [coughs], and, um, they, uh—they kept, um—they kept it there, um, um—it—laid out there in the desert, and—and doesn’t rust like it would in—here in Florida, you know? It would all be rusted away [laughs] if that had happened here, and so we had that piece of—of the wire, and we—we debated as a—as an organization what to do with it. It wasn’t big enough to use anywhere really. So we wound up—and we cut it into pieces about, um, six inches long and mounted it on plaques, uh, and with a little bit of a history of it on the back of the plaque, and we use that in our demonstrations. Uh, we take it—take it around where—and we—we have these plaques distributed among the membership, so that there’s al—[always] one available somewhere, but it’s very interesting and—and—the interesting—one of the things about it, that the—it was shipped to me—mailed to me in a padded envelope and it was rolled—folded up, and I tried to straighten it out with my hands when I took it out of the envelope. I could not do it. We had to finally put it in a vice and—and hold down one end of it, and finally got it straightened out, and it was so hard that you couldn’t cut it with wire cutters or anything like that. You had to use a saw to cut it, uh [clears throat] but that was what—the wire that was used in the, uh, original Transcontinental Telegraph Line in 8—finished in 1861 [coughs].
Cravero
Wow, incredible. Well, let’s see. Before we, uh—give us a little demonstration, do you have anything else that you’d like to add? Any final thoughts or…
McFarland
Well, I—I don’t know anything off the top of my head. Uh, uh, railroading was an interesting occupation, and I’m sure it’s still is, although I’ve been away from it now for many years. I’ve been retired for 30 years now, so, uh—and I—I’d left the railroad for 20 years before that, so [laughs] it’s been awhile since I’ve been railroading, but, I—I enjoyed the—the—working there, and as I said, I worked as a train dispatcher, which was, um, very complex and complicated job to keep the trains moving.
Uh, when I started, an old time dispatcher said, “Oh, there’s nothing to it.” Said, “You just—you just meet ‘em—don’t meet ‘em too close together or too far apart.” [laughs] Well, its’—that’s an oversimplification, but it—it’s what you—that’s exactly what you were trying to do was—is to move the trains over the—over the, uh, territory wi—in—in the most efficient manner possible, and that, you know—and single track and—and—and, uh, with limited, uh, communication. You had no communication—when I started, you had no communication with—with the people on the train other than handing them up, uh—as they pass an open telegraph office you—you could hand them up orders or, uh, messages of what you want to do, or they could throw off something as they went by, but, um, that was an interesting, uh, occupation and—and very demanding, very challenging. Um, somewhat comparable to an aircraft, uh, uh, air—air controller, except that we couldn’t tell the tr—trains to pull up and go around or—or, uh, fly higher and—and not hit—hit the train ahead of them. They were—they were, uh, consigned to the track. They had to stay on the track, so made—made it a little bit more complicated.
Cravero
Well, I guess, if you would, let’s, uh, give us a little demonstration here. Let me see if I…
McFarland
Well, I’m sorry…
Cravero
Can...
McFarland
That this is not working. I don’t know what it is, but, this—this is the sound [tapping]—this is the sound of—this instrument in—in this is called a sounder, [tapping] and this, uh, box-like object is called a resonator, and the purpose of it is to focus the sound so it can be, uh, heard more clearly, and the can—the Prince Albert tobacco can, we—we now—we call it the “first solid-state amplifier,” because it makes a difference [tapping]. If you can hear the different—[tapping] with and without the can [tapping], and somebody back in the—in the early days of this discovered that you could do that—that, because a railroad agent had more to do than just sit at a desk and listen—listen for this. Uh, he had to be out in the freight warehouse or [inaudible] out—outside with the train going by or something like that, and he needed to be able to hear the dispatcher’s wire when that was happening.
So that, um, uh—that really changed the way that you could do that, and—and [inaudible] I never worked a job that didn’t have a can stuck in the resonator like that, and this—this, uh, is just the same thing and—and—[tapping] with a key here. I’ll move this out of the way. This—this has a key [tapping] and that’s the way you sound it, and you make a dot [tap] by closing the key [tap] real quickly and a dash [tap] by holding it down three times as long as you do for the dot, and you [tapping] do that to spell out, uh, everything that you want to say, and, like texters today, we use a lot of abbreviations. As a matter of fact, many of the abbreviations that texters are using were being used by telegraphers a hundred years ago, but, this is the key [tap] and this is the sounder, and then this called a bug, and it’s called a bug because the logo is a beetle, and nobody knows why they chose that as their logo, but they did.
It started out—if you—if you worked 8 hours or 12 hours a day, which, uh, up until the Hours of Service [HOS] law went into effect in 1908, that’s, uh—you worked 12 hours a day, [tapping] and you worked 12 hours a day with this up and down motion you—you developed telegrapher’s paralysis. We call it carpel tunnel syndrome now, but it was telegrapher’s paralysis then [tapping], and so they began experimenting what you could do to—to alleviate it, and the first thing they did was turn the key on its side and work it back and forth, and they kept working with it and eventually came into this form, and this is now called a vi—a—a speed key, and I can’t demonstrate because my power somehow or another is not working here today [tapping], but, um, you—the speed key—if—if I want to make a—a series of dots with—with this straight key [tapping], it goes like that, but, with the speed key, I can do it just [tap] with—with one movement of my thumb, and so, that relieved the carpel tunnel, but it also speeded everything up.
McFarland
And so, those are the—those are the—the principal instruments that—that were used by landline telegraphers, and that—the—this is called American Morse, and it was used, uh, all over—all over the world, really. It—it just changed the whole world, and then, uh, in the late 8—1800s, [Guglielmo] Marconi discovered that you could send, uh, power through the, uh—through the air and—and modulate it and—and make a—a code—send code through the air, and they did—they did that and—using a—a slightly different code. Uh, the—this code—the American Morse Code has a lot of spaces in it, which makes it, uh, uh, a lot quicker, but, with the—when it went to radio, they couldn’t tell whether the spaces were accidental or intentional, and so they eliminated the space letters and everything became, um, uh, the—the tone then—the length of the tone was—determined whether it was a dot or a dash, and that sounded like this [beeping], but, uh—and that’s still used by ham radio operators and all base radio stations, like your local police station and your fire stations and things of that nature, are required by the Federal Communications Commission to identify themselves every hour, and now they use a computer, but every hour on the hour, uh, these—these stations will identify themselves using International Morse Code, sending their call letters—whatever they might be, and that—your television stations, your—your commercial radio stations, they all have to do this—do that, and they do it. So that, uh, America—I mean, the International Morse Code is still in use, uh, quite a bit with ham radio operators and that. American Morse—the last known use in the United States was in 1983, but th—that was just really an anomaly, because it had—by the mid-70s it had pretty much disappeared, but there’s just this one place out in Montana that still was using it until 1983.
Cravero
That’s fantastic [clears throat]. Mr. McFarland, we really appreciate you sharing your story with us and demonstrating the tools of your trade.
McFarland
Well, I’m happy to do it. Happy to do it.
Cravero
Alright. Well, thank you so much. That will conclude our interview and, uh, we really appreciate you being here with us.
McFarland
Thank you.
Dombrowski
This is an interview with Bette Skates, the church historian for Holy Cross Episcopal Church in Sanford. This interview is being conducted on July 8, 2010,[1] at the Museum of Seminole County History. Interviewer is Diana Dombrowski, representing the museum for the Historical Society of Central Florida.
Skates
Good.
Dombrowski
I just have some basic questions first. Your name is Bette Skates, but where and when were you born?
Skates
I was born in Philadelphia[, Pennsylvania] in 1933.
Dombrowski
Oh, wow. What brought your family to Florida?
Skates
My father’s ill health, which is what brings most people to Florida back in the day.
Dombrowski
Yeah. That’s true. When did you move here? Did you grow up in Central Florida?
Skates
I moved to Sanford in 1944.
Dombrowski
Oh, okay. What was it like? Could you describe it? Was it very big? Was it busy?
Skates
Sanford was a railroad town. And my father worked for the railroad—is the reason, besides the fact that his health was not good, and he needed to get out of the North. And he was a Georgia boy to begin with. So he wanted to come south. And so when he had this opportunity to work for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, at the freight station, he was very eager to accept the job. We came in on a train that they call the—well, there’s two of them. One was the Orange Blossom Special, and the other was the Champion. And this was the passenger train from the North—from Philadelphia and New York. All points north.
When we came into the station, my mother had never—well, yes. Mother had been south before, but we hadn’t, as children—very young children. I was ten—nine or ten. And when we pulled into the station and got off the train, the humidity hit us like it was going to knock us out. And I said, “Oh. Let’s get back on the train.”[laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
And that was before air—trains were air-conditioned too, but—but it was still cooler on the train.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
So my dad said, you know, “This is nothing. This is fine. This feels wonderful. Get used to it.”
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
[laughs]And my mother—she’s just kind of being quiet and fanning herself. We had this—it—it was the old station that was on—on Ninth Street, and they’ve since torn it down.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
On Ninth and, uh—well, it was just Ninth Street. I guess there was side street, but I don’t recall. right off of French Avenue. Because then the tracks still all—we still had tracks running all over downtown.
Dombrowski
Hmm.
