Jones, George A (1911-2002) |
Worcester County Library: Local History and Genealogy Collection, Snow Hill Branch, Snow Hill, MD
|
Interviewee: |
George A. Jones (1911-2002) |
| Interviewer: |
Lori Walker (First Interviewer) & Katherine Fisher (Second Interviewer) |
| Date of interview: |
1982 April |
| Length of interview: |
35 min |
| Transcribed by: |
Alec Staley |
| Preferred Citation: |
“Name, Oral History Collection, Date of Interview, Worcester County Library, Snow Hill Branch, Snow Hill, Maryland.” |
Topical Terms:
Education
School
Storm of 1933
Transportation
Worcester County (Md.)—History
Worcester County (Md.)—Social life and customs
Location Terms:
Pocomoke City (Md.)
Public Landing (Md.)
Stockton (Md.)
Interview Begin
INTERVIEWER: Can you state your name, full name?
GEORGE: George Alma Jones, Sr.
INTERVIEWER: And your age?
GEORGE: 70, I’ll be 71 April 28th.
INTERVIEWER: How about your parents’ names?
GEORGE: My mother was Annie Jones, married a Jones, and my father’s name was Marion Thomas Jones.
INTERVIEWER: Do you remember your grandparents names?
GEORGE: Yes. My father’s father was named George Thomas Jones, and my grandmother was Sarah Wise Jones. And my mother’s father was Alfred Alma Jones, and my grandmother was Elizabeth Jones, Elizabeth Payne Jones.
INTERVIEWER: How many brothers and sisters did you have?
GEORGE: I had three sisters and one brother.
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me their names?
GEORGE: The oldest was Bessie Jones, Evelyn Jones, Mervin Jones, and then myslef, and I had a sister Grace Jones that died when she was 9 years old.
INTERVIEWER: Where did you first live, that you first remember?
GEORGE: I was born and raised on a farm. Now that my brother that died in July last year, Mervin, we were all born on that farm.
INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me where it is, like related to somewhere?
GEORGE: It is 2 mile and a half, west of Stockton, on the Little Mill Road.
INTERVIEWER: What did your father do for a living? Farm?
GEORGE: He was a farmer.
INTERVIEWER: How about your mother, did she work or did she take care of the kids.
GEORGE: No. She had chickens to take care of.
INTERVIEWER: What chores did you have to do when you were little, young?
GEORGE: When I was small, we had, of course in 1918, white potatoes were ten dollars a barrel, and more during the first World War, and my father made enough money on white potatoes to put in water, and it was, the water was pumped by gasoline engine and we put in water and a bath, running water in the kitchen and bathroom upstairs, and before that we had 3 chicken houses with about 200 layers in each house, and I had to tote water to all those chickens. Had to feed them twice a day.
INTERVIEWER: How old were you when you did this? Like 6 or 7?
GEORGE: I was probably 6 or 7.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of jobs did you do when you were 14 or 15?
GEORGE: Well I worked on the farm until 1926. In 1926 things started to get bad on the farm. And a man that owned a grocery store in Stockton, offered me a job, workin’ in the grocery store, after school and before school. I’d go to work at 6 o’clock in the grocery store and my father said go ahead and take it, because there really wasn’t enough money made on the farm and it would give me a chance to have money to go to school. And I went to work in the grocery store in 1926, I was about, I guess I was 15, and I’d go to work at 6 o’clock and work till school took in, and I’d go to school and after school I’d work till 9 o’clock at night. I had a, for transportation, he had a delivery truck that I drove home at night and drove back the next morning to go to work. And I got 6 dollars a week for 6 days. And during the summer I got 12 dollars a week, because I’d work from 6 o’clock in the morning till 9 o’clock at night, 6 days a week.
INTERVIEWER: Did you buy, you know how people my age they buy records and clothes and things like that, what did you buy when you were my age?
