Allowing for a year's difference between the two youngest children, and
allowing that the boy was born immediately before the War, the girl
could not be younger than seventy-eight. She could be older. She states
all facts as through her mother, but she seems to have experienced some
of the things she relates. Her memory is fading. Failure to get pension
or old age assistance oppresses her mind. She comes back to it again and
again. She carries her card and her commodity order with her in her
pocketbook.
She had asked me to write some letters for her when her daughter
interfered and said that she didn't want it done. She said that she had
told the case worker that her husband worked at the Missouri Pacific
Shop and that the case worker had asked her if she wouldn't provide for
her mother. They live in a neat rented house. The mother weighs about a
hundred and ten pounds and is tall. The daughter is about the same
height but weighs about two hundred and fifty. Time and again, the old
lady tried to convey to me a message that she didn't want her daughter
to hear, but I could not make it out. The daughter was belligerent, as
is sometimes the case, and it was only by walking in the very middle of
the straight and narrow path that I managed to get my story.
Interviewer: Samuel S. Taylor
Person interviewed: Austin Pen Parnell
4314 W. Seventeenth Street, Little Rock, Arkansas
Age: 73
Occupation: Carpenter