Skates
They’re—they’re not there now, because back in the day, when trains first came in—all of the wharves and the produce—everything came in to downtown to the river. So, um, we had—let me get back to my story. So we got off the train and my sister and I—and she was a year younger than I am—and we both started—“Something smells funny. What is it?” My dad said, “Oh, that’s sulfur water! Oh, come over here, girls!” He says. “Come over here!” And here’s a water fountain, right up against the train station. I think it was a brick train station. Right there, it’s all green inside, where the water is coming out. And we’re looking at this saying, “Oh, this smells so bad!” You know. We’re holding our noses, and he’s getting very annoyed with us. “Take a taste of that water. That’s healthy water. That’s better than drinking that Schuylkill River water you’ve been drinking in Philadelphia.” Of course, my mother is being as she always is—long-suffering. And she said, “Well, they can taste it if they want to.” We tasted it and we almost gagged! Sulfur water—the first time you ever taste it, is horrible. You do get used to it. And you do realize that it is healthy.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
But, it’s all the water fountains in the city. And there were water fountains in the parks, and there was one in front of the [First] Baptist Church [of Sanford], and different places. They were all over town. And they were all sulfur water.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
So you did get used to it.
Dombrowski
Oh my goodness. So was the smell everywhere too?
Skates
Everywhere. Sulfur smells like rotten eggs.
Dombrowski
It does. Yeah. I remember we went to the [Ponce de Leon’s] Fountain of Youth [Archaeological Park] and they were giving it out, you know.
Skate
Yes, yes. But it’s supposed to be good for you. So, we got off the train there. And we—I think we took a cab, because we didn’t have a car at that time. And we went to an apartment my father had rented. And I guess I need to say this too, because these are the things that people that haven’t lived here don’t understand or can’t get used to. When we got to the apartment—we had an upstairs apartment. A lovely old two-story house in Sanford just two blocks from where I live now, by the way. And the whole upstairs—this was during the war—and every house in Sanford had been made into apartments and efficiencies, because the Navy base[2] was here, and housing was a premium.
As we started to go up the stairs, and on the porch was a burlap sack that had something in it. My dad said to me, “Bette, grab that bag and bring it upstairs.” We had our suitcase and everything. I went to pick up the bag, and roaches came out of the bag. They were flying roaches and they were flying all over. I don’t know how many. It might have been two, but it seemed like a hundred. Of course, I dropped it and screamed and had a hissy fit, a good Southern expression. Someone had left a bag of oranges there for us. And, so roaches, of course—so that was my introduction to Sanford.
The apartment was lovely and it was cool with oak trees. Of course, I found out that oak trees breed roaches too, so we had roaches flying in the windows and things like that. Yeah, like the water, and the humidity—you try to get used to it. I don’t think I ever got used to the roaches. But that was my introduction to Sanford.
Dombrowski
How long did you live in the apartment?
Skates
We lived there for four years, and then my mom bought a house. And my father was ill. I mean, he was very ill, and he knew he was dying. My mother opened a beauty shop downtown, just in 1956, because she knew that she was going to have to support the family. He died in ’56. So she had her beauty shop for 25-30 years in Downtown Sanford.
Dombrowski
That’s really nice.
Skates
She’s the one that could tell the stories [laughs].
Dombrowski
Okay [laughs].How has Sanford changed when you were growing up there? It was a big railroad town, and your mother, it seems, was there for a very long time. Did you see it get busier? Or develop more?
Skates
Yes, development. The stores that I remember, as growing up, are—I was trying to think if there are any that are still downtown. But, coming from a big city, it was very nice that we could walk everywhere. Ride bicycles.
We went to school at the grammar school and then at Seminole High School, which was just up not too far from my house. I mean, everything was convenient. It was very nice. It was a good, homey feeling, and everybody was friendly. It was a very nice place to grow up, I think. And the schools—my father did not think much of the schools, but then again, in the South, schools hadn’t really caught up by that time. It took quite a few years for them to catch up to what we had been used to. But it, you know, was a nice place to grow up. Very nice.
Dombrowski
That’s—that’s nice [laughs].
Skates
[laughs] Yeah.
Dombrowski
What was it like for your mother to set up the beauty shop? Was it very difficult? Or…
Skates
It was very difficult. My grandparents—her mother and father—had lived in Philadelphia. And they had, um—they sold their property up there and came down, just after my dad died, to live with my mother. I know—to help her. We didn’t realize it, at the time, but, um—and they helped her with finances for the beauty shop
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
So that was—it was very nice. And they lived with us actually, until they both died. They lived with my mother. Um, So that was, um—that was the way she could do what she did. The beauty shop was, um—what—what she would charge for what—for the work she did—I wish I had a price list. But I remember one time, she said something about a dollar and quarter for a manicure. We all said, “Is that all?” She said, “If I had charged a dollar and a half, they wouldn’t come back.”
Dombrowski
Oh, wow.
Skates
So, I mean, the prices were—were—were really…
Dombrowski
Different.
Skates
Different.
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
[laughs] Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. But it was her—her hopes[?]—her beauty shop was in the Montezuma Hotel, which that building has burned down since…
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
Then. It was a big hotel that was built here in the 1880s.
Dombrowski
Hmm.
Skates
It was about four blocks from the river, and People would get off the steam ships and walk up the little hill and—to the hotel. It was called the “Bye Lo Hotel,” at the time—I mean, at that time. It was later changed to the Montezuma. But it was—when Mother had the beauty shop there, it was a little spooky
Dombrowski
Really?
Skates
It was old, you know?
Dombrowski
Yeah.
Skates
And—and there’s a lot of people who still lived there. But, uh, it burned down a few years ago. [inaudible]…
Dombrowski
Hmm.
Skates
About 12 years ago, I guess. So, uh, that was—that was a loss, but it was the first hotel in Sanford that had a swimming pool. Maybe the only…
Dombrowski
Oh, wow.
Skates
One. It was in the basement…
Dombrowski
Oh, okay.
Skates
Of the hotel.
Dombrowski
That would be cool.
Skates
Yeah.
Dombrowski
Yeah.
Skates
So that was neat. Later, they, uh, put a furnace in the swimming pool and didn’t use that anymore. I never saw the swimming pool with water in it.
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
I did see it with a furnace in it.
Dombrowski
Oh [laughs].
Skates
But, uh, um…
Dombrowski
Um, Where did you go to school? Did you go to college?
Skates
Yes.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
I did. I went to Stetson University, um…
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
I started at Stetson in 19well, let’s see. I was going to OJC—Orlando—it was Orlando Junior College. I went there for a while, and then I went to Stetson. It took me—I—I figured this out one time, but I don’t remember. Let’s see. 70—It took me about—I hate to say too much, because I—I—it took me a long time to graduate. I got married when I was 18.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
I went to college, and I spent three months at Middle Georgia College, up in, uh, Cochran, Georgia. My cousins, uh—my dad’s sister wanted their daughter to go, and she wouldn’t go. She was homesick. And they said, “Well, if Bette would come and go with her, she would go.” So I went there, and I spent three months. Had a wonderful time. Made the Dean’s List. Was just doing fine, except I had a boyfriend, and I was in love
Dombrowski
Aww [laughs].
Skates
[laughs]. And my moth—the woman’s—the—the—the boy’s mother kept saying, “Well, I was married when I was 18,” So I decided that it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me. So I married him. So…
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
I went to college in between having my children.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
Every time I could get, uh—I could find some money, or get a loan, or—there—there were student loans—there were [Federal] Pell Grants we could get. They—Loans were much easier to get in those days, so I could get student loan. So I would go to school for a while and then I would get pregnant again. And then I’d…
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
Go to school for a while and then I would get pregnant again.
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
This went on until 1964—well, it—let’s see when. I don’t remember how many years. But I finally started teaching when I was—when it was, um—it was 1965, I think.
Dombrowski
Oh, okay.
Skates
So it took me a long time to get certified to teach, but I did. And then I taught for 30 years in Seminole County.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
Yeah. Which has been exciting.
Dombrowski
How many children did you have?
Skates
I have four children.
Dombrowski
Oh, okay.
Skates
Yeah. So I was kind of spacing this. Finally—I might want to censor this—finally about 1968, my husband got tired of it. Anybody, I guess, could understand that. He said—he didn’t sign on for that. So that was alright. But we managed, very well, and thank goodness I had my education so I could support my family. So it was good.
Dombrowski
So you taught in the school system for 30 years. What was it like in the 60’s? What was integration like?
Skates
My first 10 years, I taught out in Geneva [Elementary School].
Dombrowski
Oh, I like Geneva.
Skates
Oh, I love Geneva. I still hear from those kids. They’re great. Of course, they’re not kids. They’re grown. It was wonderful. It was probably the best teaching assignment you could have for a beginning teacher. Because by that time, I was 35 when I started teaching.
I was trying to think of how to put this. The schools had not been integrated much at that time. I don’t remember the year that I had the first black student, but I had a sweet boy. Now I was teaching fifth grade. He had come up through the grades. There was only five grades—five classrooms—at Geneva.
And the first year that I taught there, I taught in the auditorium, because there was no place. So what they did was take out the first couple rows of seats and let us set the classroom up right in front of the stage. Which was good until I got a couple of kids that were a little bit older than they should have been in fifth grade—a boy and a girl. And next thing I knew, they were behind the stage, and I had to go get them. They were good kids, and they really didn’t do anything bad, I don’t think. But I would have been in big trouble.
But anyway, the first black child I had—I was going to say I’ll never forget his name, and I did. What a sweetheart he was [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
But he was just testing. He was testing us, going to see if the system was going to work. He was a nice kid. Good parents. If I called his parents before he left school, by the time he got off the bus at home, they were back at the school to see what he had done or hadn’t done. Because he didn’t like to do homework and he didn’t like to do class work. Guess he had just been allowed to get away with more than he should have. But he wasn’t used to me. Anyway, he was a nice kid. Yeah, it was interesting, and the children we had at Geneva—the black and the white children—were I think just the salt of the earth. I mean they were really good people. Parents were country folks, most of them at that time. Now, later on, when UCF [University of Central Florida] opened, we started getting a different group of children. Their parents were more educated. They were professors and people that worked at the college. And so by the time I left Geneva, it had changed a good bit.
