OH124 Rebecca R. West Oral History
Abstract
Rebecca West discusses her life in Murray, Kentucky during the 1930s and 1940s. She recalls her father's wholesale grocery business, the effects of the Great Depression and the local public school system. She describes how children met at the drugstore after church to talk about events in town. She remembered picnics at Pine Bluff, receiving her driver's license at sixteen and local remedies and medical treatments. She remarked that a friend was quarantined for being diagnosed with scarlet fever. She remembered the family sitting and listening to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats during the Great Depression. She states that teachers were paid in script or grocery food stamps and that school sessions were also reduced from nine months to seven months during the depression.