GEORGE: Well I bought mostly my clothes, and as it was we didn’t have too much money on the farm, and when you drive an automobile I had the expense on the upkeep on that, not the upkeep, but the use of gasoline and oil, and I traveled quite a bit. I did quite a bit of riding.
INTERVIEWER: What did you parents, did you make much, did you have most of your food around on the farm? Did you grow all your food on the farm or did you have to buy other things?
GEORGE: Well we raised most of the food that we had to use. We were raised on a farm. The only thing that we had to buy was maybe sugar and salt, vinegar and sometimes other necessities, like a load of bread for sandwiches, but then bread wasn’t sliced, you had to slice the bread that you bought, and naturally we had cows and they’d give milk, and my mother would make butter and sell it in the grocery store where I worked. We would trade the eggs and butter for necessities in the store.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any pets? A dog or cat?
GEORGE: Oh yes. We had rabbit dogs, and we had 1 or 2 cats around the far. But we always kept rabbit dogs because we would go rabbit hunting in the fall.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have anything special, like a goat, that was yours?
GEORGE: No. I had a calf, that was mine. And my father gave me several rows of white potatoes, and we’d put that money in the bank.
INTERVIEWER: How about refrigeration?
GEORGE: We had ice boxes. I had an ice box. I don’t believe that we had any type of refrigeration until we put in electric. Yes we did too, we bought a, at the same time that we put in the bathroom and water in the house, we put in gas lights and we also could operate a refrigerator from the gas lights. It was a gas refrigerator.
INTERVIEWER: Never heard of that.
GEORGE: Never heard of a gas refrigerator?
INTERVIEWER: No. How about social events, when you were a child?
GEORGE: Well most of the time in the winter months, we didn’t have much social events. In the summer except go to Red Hills or Public Landing, and mostly Red Hills, because Red Hills was closer than Public Landing and that maybe 2 or 3 times a year and then the Pocomoke Fair, which was in the summer. In the winter we would play Rook, and Hi-Lo Jack-in-the-Game, and go to neighbors houses and maybe 2 or 3 times a winter we would have a party at somebody’s house. Young people would.
INTERVIEWER: School. Where did you go to school?
GEORGE: I went to school at· Stockton. And the old building was on the bay road, out of Stockton, and went to that until 1926. The year I started to work the grocery store, And then we moved into the new school, that was on the Girdletree Road from Stockton, in April 1926. And I was in the 8th grade when we moved to the new school. Of course, 8th grade was considered high school, 7th grade was still in the grammar school. There was only 11 years, you graduated. The 11th grade. And my first grade teacher was Miss Annie Cullen, in the first grade, and the second grade was Cousin Bertie Jones and the third grade was Miss Helen Tull, and the 4th grade, no the second and third grades was Cousin Bertie Jones, she later married Payne, Arthur Payne, and she's still living now, she's 88 years old I believe now. And in the 4th grade was Miss Helen Tull, and the 5th grade was Helen Jones, which was, she was my cousin too. But she didn't show any favors to me. And then in high school was Miss Holland, Miss Mary Holland, and she still livin', I went to see her last week, she's in a nursing home at Sudersville. And in the 10th grade was Miss Sanders, I don't know what her first name was. And then in the 11th grade was Mr. Dryden, who was the principal of the school, Mr. Ewell Dryden, and I graduated 1930. 11 of us in our class. And we had baseball, which I participated in from the 8th grade, 7th grade on up through high school and soccer. Of course Stockton was a small school comparison to Snow Hill and Pocomoke, Berlin, and we tried mighty hard to win, but we were unsuccessful until the year after I graduated. The year after I graduated, Stockton won the championship baseball. There was only 3 boys that graduated 1930, so 1931 gave them a good chance to have a good team. And also in school we had, at the end of each year we'd have a class play. The graduating class of course, most all of the students in high school would participate in the class play.
INTERVIEWER: They had to, you just can’t have a Senior Class okay with 11 people.