My two younger boys, I brought with me to Geneva, so I taught two of my own children in fifth grade. Which was—everybody says, “How is it working?” I said, “It works fine.” No problem. They were good kids to begin with. It worked out. It was fine. That was good too, because, that was, at the time, in Sanford. My two older children—there were a lot of problems at schools in Sanford, with the integration. They started busing—I don’t remember the year. When I was going to Geneva, my daughter was being bused to what used to be an all-black high school—Crooms High School—which they did just to integrate. And that was wrong. Because the kids—the black kids were not happy, the white kids were not happy. And the black teachers and the white teachers were all upset about it, but they were busing the kids across town. So I’m driving to Geneva ten miles away and my daughter is in a bus driving across the city, and I don’t know where she is and what’s happening. It was worrisome. But it all worked out. It just took time and a lot of patience on both sides. It should never have been separate to begin with, but we have to fix our mistakes.
Dombrowski
So tensions were high?
Skates
Very high.
Dombrowski
Was it ever violent?
Skates
Yeah. There was violence. A lot of it was threatened. You know, just like, if you go down this street, we’re going to throw rocks at the bus and things like that. That was very worrisome. And my oldest son, when he was in ninth—and well, high school. It was ninth grade at Crooms. But when he was in ninth grade and tenth grade—all through school, he was a big boy, and had red hair. And it was a novelty. He got a lot of—he did his best to stay out of trouble, but trouble came to him. And of course, he tells me now he got blamed for a lot of things he didn’t do, but I’m not going to go there. You know how kids are. Anyway, he hung in there. His high school experiences were very bad. Very bad. Yeah. It was real sad. But my daughter didn’t seem to have the problems. She was also redheaded, but she seemed to go with the flow easier. He was a target. You know, a big guy. But he’s not a fighter. He didn’t want to fight, but anyway. We got through it [laughs].
Dombrowski
Good [laughs].Did you all live in Sanford at the time? Did you drive to Geneva and back?
Skates
I drove to Geneva. Yeah. I bought the house that I’m still living in, in 1958.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
Yeah. So I raised my family there. And just last couple years ago, we celebrated our 50th—I said, I’ll never have a golden wedding anniversary—so we celebrated our golden anniversary living in the house. So the kids got together and each one did something. But anyway, they have a photograph of the house framed in a beautiful frame that my grandson found when he was working for the College Hunks Hauling Junk. He found a frame and on the bottom of it my daughter wrote in gold, “Thanks for the memories.” So it’s very nice. I have it hanging over the piano. It’s very nice.
Dombrowski
That’s wonderful. So it’s downtown?
Skates
Yes. It’s downtown. If you go—First Street is the street where all the commerce is, where the business is. I live between Eleventh [Street] and Twelfth [Street] on Park Avenue. And Park Avenue’s the main street that goes down to the lakefront, and used to be [U.S. Route] 17-92 back in the day. That is where traffic went through the town. It’s in the historic district.
The house was built in 1924. It’s probably more than anybody wants to know, but it’s called a “Craftsman Airplane Bungalow.” Because the upstairs is one room, and a bathroom, and it has 12 windows all the way around. So it looks like you’re looking out airplane windows. You’re not. They’re regular windows, but anyway, that’s what it’s called.
Dombrowski
That sounds really cool. I love Craftsman style.
Skates
Yes. It’s really nice. I have pillars on that house that are real unique. They’re made out of coquina.
Dombrowski
Wow.
Skates
Yeah. My fireplace—the chimney is made out of coquina. And it’s much higher than the first floor. It goes up past the second floor, because the second floor is sitting kind of in the middle of the house. It’s really neat. You’ll have to come see me.
Dombrowski
This sounds like a real Florida house.
Skates It is a real Florida house. Yeah. For a good many years we didn’t have air conditioning, so we had what they called an “attic fan” that’s up in the second floor attic. When you turn it on and you open a window in each room, one window—it sucks the cool night air in and keeps the house cool. Only it slams doors, you have to be real careful, because doors get sucked. You get slamming doors all day. But it was neat. I don’t remember being miserable.
Dombrowski
Well, good.
Skates
I don’t remember being exactly hot. So it must have worked.
Dombrowski
Were you a member of the church since you moved here?
Skates
No. We were Lutheran when we first moved here. My sister and I had both been confirmed in the Lutheran Church in Philadelphia. And so I convinced my husband that he should join the Lutheran church, and so we went as a family until he left. And well, the kids were teenagers, and you know how hard it is to get teenagers to go to church. So I just decided that I had always loved the [Holy Cross] Episcopal Church, and I loved the architecture, and the history, and Jesus. I’m sorry, Jesus. I get carried away. But so we—my daughter and I, and my youngest son—all joined the Episcopal church. My two older sons were not interested. But they were grown by that time, and I didn’t feel like I could force them to do that. They had to want to do that. And I’m still a member.
But how I got the job as historian, I made the mistake of correcting someone. You know how when someone says, “Oh, it was 1873—2, or something?” I said, “No. it was ’73.” “We need a historian. You’re—you’re it. You’re going to do it.” [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
I said, Oh, my gosh. I should keep my mouth shut. [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
But I love it. I’ve been doing this since, um, [20]04.
Dombrowski
Wow. Okay.
Skates
Yeah. So the church, they said, had no written history. I’ve—I’ve found all kinds of stuff, so it’s—I’ve collected it. I’ve got it together. I write a news, uh, article each month for our church newsletter that goes out every month, telling, you know, whatever it is I found out recently about the church. And so it’s—it’s a good thing. I enjoy it.
Dombrowski
Could you speak a little about the church? When it was founded, you know?
Skates
Yes,. This was General [Henry Shelton] Sanford’s church. When General Sanford—Henry Sheldon Sanford—came to this area in 1870—probably 1870. It was after the Civil War, and he was trying, as a lot of—I don’t want to call them “carpetbaggers,” but some people do. A lot of people—wealthy northerners—came down and tried to make their fortune, or another fortune. He had been ambassador to Belgium. They called him a liaison. Liaison? That doesn’t sound right. Well, anyway, yeah. I guess he was. But he also was a spy for the Union Army during the war—the Civil War.
Dombrowski
Oh, my goodness.
Skates
And he was traveling around going to different foreign capitals, trying to get some of those countries to send ammunition and guns to the North. So there’s a whole big story that I haven’t even started on of his spying for the North. But when he finished up with that job—I guess he retired from that job, because he was probably in his 50s then, I think. He married a beautiful lady. She was living in Belgium, but she was from the United States. The Sanford Museum has a huge, gorgeous painting of the home they lived in, in Belgium. It looks like a small—like maybe the Queen might have had that summer home, or something. It was beautiful. We have friends in Sanford that have visited that area and that house, and they’re using that house as a retreat for nuns now. Anyway, General Henry Sanford—he became a general, because he gave some cannons to the state of Minnesota, because he wanted a title. So the Governor of Minnesota [Alexander Ramsey] made him a general.
So, anyway, let’s see. Let me get back to the church. So he bought a lot of land down on the lakefront. He was right for his time, that Sanford—and of course it wasn’t called Sanford in those days) —that this area, Mellonville, was going to be the “Gateway to South Florida.” Because all supplies—food, you know, everything that people need to start up a homestead—they would have to buy in Sanford. So he had a lumber mill. Somebody else had a grocery store. I mean they had all things people, you know, the pioneers, would need.
He bought orange trees from all over, and he planted orange trees. One of his groves—his first grove [St. Gertrude’s Grove] —was downtown right on the lakefront where there’s apartment buildings and city hall and things there now. Citrus didn’t do too well there. The soil apparently wasn’t good enough, and so they moved out to what he called Belair [Grove], and that’s out towards Lake Mary, around the lakes. So, his Belair Groves[sic] were very profitable.
About 1873, he decided that there needed to be a church. He and his wife, Gertrude [Dupuy Sanford]—now, Gertrude didn’t come here much, because this was not her cup of tea. And when you see pictures of her as a young girl, she’s absolutely beautiful. Beautiful clothes, and very high class. And they had about five children and they were all born in Europe. She didn’t come here often. But he planted Belair in orange and lemon trees. He had a grove manager whose name was Reverend Lyman Phelps. General Sanford was from Connecticut. And he convinced this Episcopal priest to come down to start a church. Well, he did, but he also made Lyman Phelps his agent and his farm grove manager, because the man had a background in botany too. The man was very, uh,—he was very versatile.
When, um—when General Sanford—I call him “General Sanford”. A lot of people say he—he doesn’t deserve that title, but it just comes easy to me, for some reason. It—it denotes a lot of the things that he did, other than just being Henry Sanford. Um, so they started to build this church, and Mrs. Sanford wrote to all of her wealthy friends, and in her letters, she said, “Please, um, help us build our dear little church.” And that was her—the way she called it—their “dear little church” in San—in—in this city. Someone, finally, along the line—a friend of his daughter—[inaudible] said—said, “Well, we should call this city ‘Sanford,’ after you, Mr. Sanford.” And Mr. Sanford said, “Ha. What a good idea.”
