Aileen Kilgore Henderson details Tuscaloosa’s before days
Any discussion of Aileen Kilgore Henderson will start with thinking of some remarkable quantities.
This new e-book, “The Earth through the Dime Retailer Doorway: A Memoir,” her eighth, is getting posted in Henderson’s 99th 12 months.
Her to start with e book, “The Summer season of the Bonepile Monster,” did not seem till Ms. Henderson was 74.
She has posted four publications for youngsters, a nonfiction get the job done on Alabama Condition Geologist Eugene Allen Smith and two earlier volumes of memoir which tell her lifestyle tale right after “Dime Shop.”
In 2001, Henderson published “Stateside Soldier: Lifetime in the Women’s Military Corps, 1944-1945” which follows “Dime Store” straight and then, immediately after she experienced long gone to higher education on the G.I. Bill, married and started a teaching occupation, “Tenderfoot Teacher: Letters from the Massive Bend, 1953-54” (in Texas).
Henderson tells us that she began preserving a sort of journal when she was only 8, in 1929, and that her family retains all letters, a darned very good strategy.
“Dimestore” is richer and a lot more comprehensive than would be probable if relying entirely on memory.
This short and pleasurable book tells the story of just one minor woman in Tuscaloosa County, but also offers the reader a fairly vivid very first-hand account of daily life in this article 90 a long time in the past.
Some of it is stunning.
Her first chapter describes dwelling in a coal mining camp in Cedar Cove, Alabama.
This could possibly have been a litany of horrors: poverty, starvation, isolation.
But it actually is not. The chapter starts “I was born into paradise.” Lifetime in the corporation city was simple, no electric power or functioning water, accurate, but idyllic in its individual way. Henderson and her family members ate healthful foods — not varied or extravagant — heaps of butter beans and cornbread.
People had parties, made their very own songs, cooked sweet, grew bouquets, made up game titles and stories, enjoyed their pets. The schoolhouse, she tells us was “a location of magic.” There had been guides she “raced by way of, savored and puzzled over.”
The Henderson house was five rooms, then powering that, a back garden, cow get rid of, chicken dwelling, pigpen and, farthest back again, the privy.
No paradise is with out its serpent, however. Henderson tells us that she sooner or later became informed that the firm cheated just about every miner every single day on the quantity of coal he had dug. There was no 1 to complain to: no union, no investigative reporters, no other careers to go to.
The loved ones moved to Brookwood and, immediately after graduating from superior college in 1938, Aileen took a position at Kress’ Office store, just one of 4 in Tuscaloosa at the time. For months, she designed a lengthy commute by bus, then moved to the town where by she shared a rented place with her sister.
Lots of of us keep in mind fondly the 5 and dimes of the ’50s and ’60s. Henderson tells us of these shops in the ’30s and early ’40s. They thrived, with clerks on the run all day long.
Kress marketed basic non-prescription eyeglasses — they magnified — for 50 cents, plastic rimmed, or, for 25 cents, with metal frames.
Gross sales have been brisk: “On a normal Saturday we sold at least 20-two pairs of the fifty-centers and quite a few extra pairs of the twenty-five facilities.” One Dec. 22, “we marketed twenty-a few sixty-cent purses and 20-4 fifty- cent purses.”
Pop society was impressive stuff. When Scarlett O’Hara wore a hair snood in “Gone with the Wind,” Henderson marketed 67 the initial working day they were being in. Kress, sensibly experienced purchased 92 dozen.
All this in a city that had three other department suppliers!
Henderson writes with some amusement of that a great deal additional genteel working day.
“A most essential merchandise was the sanitary provides that women will need. Some individuals had been utterly chawed to acquire Kotex or Modess or Kress’ more cost-effective sanitary napkins, Sanovel.” Adult men were in particular anxious. They may possibly hand her a take note indicating their need and then “While I wrapped their deals, they lurked at a neighboring counter, pretending they did not have any link to me or my counter’s contents.”
Counter girls have been compensated, but badly, and there was no health insurance policy.
Henderson experienced to preserve up for a tonsillectomy. Later, an appendectomy expense $100 at a time when she earned “$9.80 for 6 days function.”
Sometimes we are tempted when encountering the wages of past a long time, to think indeed, but that much revenue went a large amount farther then. It has been my knowledge that this is seldom real.
Henderson features stories on her sister’s love everyday living, sketches of her fellow personnel and their shoppers but most importantly tells us what Tuscaloosa felt like, as the country moved by the Depression and into the war decades, with Royal Air Power cadets at Van de Graaff Subject and the New York National Guard teaching just east of town.
It was a new entire world, modified forever, and Aileen Kilgore would go out into that new planet and stay a very long and exciting lifestyle, offering us shots of a great deal of it.
Don Noble’s latest ebook is Alabama Noir, a assortment of primary tales by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
“The Planet as a result of the Dime Retail outlet Doorway: A Memoir”
Author: Aileen Kilgore Henderson
Publisher: University of Alabama Push
Internet pages: 135
Cost: $24.95 (Hardcover)