GEORGE: No. Of course it was quite a production, Miss Mabel Jones, which is a very distant cousin of mine, was the music teacher and director of the play. And most of the time we would have operettas, most of the time, which consist of music as well as drama, and many years ago, before, we would have minstrel shows. And minstrel shows was discontinued in the early, late 20's and then they would just have operettas. They were quite a production, on, 2 years we had such a good production we'd go to Pocomoke and show it in the Marva theater, of Snow Hill in the Oper House, which was the theater.
INTERVIEWER: How about discipline in school?
GEORGE: Well, Miss Helen Tull, was a very strict discipline teacher, but I never really had any trouble with Miss Helen Tull. I had more trouble with, I guess I was more trouble to Cousin Bertie Jones, and Miss Helen Jones. And one time I remember, Cousin Bertie Jones sent me and 3 or 4 others to the principal, and the reason for it was, she caught several of us shooting spit balls. Two or three of us brought corn to school, grains of corn, and we would shoot these grains of corn and the principal of the school had beaten several boys in the upper grades, so we went to his room, and several of the high school students which I knew, were making me laugh, so the principal said to me in a very stern voice, said, Jones whar are you laughing at, and I said nothing, and he said "Fools laugh at nothing". I always remember that. But as far as discipline was concerned, I was more or less a jokester, and we played jokes on everyone, that I could get by with. And a number of my classmates, would say that I always got them in trouble, and I had a poker face when the teacher liked.
INTERVIEWER: Right. Smart though. How about subjects, what kind of subjects did you take?
GEORGE: I had, in school I had, in high school, the first year I took the academic course, which I shouldn't have. I took French, Chemistry, Latin, no Latin, the first year I took Latin as a foreign language, chemistry, mathematics, English and of course, included in English was spelling, which I wasn't too good at. At chemistry and history I excelled in both of these subjects, mathematics was fair, but I would just barely get through school. I didn't study hard enough. Like I should have.
INTERVIEWER: I know you graduated, did you go on to school after you graduated from High School?
GEORGE: No I didn't. In 1930, as you know the depression was on, it was almost an impossibility to borrow money to go to school, and if your parents didn't have enough to send you, you didn't have enough to go to school. So I was offered a job, I had worked in a grocery store, and I had also worked at Public Landing, which was at that time a kind of a summer resort, more or less. And I worked for Mr. Tom Purnell, who owned most of Public Landing, and I worked in a restaurant down at Public Landing. We had a hamburg stand, fried oysters, hamburgs and hot dogs, this was on a Sundays in 1926, 27, 28 and 29. In 1930, I went to work full time, left the grocery store, and hamburg then was 10. cents and oyster sandwiches were 10 cents and hot dogs was a nickel and all drinks were a nickel. On a Saturday and a Sunday, there would be anywhere from 300 to 500 people. And naturally it was crowded, a big crowd of people. In those days, and we were just as busy as we could be all day long from 9-10 o'clock in the morning, Lot of people came down and would have picnics, but there would always be somebody that would want a sandwich.
INTERVIEWER: Now we get to dating.
GEORGE: During high school, in our class was only three boys, and there was plenty dates available. And most of the time, the girls mothers would not want them to go out while they were going to school, but on a Saturday, Friday night, or Saturday night you could go to a movie, It was no trouble for us to get dates.
INTERVIEWER: I can imagine. I feel sorry for the girls.
GEORGE: And if the other girls that didn’t have a date, they’d have to go down in the lower grades in order to get a date or get a date with somebody in Pocomoke or Snow Hill. Which was quite a distance away.
INTERVIEWER: Did you have any hangouts, like where you went on a Friday or Saturday night? Like a hangout type of place.
GEORGE: Well we would entertain ourselves more or less. At that time we would go to a girls house and dance and play records. We'd have records of Guy Lombardo and Jimmy Dorsey, which was the big bands of those times. Mainly it was to learn how to dance. And maybe once a week we'd go to different girls houses and have dances. That was another source of entertainment. Because we didn't have much money to spend.
INTERVIEWER: How often did you go to town when you were small?