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
[laughs]. And I don’t remember the years that that was—that was started. But, so anyway, by 1873, they had completed the church. Lyman Phelps and Reverend Holeman—H-O-L-E-M-A-N—um, were priests there. And they had, um, services that—these priests—I—when I read their—in the diocesan records, there’s—they had to keep records of what trips they went on and where they went. They rode horses, walked—horse and buggy—through Florida sand, which anybody that walks through it knows that—there was[sic] highways. The only way you went were by animal, you know, roads, where animals, or maybe the Indians, had made them. Um, they went to, um—but they went all over Central Florida. They went to Eustis, to Longwood, to Orlando. They started the St. Luke’s Church in Orlando, which is now the Cathedral [Church of St. Luke]. They went all over Central Florida, uh, especially Lyman Phelps. Um, But he—they were, um—it just amazes me, when I read their exploits, and the alligators…
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
You know, the mosquitoes, the—oh, my soul. But, um, anyway, so that’s how the—the Episcopal church got its start. That church—that was built in 1873. 1880, along comes—and they called it a “tornado,” and I haven’t been able to say that it wasn’t, but I think it was more like a hurricane, and maybe a tornado—a tornado was [inaudible]. It blew down Mrs. Sanford’s dear little church.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
And we have pictures of it. And the—the steeple is laying on the ground, and the church is still standing, but it’s—it’s—it’s damaged. So they got busy. Mrs. Sanford raised some more money, and by, um, 1880, they had built another—well, yeah. It was 1873. By 1880, the church blew down. By 1881, they had a new church built. That church survived until 1923, and it burned down.
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
So they—1924 and ’25, they rebuilt it. So the church standing on that property is still on the same property that Sanford gave us. That church now was built, uh, in 19—1924, it was completed. It’s, uh, what they call “Spanish Mediterranean” [Architecture]. It’s…
Dombrowski
Oh.
Skates
Very Spanish-looking. It’s a very pretty church.
Dombrowski
Where is it?
Skates
It’s on the corner of Fourth—Park Avenue and Fourth Street.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
And the parish hall was built by 1926. So one of the things I always thought was interesting, when they first built—or probably the second church—in the side where they had some room, they put orange trees so that in case times were bad, they would have some money. They would have a way of getting money still.
Dombrowski
Aw.
Skates
That was kind of interesting.
Dombrowski
Um,I do have a question. I don’t know much about the church in Sanford. Is it the main church for the city? Are most of the people in Sanford Episcopalian?
Skates
No, no. They’re not. Probably back in the day, it was the only church, but then of course, the South is mostly Methodist and Baptist. And right now the street—Park Avenue should have been called “Church Street.” Because there’s the Episcopal—well, first, a block closer to the lake was the Congregational church. But since they’ve moved that—they tore it down and moved down Park Avenue. The next church was Holy Cross. Then, next door to us is the [First United] Methodist Church [of Sanford]. Right next door to that is the [First] Baptist Church [of Sanford].
So on Sunday mornings, we used to have a real traffic jam down there. Not so much anymore. No, Holy Cross—I think it’s like all the churches. They’re struggling. But we’re still here. We have two services, an 8 o’clock service and a 10 o’clock service. If we had everybody at 10 o’clock, we would have a good crowd. But when you separate it into two—the people who go at 8 o’clock won’t come at 10. The people who come at 10 o’clock won’t go at 8 o’clock. So our priest does two services. And yeah, it’s a busy little church. We have a fairly good-sized Sunday school, considering Sunday schools are hard for churches these days too. So, probably at one time it was the center of the area, church-wise, but not anymore.
Dombrowski
In your time as a historian there, have you—reading through the documents and that sort of thing, have you noticed any trends in how many members they had? Like when UCF came, did more people come to the church?
Skates
It was the biggest—the largest crowds that we have ever had was through the war years when we had a Navy base in Sanford. And that started up as a training base for carrier—for planes to land on carriers. I’m not as familiar with the history of the Navy base, but it closed at the end of World War II, and it was a big drop in the congregation. But then when [the] Korea[n War] came back, they started the base up again. And a lot of those people too have been Navy people—very sophisticated—have been all over the world. Lived in many different places.
So those are the people we seem to pull in more than the people that grew up here. Most Southern people are Baptist. My dad’s family—they were all Baptist. But it’s different. Different churches suit different people. I mean, you want whatever it is that makes you feel the presence, or that you feel that you need, that’s where you should be. So I’m very ecumenical. I can, um, belong to any church you want to [laughs]. But Holy Cross is lovely. And the services are beautiful [laughs].
Dombrowski
Uh, how involved has the church been in the community? Do they hold a lot of, have they held a lot of events?
Skates
Sanford—Holy Cross—was the “Guiding Light for Grace and Grits,” which is to feed the homeless. It’s a feeding program that we had at Holy Cross. And I can’t remember these years, it’s been going on for a long time. And we had it at Holy Cross. Every Wednesday night, Holy Cross would feed, oh, a hundred people. But it would depend on the season and what. Homeless people from all over. And not just men, but families. People would come to eat.
A few years ago, we wanted to remodel the parish hall, which is where the kitchen is. And we opted to find another place to hold the Wednesday night feedings—dinners, I should say—and that was—that was hard, because the people at the church—and we have some people who are so dedicated to this—they finally found that the City [of Sanford] would let them use the [Sanford] Civic Center. It costs, I think, $200 a month or something like that. We have to pay the City for that. So now they’re feeding them down there. And also, during the transition when the parish hall was being refurbished, and the kitchen was—when we had a new priest—he really has done a lot. I mean, he has Wednesday night services, and so they had a meal there on Wednesday nights, and classes and everything. So that kind of made them want to keep the “Grace and Grits” out there. And Holy Cross wasn’t the only one that does this. I must explain this. Every church—not every church, but many churches in Sanford—there’s a Methodist church, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Lake Mary, the [All Souls] Catholic Church [of Sanford]. All of them.
Dombrowski
Just a minute here. Just to make sure.
Skates
All of them have people that come and help so we’re not doing it by ourselves. Did it run out of battery?
Dombrowski
No. It’s working. No. It’s working, I just wanted to make sure that the whole thing had recorded and everything. I’m sorry.
Skates
But anyway, it’s a whole city thing. There’s a whole lot of people involved in this. So, yeah. We do that. We also have our new priest—well at least not that new anymore. He’s been here 2 or 3 years, and he’s very much involved in helping the homeless. They call it “SACON[sp].” I couldn’t tell you what it stands for, but they go to different places in the neighborhoods and help homeless people get ID cards. Because if they don’t have an ID card, they can’t—well, there’s a lot of things they can’t do. They can’t even get shelter sometimes, if they’re going to shelters. So this has been a good thing. And helping—it’s helping the city to know what the population is of the homeless, and where they’re staying and what they’re doing. So that’s a good thing. He was just very much involved in that.
We have some kind of a health thing one day a week at Holy Cross in the mornings, where people can come. I’m not really sure what, I guess I shouldn’t say anything about it, because I’m not sure what that is. I don’t what the group is that’s doing it. But yeah, Holy Cross is involved.
Dombrowski
Uh, is there anything about the church that you’d like to discuss that we haven’t covered?
Skates
We have a lot of memorials in Holy Cross that I’ve been trying to—and this is a hard job. We actually have two memorial books that from the beginning people have—the gifts of love that they’ve given in memory of someone that they lost. But when I go to the memorial books, there are items in there that we no longer have. We’ve had a couple of break-ins over the years, so they’ve lost some things, and then there’s items that we have that aren’t listed. So we’ve endeavored to work on this. I was trying to take pictures and it’s just one other job that I haven’t finished. It takes a lot of time to do that. And I really—I could get help—old-timers, because I’m not an old-timer there. They’ll say, “Oh no, I remember that was given in memory of so-and-so.”
Right now, I’m working on—when the church was rebuilt in 1923-1924, the altar and the pulpit at the front was very plain. I can only tell from pictures, but unattractive. And in 1940, sometime, a member of the choir—and I’m still working on this. This is one of those strings you have to keep following and try to see if you can come to the end—was killed in an automobile accident. And he is—what’s the word? They have said that he had given in 1945 money to buy a new altar. A new altar, and reredos behind the altar, and an altar, and chairs. We have a lot of furniture, because it’s a very formal church. I don’t think you call it “High Episcopal.” I think some people might, but we have a good candelabra, good communion-ware. A lot of stuff. And anyway, this man—apparently there was a big brouhaha that the vestry wanted to put a new roof on the church, which is a tile roof—which always needs work—or to buy the altar furniture. And just recently I talked to a lady, who’s in a—a Heritage [at Lake Forest] nursing home out here, who was telling me about this. I didn’t know this story. And she said, “Oh, my goodness.” She said, “Everybody was fighting, and everybody was mad. They wanted the roof.” “No, no. We want the altar.” Well anyway, the altar people won out, because the priest wanted the altar…
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
Redone [laughs]. So, uh—so I’m still working on that. And, as, uh, oral tradition says, that that money was used for the new altar-ware—altar and furniture, I should say—um, by this man, who gave it, But, um—in honor—in [inaudible] —yeah. In of our members who fought in World War II.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
So I asked one of our older members if he remembers that. He says, “Oh yeah, there’s a plaque up there in the front of the church someplace that tells all the members that died. I’m sure it says something about ‘in memory of’ that.” Well, the plaque wasn’t there, so several ladies started on a search of the rooms, and they found the plaque. Only, it wasn’t a plaque. It’s a big framed picture with 70 names beautifully written by someone on there, with little gold stars next to five men who were killed during the war. But I still don’t know if it’s a memorial to them for the furniture. So I’m working on that, because I have the big memorial plaque reframed and I guess we’ll rededicate it one of these days when we find out what’s the story on it. But there’s things like that that come up when someone will say, “Well, who gave that baptismal font? What was that all about?”
Or, we have two things in the church—this is interesting—we have two things in the church that we know for certain were there in the first church. That General Sanford gave: a crucifixion picture that he had bought in Belgium and donated it to the church. That picture—and we were trying to get an idea of the value of it—and the man that we had restore it said, “It’s not worth a thing. All it’s worth is what it’s worth to the congregation. But as far as famous artist, no.” It’s the crucifixion. Even after it as restored, still doesn’t look very good. Because it went through the hurricane the first time. Through the fire the second time. Someone rescued it. So it has—the restorer said it has water damage. So that was something that we know General Sanford physically probably touched, and that it was there. The other thing is a small lectern, where they put the Bibles on, or the prayer book. And that’s in the chapel that was given by Reverend Lyman Phelps. We think he built it. He made it in memory of his wife. So that’s pretty interesting to have two things back a hundred and how many years—138 years or whatever it is.
Dombrowski
Oh. That’s very special.
Skates
Yeah. It is special. So it’s the history. I mean, I could go to any church. I love—just love churches. But I love the history of this church. It’s—and I’m sure that if I were in Philadelphia I’d go to Christ Church I went to Williamsburg [,Virginia][3]—my mother and I—we went to the—oh, what was the name of that Episcopal church[4] there? It’s so beautiful in Williamsburg.[5] Where Patrick Henry gave his speech.
Dombrowski
In Virginia?
Skates
In Virginia. That was—so it’s the ambiance. It’s what you feel. It’s very interesting. And I do get excited about it [laughs].
Dombrowski
I’m just going to check the battery one more time. Oh, it looks fine. Whoa. I didn’t notice the bars. They change as I talk and get closer. But the battery’s fine. Okay, great.
So, uh, you’re a historian there. It sounds like you do a bunch of different things.
Skates
I’m kind of a detective. There’s not a day goes—well, a day—there probably is. But not a week goes by that someone says, “Bette”—well somebody asked me the other day, “Isn’t our,”—we have a huge bell on the bell tower—“Isn’t that bell called ‘Raphael?’” I said, “No, I don’t think—that’s not the name of the bell.” And he said, “Oh, I’m pretty sure it is.” Well, now I have to figure it out. Is it or isn’t it? Or, people will say, “Well, where did the bell come from?”
Oh, and then we have this magnificent organ of Ferrante[sp] Brothers organ from—I can’t remember where it’s from. I want to say Canada, but I may be wrong. It was installed in 1947, and this is just a magnificent piece of furniture. Ferrante[sp] Brothers. I believe there’s another name that goes with that. I guess I can’t remember. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. This is not a test. That was put in in 1947, and I’ve forgotten how many pipes there are for it, but—oh, more than 100 pipes. There’s pipes and pipes. Pipes that you can see over the choir loft, but there’s also a whole closet full of pipes. Our organist—she knows how to play it. It’s just beautiful. So that was—I don’t know where the money for that came from. As far as that being a memorial, or something, I don’t know. I don’t think so. So many things are, but that’s not. But someone will say, “Well, what year was the organ installed?” Or, “Where did it come from?”
So I—yeah. I do. I have to have a little notebook in my pocketbook and I keep writing it down and then I have to go back and research it. And I have a lot of friends too that have been long, long-time members there, so I usually go to them and say, “Do you know anything about this?” And some of them will say, “No, I don’t know.” Or, “We’ll look it up.” But we have—and I’m trying to get all the histories together and put them in one place so it’s pretty organized. It’s fairly organized, but not as much as I would like to have it done. But I’ve saved all the newsletters[sic] columns that I’ve written over the years. I have them each in a different notebook with acid-free paper so after I type them I print them off and put them in the folders and so I’ve got all that. So that’s a pretty good history right there. It’s good. Did I answer the question? [laughs].
Dombrowski
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Skates
Also, I must give credit to Alicia Clarke at the Sanford Museum. We have much help from her. And then some! Sorry.
Dombrowski
[laughs] No. I don’t mind at all. I know we’ve been talking for a long time now, but if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to find out more about what your time as an educator was like Seminole County.
Skates
Oh, I think I had the best 30 years that you could have had really, because it was—right now, I have friends, my neighbors. I have a lot of friends still teaching, and it’s very different now. It’s very different. We had—the wonderful thing we had that teachers today don’t have, and that’s freedom. You can’t say—if Johnny brings in a whole bag of shells that he had his mother just collected at the beach, we can’t dump those shells out and sit down and go through them and maybe catalog them or talk about them or what can we do with it. There’s no way of being spontaneous, because teachers today—if that child brought that in, I would have to say, “I’m sorry, you’re going to have to put that away. We don’t have time to look at that.” And that bothers me a lot. Because I really feel like the teachable moment is when the kid is interested. And if nobody is interested, then there’s no teachable moment.
It’s—when I was teaching at Idyllwilde [Elementary School] one year, the kids found a dead rabbit on the playground. I have a friend who had just moved here from Chicago[, Illinois], and she was working with me at the time. She was getting ready to take over half of my class, because I had 45 kids in my class. And they had hired her to take part of my kids. But she tells me about this every time she thinks about it. She said, “So, the kids wanted to know what to do with the rabbit.” And I said, “Well, we’re going to have to bury it. Let’s bury it.” So we got a shovel from the janitor and the boys dug a hole right outside the classroom door. And buried the rabbit. Well, they got to talking about what was going to happen to the rabbit in the ground. Well, of course the kids—and these were fourth and fifth graders—they would say, “Well, the bugs and the worms are going to eat him,” and so forth. So, just before school was out, the boy that dug the hole said, “Ms. Skates, can we dig that rabbit up? See what’s left? See if we can find his bones?” And I said, “Well, that’s a good idea. Let’s do it.” So we did. We couldn’t find it! This kid dug up a whole are as big as this table. Couldn’t find a thing left of the rabbit.
Dombrowski
Oh, my goodness.
Skates
But that sounds—and it would probably almost be silly to some educator—but those are things that—what did they learn? Well, we could put a whole bunch of things on the board. We learned this. We learned, you know—what is this? So, or you know—well like the space shuttle. We had classes when the Space Shuttle [Challenger] blew up. We all went outside on the playground to watch the space shuttle go up. And this was—what was this? [19]89?
Dombrowski
Oh, I have it here. No, I don’t.
Skates
But anyway, we were all out on the playground, watching, and we saw it went up, and we saw all these stars and everything. The kids were all saying, “Look at that. They’re putting out stars,” all kinds of things that kids would think of. And my fellow teacher was standing next to me, she said, “I think we ought to take the kids in.” I said, “Okay.” So we take the kids in. Well, she happened to have a little TV set in her closet. And we brought that out to see what had happened. And we could do that. You couldn’t do that today.
Dombrowski
That’s true.
Skates
She brought it out and we set that out between our two classrooms. We watched it all day long. The kids—it was very sad. We all were grieving. So we grieved together. So, what is this? How did this happen? All we could do was speculate. We didn’t know. But what would you, you know, you…
Well, first off, I think taking time outside would probably take time away from teaching about the FCAT [Florida’s Comprehensive Assessment Test].
Dombrowski
I was going to ask how you think the FCAT has influenced—okay.
Skates
You know, every week, teachers, back in the day—and I retired in [19]97. Every teacher gave a test at the end of the week. You would take your math book and go through—and everything that I had taught in math that week—the test would be on Friday. Same thing with spelling tests—on Friday. Social studies on Friday. And we did teach social studies. We did teach the Constitution. We did teach early American history. We did teach that. I think that, in fifth grade, we stopped at the Civil War, but that’s all we had time for. So, you gave the test. At the end of the week, you knew what the child had done. By the time you correct those papers, you knew that Johnny and Mary and Susie were having trouble with multiplication. So next week, let’s zero in on those three and their multiplication tables. How hard is that? I mean, why do we have to do what they’re doing now? I don’t understand.
Dombrowski
I don’t want to interject my opinion too much, but my mother teaches middle school. And so I’ve heard a lot about FCAT, and a great deal about how it’s changed. She used to teach in New York and it’s very different.
Skates
Oh, yes. I think, even now—well, this friend of mine that came down—she wasn’t a friend at the time, but now she’s my best friend—from Chicago, you know. She’d said, “Oh, my gosh. These schools—they’re so far behind! In Chicago in fifth grade, we were doing this.” And you know, well, it takes a long time. I mean, you know, the [Great] Depression hit the South harder. The agricultural society makes a difference. Kids are not—they may be working in the fields some. I mean not so much in my time, but it was just different. And it takes a long, you know—I think this a lot about even the ship of state, it takes a long time to turn a ship around. And it takes a long time to turn the education system around. It’s like it’s the biggest boat you ever saw and you’re just trying to turn it around and make things better. I think we’ve come a long way, but I think there probably still is a way to go.
But now we’ve got—it’s so muddled with this FCAT and this—pushing, pushing these kids. My grandson goes to a parochial school. Goes to St. Luke’s Lutheran Church School in Oviedo. He doesn’t have that stigma hanging over his head. He’s going in third grade. He loves school. He’s a good student. And he struggled to begin with. He had problems with his reading. But if he were in the public school, he would really be in trouble. First off, he’d be going into the third grade. You have to take the FCAT. If you don’t pass that, you have to repeat third grade. Well, his handwriting is very poor, what are you going to do about that? But the private school—they give them more time. They also give them more one-on-one situations. I don’t know. I’m just so that glad that his mother and father—my son and his wife—are so wise. And it’s a sacrifice. It’s a lot of money every month to keep him in private school. He’s their only child, which is a good thing. It’s tough. Your mother is right, and she’s right in the middle of that FCAT business in middle school.
Dombrowski
Uh, you mentioned the Challenger accident. Are there any other events that stick out in your mind, that you remember teaching or going through with your students?