GEORGE: Well when I was growing up we'd go Saturdays, the only time we would get to go to town and my father bought an automobile in 1919 and, not many people had automobiles in those days. Our mode of transportation was horse and buggy. We went to school in horse and buggy, in fact we didn't have any school buses, when my brothers and sisters, either graduated from high school, or my brother he quit high school, I think in the 8th grade, (unintelligible) and I rode horseback, until the bus started running in 1926 or 27. And then I would ride on the bus to go to school, except when I started to work at the grocery store and then I had my own transportation. And we would put the horse up at Dr. Dickersons, at the old school, we would put it up at Cousin Jim Smack, who live right across the street, in his barn. And we always had 2 horses and (unintelligible) mule to work on the farm. We always got places that we wanted to go real bad, if we had to walk.
INTERVIEWER: Did you go to church?
GEORGE: We went to Remson Methodist Church. And later years we went to Stockton mostly.
INTERVIEWER: How long were your services, do you remember?
GEORGE: The sermon was about 30 minutes long, and the whole service, the Sunday School and Preaching was about two hours.
INTERVIEWER: About the same as it is now. What was the closest, you were about middle way between Pocomoke and Snow Hill, right. Where you lived.
GEORGE: It was about 10 mile to Pocomoke and 10 mile to Snow Hill.
INTERVIEWER: I guess you can go either way. Do you know what the population was about in Snow Hill or Stockton?
GEORGE: Stockton then was about 600, 5 or 6 hundred. Snow Hill was about one thousand or fifteen hundred, Pocomoke was a little larger maybe a couple hundred more.
INTERVIEWER: How about law and order. Did you have any policemen?
GEORGE: Well we had a part time policeman in Stockton, also had a sheriff in Snow Hill and he covered Snow Hill and Pocomoke and they had town police in Pocomoke, and Snow Hill, in Stockton we had a Constable, who was deputy sheriff and he only worked nights, and he was the town blacksmith, Mr. Jack Holland. He had a daughter in my class, that's in this picture.
INTERVIEWER: How about hangings? Did you ever go see anybody hung?
GEORGE: When I was a small boy, my grandfather, who lived in Pocomoke, I wasn’t going to school, and one time my mother let me go with him he would take drummers. Do you know what a drummer is?
INTERVIEWER: No
GEORGE: Well a drummer would have 2 large trunks, that he sold dry goods to grocery stores, grocery stores then was a general merchandise store, they sold everything, suits and groceries and all kinds of dry goods. He would pick up the drummer in Pocomoke at one of the stores, or to the hotel and load his trunk on the buggy and drive him to Stockton and he would go to the store and then he would come out, Grandpa Powell would come out to our house and stay all night. And the drummer would stay in the hotel. There was a hotel in Stockton then. Cousin Jim Smack and his wife run the hotel. Cousin Jim Davis, I mean, and he would stay at the hotel overnight, and in 2 days time he would finish with all the stores and then he would come to Snow Hill. So my mother let me ride with him to Snow Hill, and we stayed at a relative’s house in Snow Hill, but the next day, there was to be a hanging. This man an Italian, his name was Gruno and I don't know how you spell it, I think it was Gruno. He had killed a whole family, out on the, what was known then as the Chandler track of Robinson, his wife and children and the reason he killed her was he wanted her to run away with him and she wouldn’t run away with him so he killed her in a potato patch.
INTERVIEWER: Did you actually see him…
GEORGE: No, I didn’t actually see the hanging, but I was in Snow Hill the day of the hanging.
INTERVIEWER: I wouldn’t have gone.
GEORGE: I was just about 5 years old, they wouldn’t let me go to the hanging.
INTERVIEWER: No I don’t think so. I wouldn’t have gone either. How about your first car? How old were you when you got the first car?
GEORGE: My father bought a car in 1927, well he bought the second car in 1927, he bought his first car in 1919, which I was too young to drive, always wanted to, I would pull it up and back it up. I was too small to drive it, but in 1929, when I was in high school, my father bought a Chevrolet Sedan, 2 doors, and that’s what I did most of my dating in. I would borrow his car, I would have to fill it up with gas.