Skates
What did we have? [John F.] Kennedy’s assassination didn’t affect me, but it did my children. They were in elementary school and Kennedy was assassinated—my two older ones. They were talking about this, not long ago, about the atomic bomb scare with the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were talking about the duck-and-cover. You know, an atomic bomb is blowing up over your state, and what do you tell the kids to do? You tell them to get under their desks and cover their head[sic]. That involved them. I wasn’t teaching in ’63. Let’s see, what else could there be? Thinking back to Kennedy, I can’t think of anything else.
Dombrowski
Okay. Did UCF opening or Cape Canaveral opening change…
Skates
It did. I think it changed. With the Cape, with Geneva—the school—when we started getting the influx of people moving to that area. The fathers were engineers and the moms worked, most of them, over there too. Those were great kids. I don’t know, maybe because the parents were involved in scientific things like the engineering and everything. Every couple years, it seems like they come up with something new. Your mother can relate to this too.
They taught us what they call the “New Math.” And I’d only been teaching a couple years and we had this great, and I still have the book—a great big blue book about New Math. Well first off, we were supposed to be teaching the metric system, and that was because of the engineering thing, I think. But they had—I remember one of the fathers was an engineer and he came to school and I was struggling as much as the kids were. They gave us the course in the summer and we were supposed to start teaching it in the fall. So I really didn’t—nobody had a chance. The father came in, he said, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Now, how do you talk to an engineer? And I was honest with him, “Well, yes. I do.” I said, “We had six weeks.” I think we had a course. And I said, “Not as much as I’ll know at the end of this year.” And he said, “Well, my son doesn’t know what the hell’s going on.” I said, “Well, I am really sorry.” But he was very nice about. But he really kind of put me on my toes. Which was a good thing. I’m glad he did. But by the end of the year, I even knew what prime numbers were [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
In fifth grade, you teach addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I figured the fact that I could multiply and divide fractions—I was pretty smart [laughs].
Dombrowski
[laughs].
Skates
Don’t go beyond that. Oh dear.
Dombrowski
I just have a couple specific questions left. If you wouldn’t mind, just because it’s a personal history about you, what were the names of your children—are the names of your children?
Skates
Phillip, Pamela—well, he’s Jimmy. And the youngest is Bill. They all have their given names, but that’s what we call them. They were—Phillip was born in [19]5—he was born ’54. I have a nice little rubric here. Pam was born in ’56. Jimmy was born in ’58. And Bill was born in ’63. I think I was busy going to school there or something.
Dombrowski
Uh, where—which schools did you teach at? You taught at Geneva.
Skates
I taught at Geneva. That was my first assignment. Well, I went to Southside, which is a school in Sanford right near my home—was where I did my internship, and that’s where my kids went to school. And that’s an old—that was—when I bought my house, that was the best school in Sanford. And that’s the reason I bought that house. It’s now been turned into—what did they call it? A nursing home. Golden Years nursing home. It’s a lovely school. It’s built in a square and in the center is an atrium. And all the classrooms are built around the atrium. And down in the basement is the lunchroom, and up a little flight of stairs in the auditorium. It was a very nice plan for a school, but it’s a nice plan for a nursing home, I guess. But they closed the school, because they built new schools and whatever. But my kids got to go through that, which I was glad for that. At least the two oldest ones did. And then the other two came with me to Geneva. What was the question?
Dombrowski
Oh. Which schools have you taught at?
Skates
Oh, and then I went, I was at Goldsboro [Elementary School. This was a good thing. When I left Geneva, and I had gotten my Master’s in Exceptional Education, and I wanted to teach learning disabled children. And the principal at Geneva, for his own reasons, said he wasn’t going to have a special ed[ucation] class. Well, it wasn’t true, but that’s what he told me. So I had this Pell Grant that I had used to get my Master’s, that if I taught at a [Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965] Title I school, which I don’t know if you know that means now, but it was a school that had more free lunches than any other school or something like that. So the principal at Goldsboro called me and he said, “If you come and teach the learning disabled children at Goldsboro,” he said, “I can sign off on your student loan.” So I spent two years there and signed off all that my Master’s cost me. I mean, I had not paid for—he would sign off the loans—the superintendent would sign it off…
Dombrowski
So they would pay for it.
Skates
So they paid for it. So that was very good. I don’t know if that’s what you call a Pell Grant. I’ve forgotten. But I taught there two years and then the principal from Idyllwilde called and said they had a new wing opening up. They call it the E Wing—Exceptional Ed. Wing. And would I come out and do their SLD [Specific Learning Disabilities] classes. I said, “Oh, yes.” So that’s where I was when I retired.
Dombrowski
Okay.
Skates
That was good. I—those were good years. They were all good years.
Dombrowski
Well, good.Those are all the questions and topics that I have. Is there anything else you’d like to speak to that we haven’t?
Skates
I don’t know. I think I’m probably boring you.
Dombrowski
[laughs] Well, no. This is a good time.
Skates
Now, how are they going to work this? Are they going to have a library?
Dombrowski
Yeah, I think I’ll just…
Skates
Right.
Morris
It is October 4th, 2011, and I am talking to Arthurene Wilson Cook at the Museum of Seminole County History. I am Joseph Morris, representing the Linda McKnight Batman Oral History Project for the Historical Society of Central Florida. Could you tell us about yourself?
Cook
Well, I was born in Orlando in 1930, and we lived there until I was about eleven years-old, right after Pearl Harbor, so I would say, we moved into Sanford about 1942.
And, um, I have a very clear remembrance of Pearl Harbor, because I remember being out in the yard. And my parents had company, and I went in, and they were all listening to the radio. And they were talking about the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor. And the next day when we went to school, they called us into the chapel, and we listened to FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] declare war on Japan. So I can remember that very clearly.
We moved to Sanford, and we lived on Celery Avenue. And across the street from us was the Department of Agriculture. Had their, their farm, where they raised the various types of vegetables and things, and they tested them and all that kind of stuff. And my brother and I were absolutely enthused, because right up the road about two blocks—and after our house the blocks became long—they[sic] were farms, and they had all this tilled land where the artesian wells flooded the fields and watered them from beneath, rather than on top. And you could reach down there and the artesian wells flowed all the time. Well, we thought all that sulfur water was wonderful. Then we had to live in a house that had sulfur water, and it was not wonderful. Smelled awful. [laughs] But we thought that this was new. We had never lived in the country. We had lived in town—in Orlando—so we were not used to being out, but we went all up and down the fields and cut onions out of the agriculture people’s farm, and made onion sandwiches, and were just carefree, barefooted kids having a good time.
And, then when we moved to Sanford, I was I think in the fifth grade, and we were here for several years. And then, this is the middle of World War II. And my dad had been in the Army before, and had gotten out when he married my mother in 1927. So, he was drafted. And they were not drafting fathers, but they drafted him. And we did not own a home at that time. We were renting.
And so we went back to Georgia, to Columbus, Georgia, and lived with my grandparents during World War II while he was gone. And, Georgia was—at that time, had graduated in eleven grades. So when the war was over, I was a senior in high school, and my mother and dad and my brother moved back to Daytona [Beach], and I stayed in Georgia and finished high school. So, I came back, and I didn’t want to go to school another year, so I had already finished. So, and at that point, I went—I had gone to a commercial high school, so I had typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and how to behave like a young lady in an office and all that kind of stuff.
Cook
So I went to work. And Mom and Daddy, at that time, they had moved over to Sanford. My dad was running a furniture store for another man, called Ted Davis Furniture Company. It was right on East First Street, and part of the downtown area now. And as time went on, the man that owned it offered my dad a partnership, which he took, and this took care of—as time went on, and after we were grown and married, my brother and I bought into that, and we owned the Wilson-Maier Furniture Company.
Morris
Okay.
Cook
But, um, I can remember we lived out on the lakefront, which—there’s still a bar out there, but it was down. It was the home of the people that owned the bar, and it was a real nice home, right on the lakefront, going toward DeLand. And when the hurricane came, they were advising people to get out of places that were, you know, dangerous to stay in, because it was coming right that way. So we went down to the store and I can remember, I got up on a stack of mattresses and put something down and went to sleep. So the hurricane went right over me. I had no problem. [laughs] But I remember out West First Street, which is now that main road [State Road] 46, that goes out to the mall. And all the businesses are out there—that was all agriculture, completely, I mean fields and fields and fields of it. And, um…
Morris
What were they growing?
Cook
A lot of celery, and cabbage, and broccoli, and onions, and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of oranges, grapefruit, tangerines. I remember, I was sort of full of myself, riding with my dad one day out West First Street, and I said, you know, “This is a highly agricultural area.” He says, “Yeah, they do a bit of farming, too.” [laughs] So, but, uh, it was just a neat place to grow up in. The class that I would have graduated from—with—in Seminole High School, when I came back, since I had been here for several years with them, they sort of just wrapped me into that class, so that I had to go to all, everything, just like I had gone to school here. So it was a nice place to grow up. And—stop for a minute.
Morris
Sure thing. Please go on, ma’am.
Cook
All right, well after high school, I went to work for my dad in the furniture store, and, um, I was not very businesslike nor did I feel like it was—I just did not do well, so he fired me. [laughs]
Morris
Your father fired you?
Cook
My father fired me. And I went to the employment agency and they sent me to Florida Fashions, which was right there on First Street in the 300 block. And it was a mail-order company for all kinds of clothes, and it was something to where everybody and anybody that could type had a job there. You just sat down and you typed out all—the order and who you will send it to. And it wasn’t much of a job, but anyway, you typed all day and it was downtown, and you know you could—at lunch, you could go downtown and have lunch, and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, I finally went to work for, um, it was the sporting goods people. That was downstairs from Florida Fashions and I was their bookkeeper, and this was right across the street from our store. So, um, I was working and waiting on people when I wasn’t busy doing keeping books, and the owner came in one day and he told me, he said, “Arthurene, I’m going to have to let you go.” And I said, you know—my first thought was, “What have I done?” He said, “There is no fault of yours. I will give you a very good recommendation.” Well, he said, “My brother-in-law has moved down here and I have to give him a job, and I can’t keep both of you.”
So at that, I went back to the employment agency, and I got, they sent me to Family Loan Company. Well, I went up there and they wanted to know if I could take shorthand, and I could, and type and books and wait on the customers there.
And I worked there until my first child was born. And that was about three years later. And, um, I married in 1950, and I had two little boys, David and Dan. And, in the process my husband came home one day and said he wanted a divorce. And, um, so, as time went on—didn’t take very long. Back then if you agreed and he agreed and they were going to do whatever, you could have a divorce in nothing flat. So I had my two little boys, and I had moved home with my mom and daddy.
And I got a job at the courthouse with the tax collector’s office, and I worked there for a number of years. And I always said when I got out of high school that it didn’t matter what kind of job I would get, but just something that didn’t have anything to do with money. So every job I ever had had something to do with money. [laughs]
And, then, a friend of mine whose husband worked for the railroad, I had been best friends with her ever since she had come to town. And I went over and a guy that I knew from high school, just very briefly—matter of fact, I was dating his best friend, and I really didn’t know anything about him, and he asked me out. And I said, “Well, you”—he said, well, you know, like going to the beach or going to the movies, or something. We went out to dinner and all, and I said, “Well yes, I would like to go, but,” I said, “I can’t always get a babysitter. There will be times that I would have to take my two boys with me.” He said, “Well, that’s not a problem. I like children.” So we started going together, and we went to the beach, and he reached over and put his hand on my leg, and I said, “Move your hand.” And he said, “Well, somebody thinks that I was their daddy.” I said, “I don’t care what they think. Move it.” [laughs] Anyway, we went together for a year, and we married in 1955, and we have been married a little more than 56 years. So I think it’s going to take. I think it’s going to. [laughs]
Morris
Crossed fingers?
Cook
Yeah. [laughs] So, but, to go back to our, um, what it was like around here. There was a division of the black and white communities. And there were only three really big companies that people could go to work for, and feel like, that they could probably retire from that. And that was Chase & Company, who—they raised all sorts of things, and vegetables of all kinds, celery being the main crop. And—but they did fruits and all sorts of vegetables, and cabbage, and carrots. You name it. The fields were everywhere. Matter of fact, when we lived out on the lakefront, the field behind us was—well, as far as you could see back toward First Street. Whatever they had was growing there, the man would always—there was some man that he rented the fields out to other people that actually didn’t own a farm. But they would—this was big, you know, large farming, a lot of it. And they would always say to my mother, “Whatever you need out of here, take it.” So if it was green beans, we had green beans. And if it was cabbage, you know, whatever, we had.
And to go back just a little ways, but—probably never get this transcribed. When I was growing up during the [Great] Depression, I was never aware of being poor, or not having anything, because nobody had anything to speak of. People didn’t own—very few people owned their own homes. Everybody worked. And, I mean, like my parents when the Depression came along—they had a thousand dollars in the bank. They got a penny. And, I mean, you know, but, I remember I got a bike, and I knew my daddy had redone a bike, you know, a secondhand bike, but it never bothered me. I got a bike. I didn’t care.
But, it was, after the war, there was a lot of boom going on and building houses and things, so there was lots of work for people. And I know when Walter [Cook] and I got married, we actually bought a house. The Navy was leaving here at that point, or they had gotten—they had built houses in the Wynwood section off 25th street, between there and 46 going toward the east coast. And in that area there, they had two lots of houses that they had built to rent to Navy people. And they quit renting them, redid them, and we bought one of them, where we lived for 31 and a half years. And we built onto it in every direction, but we lived there for a long time. But, you know, the downtown was just about all there was. When you got off as far as French Avenue—that was almost getting in the country.
And like I said about coming from Orlando, you would run into Maitland, and see a sign that said, “Ye Town of Maitland, County of Orange.” And I always thought at—so quaint. I just looked for it every time. And then when you got to Longwood, it was just a crossroads with filling station. I mean, there was nothing out there, absolutely nothing.
Morris
Not even agriculture?
Cook
I don’t remember much in that area, and of course, I didn’t do a whole lot in Longwood at that point. Never did. And you know, whatever shopping we ever did, you went to Orlando to buy it. When I first got out of high school, this friend and I—both of us worked, and we worked Saturday morning, and then the office closed at noon. And we would get on the Greyhound bus and go to Orlando, and do our shopping right there on Orange Avenue, have lunch, and then we’d get on the bus and come back home that night. And didn’t think a thing about it. We even went to Jacksonville one day and visited a friend that had gotten married, and went early on a Saturday morning and came back Saturday night. You know, the bus was the way to go.
But, uh, I was still working at the courthouse when Walter and I got married. And he was working for the railroad, and he worked at night. And back then I worked in the tax collector’s office, because they hired me because I was a fast typist. And I did all the—typed up all the tag numbers and who they belonged to. So then, when all the tax bills were written out—handwritten—the legal descriptions, the whole nine yards was handwritten.
So up when it was time to do like tags for Chase & Company—which they would have hundreds, because those little trucks that go back and forth across the highway, they have to have a special tag that they cross the highway. And we would have boxes full of Chase & Company things, and we did them at night. So we’d go back and we’d type all those and wait ‘til about 10 o’clock, and then I’d go home. And we had to write out all the tax bills.
And for the big companies—when I went to work in the courthouse in 1953, I was, uh—the big books, that had all the tax rolls in them, had Sanlando Springs. They were valued on the tax roll, I will say that. You could—on a tax roll, they were valued at $10 a lot. Why I didn’t buy out there for those lots, or well, uh—Sanlando Springs was a beautiful place to swim when we were growing up and going there. You could go in and they had this wonderful place to swim and you had picnics, and everything for years. And then when it started growing up, the whole place is businesses, and restaurants, and mortgage companies, you know, it’s just solid. And if you get there under I[nterstate]-4 now, prepare to tear out your hair, because traffic is horrendous. [laughs] But back then, that was just uh, right up the road.
But I worked until we paid my daddy off for the furniture we bought for our house, because we bought a house before we got married, and then we came back home and signed the papers on it that we, you know—so it would be in both our names. So it was all furnished and all before we got married, and I worked at the courthouse until about the late part of ’56. And my husband said, “One of us has got to raise the boys, and the other one has got to make a living, and I think I can do better than you.” Well, I knew that he could make better money than I was, because I wasn’t making but $25 a week. [laughs]
Morris
Okay.
Cook
So I went home and stayed home, and in about 18 months, or two years, we had a daughter. So I was very busy being a mother and a wife, and doing a lot of church work. I’ve been a member of First Baptist Church of Sanford since 1947. I’m still there, and I’ve done a little bit of everything there.
But, um, you know, back before [Walt] Disney [World], it was just a whole different thing. When my daughter was in high school, somebody told her that she could—if she was cute she could get a job at Walt Disney World, on the main gate of the Magic Kingdom. So she went down there and applied with a bunch of girls, and she worked there all through high school, and all through college, on every, uh—summers, Christmas, anytime they were off for any period of time, she worked down there. So we got in free, which was wonderful. And we got to see, you know, the Main Street Parade, when the fireworks went off for the Fourth of July, all of that stuff. And, you know, they drove back and forth. I know very few people that work at Disney World anymore, because of the traffic between the two places. It’s just not happening. [laughs]
But, um, I worked at the, um—I went back and forth to the courthouse. Shortly after—before, I had my daughter, they called me in and said they were going to go to—I can’t remember what it was—but what they said we had to do was type the entire tax roll into a metal plate, that they were going to print off this metal plate. And they were going to print tax rolls. So we had to do the legal, the name of who owned it, and all this, on, uh—and we were in the—this was the old courthouse. We were in the basement, and this thing, I mean—you know what metal cutting into metal would be. “Whoom whoom whoom.”
Morris
Yes.
Cook
[laughs] It was really crazy. But, um, I remember Dottie Anthony—who was Dottie von Turbulis[sp] at that time. And she and I spent several—about a month or two working down there. Every time they had something that they needed, they’d call me in. And for years a friend of mine, Louise Austin, and I would go back and we would work when, um—there were twin sisters in one office, and when they left, they had to have somebody cover for them in the clerk’s office. And I worked down there many, many summers until they went to computers. And then I knew nothing about computers, and it was fast. And the [Seminole] County, by then, was growing so fast, they had, uh, you know—two people being out, it was nothing.
Morris
Oh, I understand.
Cook
You know, they, uh—but back when you do it all by hand, it was, it really was something. But, um…
Morris
So these were all jobs after you were married? And you would stay home with the children, but they would call you in occasionally for help?
Cook
Right. Right.
Morris
Okay.
Cook
Yeah, I’ve even—they’ve called and said, “Will you come in and do the docket for us?” I would, you know, go in at one o’clock, sit down and type for four hours, and get up and leave. And they offered me a job and said I could come when I wanted to and leave when I wanted to, if I would just do it. So I told my husband about it, and he didn’t say much. So the first day I left him at home, I told him, “Now, the boys have homework. They need to do the homework. And they need to do it.” Well, he didn’t do anything. And I said, “I don’t know how you could expect me to work if you’re not going to help me.” He said, “I did not ask you to go to work.” He didn’t want me to go to work. [laughs]
But, uh, and then I did many, many years of, uh, when the voting—I was clerk of one of the precincts, the court, the [Sanford] Civic Center. I was down there first as just a helper, and then I was the clerk for a number of years. And that was, it was always a lot of fun, because you got to see everybody in that whole precinct. But by the time I was in my seventies, getting up at 4:30 and working until seven o’clock that night lost a lot of its luster. [laughs]
Morris
Oh, I can imagine.