INTERVIEWER: Did you go to Pubic Landing on Farmers Day?
GEORGE: Well I was working in Public Landing. IN the late 1920s and early 1930s.
INTERVIEWER: How about, I don’t know if you will remember this or not, my teacher or helper or whatever she is she said there was an alligator in either Snow Hill or Berlin, I can't remember, it was real popular and some man had brought him back from Florida, when he went.
GEORGE: You don't remember what year that was in?
INTERVIEWER: I don't remember.
GEORGE: I don't remember hearing of it. I do remember some talk of a lion, mountain lion being turned loose in Cedartown area, that was in the late 1930s, but no one but two or three people ever saw it. And it soon died down, no one ever saw it in later years after that.
INTERVIEWER: Do you remember any big storms, like hurricanes or?
GEORGE: Well we had a big hurricane in 1933. 1933, I was working for Mr. Tom Purnell, he had the hotel in Snow Hill, and in 1930. the fall of 1930, after I graduated from high school, I went to work for him full time, And I opened a restaurant up in Snow Hill, 1930. In 1932 I was married. 1933 we had this big storm, it tore up Public Landing, all the boardwalk. They had a big bowling alley that was tore up, and the dance ball, and the restaurant in the place where I worked was all washed ashore, high up on the dry land.
INTERVIEWER: Is that the same one that did a whole lot of damage at Ocean City?
GEORGE: Yes. Yes. It washed the inlet.
INTERVIEWER: Washed the…yes that's…
GEORGE: Washed the inlet in Ocean City in 1933. I think it was in September.
INTERVIEWER: Was anybody hurt during it, do you remember?
GEORGE: Don’t recall of anyone, but several places, down at George Island Landing, there was seaweed hanging on a telephone wire. So the waves was rolling that high. The tide had come in 7 or 8 feet high, of course the waves was rolling’ just like they would be in the ocean, in the bay.
Interview Ends
Interview Begins
INTERVIEWER 2: Mr. Jones, after hearing his interview would like to make an addition regarding his uncle who was a commercial photographer, who took photographs that will be added to our slide collection, once they are made available. Mr. Jones, could you tell me your uncles name?
GEORGE: My uncles name was Ricksome Franklin Jones, he lived in Indianapolis and was a commercial photographer in the early 1900's, and each summer he would come to visit my mother, it was my mother’s brother, and he would take pictures of different places we would go. Like Red Hills, and the Pocomoke Fair, and we have in our possession several pictures that will show the outings that we had in those days. Back even when I was a small child.
INTERVIEWER 2: This would be before 1920?
GEORGE: This was 1911, the year I was born.
INTERVIEWER 2: Okay they will be good. Now did your uncle grow up here in Worcester County?
GEORGE: He grew up in Worcester County, on a farm near Stockton. Between Stockton and Pocomoke. And he left the farm in the early 1900's and went, and his 2 brothers, went with him, they went west and Uncle Frank located in Indianapolis, Indiana.
INTERVIEWER 2: But they still maintained contact here.
GEORGE: They still maintained contact and Uncle Hartley and Uncle John went out further west and finally Uncle Hartley came back and located in Philadelphia, and Uncle John was drowned in 1912 or 1913 in the state of Oregon, trying to save the life of a friend of his that fell overboard in the Columbia River.
INTERVIEWER 2: Oh my dear, he really did go west didn’t he.
GEORGE: So my grandfather and grandmother and Uncle John was buried in the cemetery at Pocomoke, I believe it is near the Hearn property, near the Pocomoke River.
INTERVIEWER 2: Right. Near Winter Quarters.
GEORGE: Near Winter Quarters Drive, yes, in that location. And of course all my father’s people were buried in Remson’s Cemetery, near Big Mill.
INTERVIEWER 2: Right, I know where that is.
Interview Ends