Cook
But the last election, we did early voting out at the office there on the airport. And I said to the gal—she was, you know, telling—complaining about it. And I said, “I used to work the elections.” “Would you like to work now?” And I said, “No, thank you.” [laughs] But, um, let’s see now who we—well, I’ve covered my job, and my family, and, uh…
Morris
Well, how about your husband’s job? What kind of work did he do?
Cook
Railroad. We didn’t cover the railroad. Uh, he was working for the railroad when I started dating him. And he had—they would call me and say—he’d be off on a run and they would call me and say, “He’s going to have to go straight through to Tampa. Will you have a set of clean clothes and something for him to eat when he comes through?” So you go out, and the train comes in, and you hand him this, and hand him that, and off he goes. And then we had been on train trips where the railroad would do a lot for their employees. And one time they took us all the way on the train to Rainbow Springs, over in—up around the Gainesville area. A day trip. And out to, uh, there was another springs that we went to one time. But, um, it worked a lot better that, you know, that I was at home and him working at night. Because in the beginning, you know, if you’re starting at the bottom, you work whatever. But like he says, they always were on time paying you, and you never had to worry about the check not being any good. It was a busy thing. And not everybody can live railroading. That is a whole different lifestyle, because they are gone probably 75 percent of the time. And you never know day, or if they work the extra board, you don’t know day or night, where they’re going. When the telephone rings, that’s when you go to work. And I know, I guess about the worst thing that ever happened to him on the railroad, was, um, he came home one morning, and he was pretty shook up. And we were eating breakfast, and he told the kids that he had ran over a little girl that ran in front of the train.
Morris
Oh, no.
Cook
And, uh, he had about three different people, that, uh—he was coming out of Tampa one time, and a lady looked up at him and walked right in front of the train. And then, of course they put on emergency brake, you know, you can’t stop a train on a dime.
Morris
No.
Cook
I mean, if you get stopped in a mile, you’re doing good[sic], and that’s with air brakes and the whole business. And he said the woman came up and asked, he said, “What happened?” And he said, “Well, there was a young lady stepped in front of me just as I got to her.” And he said she said, “What was she wearing?” And Walter told her, and she said, “That was my daughter.” And, uh, he had about three of those, and they always—I mean, it’s hard.
It happened to my son, too. When my oldest son, David, became old enough, he worked at the store for my daddy and all of us. And he went out to SCC [Seminole Community College], but he was not a student at all. He wouldn’t even let us pay for his books or anything, he said because, “If I don’t do good[sic], then you won’t say, ‘Well, I paid for all this.’” He said, “I paid for it myself.” [laughs] So every Wednesday when he got off, he would go to the railroad and ask them about a job, and this went on for quite some time, but he got a job and went to Jacksonville. So that happened to him. But when you work on the railroad, that it was one of the things. People, cars, things run out in front of you and there’s no way to stop. And you just never know. But it’s a well-paying job, and the benefits were great, and we just adjusted.
Morris
Okay.
Cook
We just adjusted to the whole thing, and didn’t have any problem. And then when, right before he retired, we, on our 40th wedding anniversary, we took a train from Sanford to Los Angeles[, California], and then we rented a car and went up to Portland, Oregon. And we went space available, which is like half-price if you’re on another railroad. And we stayed there a couple or three days. Portland is a wonderful city to visit. And he got up about three o’clock in the morning, and he said, “I’m going to call and see what they can do about getting us going home.” And he came back in a few minutes, and he said there’s a young lady, she says, “I can get you home, not the way want to go, but I can get you back home.” And he says, “All right, we’ll take it.” And she said, “It’ll take five days.” [laughs] And we had to go back to L.A., and up to Chicago[, Illinois], and over to Philadelphia[, Pennsylvania], to Richmond[, Virginia] to Sanford. [laughs] But we had bedrooms all the way, so that was not too bad.
Morris
Oh, okay.
Cook
But the clothes that I wore on that trip—I don’t think I ever had on again. I was so tired of them. Oh, let’s stop a minute.
Morris
Sure thing, ma’am. Ma’am, would you tell us a little more about your family? I know you mentioned your son in the railroad business briefly.
Cook
Uh, well, there was my husband Walter, and we had the three children. David was born in ’51, and Dan in ’53, and Sherry [Cook] in ’58. And now we have 10 grandchildren, and we have seven great-grandchildren. And just this past spring, in less than two months, we had three little girls born.
Morris
Triplets?
Cook
No. It seems that all of these children had finished college, gotten married, and they were all fairly close between the families, so all of them started having babies all at one time. [laughs]
Morris
Okay.
Cook
So we had four, and then all of a sudden three more. So we don’t have anything to even think about right now. [laughs]
Morris
Rushed up [inaudible] a horde of great-grandchildren.
Cook
Yes. So that has kept us very, very busy. My husband has been retired 16 years. And up until a few years ago, we spent part of every summer in North Carolina. And then we thought, after a while, that we had—well, when we first started going up, you know, there were a lot of people from Sanford, and we had our own little Sanford in North Carolina. And we would spend the summer up there and do all sorts of things, and then, you know, they had to move back home. They might have died, went somewhere else, and all of a sudden none of those people are up there anymore. So it has made a difference.
But my oldest son David lives in The Villages, and that’s a very busy lifestyle and a whole lot of different way of living. Everybody travels in their golf cart, and if you want to be busy, there are a gillion[sic] things you can do. My son Dan died nine years ago, and my daughter Sherry lives in Carey, North Carolina. She works for the State of North Carolina. She spent nine years in the Marine Corps, and in that time married a Marine.
Morris
Oh, okay. She was in the Marines, then.
Cook
Yep. And she says, “Once a Marine, always a Marine.” So she and her husband have four children, and David and his wife had four children, and Dan and his wife had two. So that was our 10 grandchildren, and trying to keep up with all of them wasn’t a problem when I was younger, and the older I get, the harder that is to do.
And back in 2001, I—well, let me go back. Back in ’96, I had a total knee replacement. When I woke up, they told me I had a blip in my blood protein that had to be investigated. Well, I had no idea what a blip in my blood protein could mean to me. So finally, I said, “Well, what do I have to do?” “Well, we’re going to X-ray every bone in your body, and if you have holes in them, we will start treatment today.” I thought, “Wow.” Well, I had the X-ray, and there were no holes in my bones, so they said, “Now you have to have a bone marrow transplant.” No, not—bone marrow biopsy. And if it is clear, you just need to have your blood checked every six months.” Well, I had the biopsy, and I had my bones checked every six months. And they did the blood work, and every time, they said, “If you don’t hear from us, we’ll see you in six months.” This went on for five years. At the end of the fifth year in 2001, they called me back, and they said that they needed to do some testing. And after about the third test, I said, “Is it cancer?” And he said, “Without a doubt.”
Morris
What type of cancer was it, ma’am?
Cook
Multiple myeloma, which is a blood-borne cancer. But if it is let go, it causes the bones to crumble. And so they told me that if you did not treat it, or if it was not diagnosed and, you know, nothing—you had no symptoms or you didn’t go to the doctor for years, you could be walking along and you could break your arm, your leg, your neck, back, whatever. So they told me that I was very fortunate that I had been checked for five years, and so mine had just become to the point where I had to have, uh—take care of it. So I started on the chemo[therapy]. And I lost all my hair, which is always a big shock to women. But, uh, anyway—and then some of the medicines they gave me, years down the road, after you’d been taking them a while—four years—I discovered that one of the medicines had destroyed my jawbone. So I had went to a doctor in Miami. He was the only one in the world—he found out about it, he worked on it. He went in the lab and did the pharmacology and all. And last October, I have a titanium jawbone from my ear to the middle of my chin.
Morris
Titanium?
Cook
Titanium.
Morris
Chewing will never be a problem for you, ma’am.
Cook
[laughs] No. So, I’ve been in remission now about four years.
Morris
Okay.
Cook
And, uh, there’s no cure for multiple myeloma, but I’ll take remission. [laughs] And that’s where my energy went. [laughs]
Morris
Oh. Dealing with all the grandchildren got a little hard after that?
Cook
It got really difficult. So I wrote them a real sweet letter last year, and told them that I loved them all, that I would love to have them visit and all that, but I was going to, uh, I said, at Christmastime, I’ll always do the same thing. But all these birthdays and all, when you’re married, you know—we went from 10 to almost 20 real quick. And then they started having children. So I said, “I’m doing the great-grand[kid]s.” I will do those. And so far, none of them have complained.
But, yeah, I kept asking the nurses when I was first diagnosed, oncology nurses, I said, “When will I get my energy back?” They said, “Some time you never do.” But I have been very blessed, because when I got on the computer and looked at what multiple myeloma was in 2001, I did not expect to be here. So I am very blessed.
Morris
Congratulations, ma’am.
Cook
And, so our family has grown. And Sanford has grown like you wouldn’t believe. And in every community—all the places where the mall is—was all agriculture. And, used to, you would go for miles and miles between Orlando and Sanford and see nothing. And now there’s not as bare space between the two. [laughs] So there has been a lot of change, not all of it for the better, but there’s a lot of blessings too. And I thank you. That was it.
Morris
All right. Thank you very much, ma’am.