Betty Carter: Interview #1

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I was born in a raised cottage down in the lower Garden District on the corner of Felicity and Coliseum. Race Street intersects right there. And I've always felt that that was a very interesting omen of my future, Felicity, into the Coliseum, and Race, those were all aspects of the thing.

Very soon thereafter they bought a house on St. Charles Avenue, also a raised cottage, right above Jackson Avenue. And I grew up, then until I was about eleven years old we lived there. My father died when I was six and a half. Mother had four children. I was the oldest, and he was thirty-nine when he died. He had beenóor he was then or had been president of the American Music Merchants Association. He had been the president of the Progressive League that became the Chamber of Commerce. He was the most active of the young businessmen in New Orleans. He was in everything, and when he died he had to be buried by the Elks and by the Shrine and by God knows who all.

And what did he die of? Probably some form of pneumonia. We have always said the flu but the flu epidemic came the following year. Mother kept us home from school that year, me and the three younger ones, because it was safer. But I don't think they had influenza back then, I think it was just pneumonia. The one thing I remember that I think sort of helps to date part of my life is that my father received a telegram, delivered, and he opened it in the hall and he looked at it with my mother and he said, "This means war." I think that it was the declaration that someone from Washington or New York had cabled, telegraphed it, about unrestricted submarine warfare. I just think the dating figures out that that was probably it, but then he died.

Ritchie: So by the age of 39, he had done quite a bit.

Carter: He was very, very prominent. He was very prominent. The family music company, Werlein's, had been established in 1852 in New Orleans; in 1842 in Vicksburg, and then they'd moved down to New Orleans. The first member of the family in America was a German from Bavaria and he went to Clinton, Mississippi. His name was Philip Peter Werlein and he went to Clinton, Mississippi, taught music, had his violin under his arm. I read something somewhere but I have never researched this that he was the head of a little college there, and there is a little college there but now it's a Baptist college. He married a woman named Margaret Halsey who was from Long Island and she was teaching at the same school. So my German ancestry is Philipóeverything else that I can find is Anglo-Saxon, Scots or Welsh.

So Philip Werlein, the first Philipóin our family we have to say Philip first, second, third, fourth, my nephew is fifthóhow else would you characterize them? The first Philip composed several pieces, one was a Jefferson Davis march, and right immediately before the Civil War he was, we have always said, the original publisher of Dixie. This is a question now. There is no question but what they published it, somewhere in the first year of the life of Dixie. But my brother says that he thinks he pirated this. Another legend is that he sent a check for $5 to Dan Emmett, but somebody else gave him $10 before the five arrived. I don't know. But we did publish Dixie and I have the Werlein version that was used at Jefferson Davis's inauguration.

My grandmother, who married the second Philip, was a ParhamóBettie Parhamóand they had settled in Warren County, Mississippi, coming from Virginia. And her father was Dr. Greenway Parham.

So Mamooóthat was Bettie Parhamómarried the second Philip but he was much older; he was fifteen or twenty years older than she was. At the end of the Civil Waróno, during the Civil War, the second Philip had volunteered for theówe've always said the St. Mary's Riflesóhe was in school up near Shreveport in the earliest form of the Louisiana State University. I don't know what the name of it was. We can't find the St. Mary's Rifles today. In the family we know that this man, eighteen or nineteen, went to Avery Island where each of the southern states sent its own small contingent to protect its vested interests in the salt mines because they had to have salt. And, of course, I used to think this was simply because you had to have salt in your food. Well, of course, now I know that was the way you pickled your ham and you preserved the cabbage and whatever you were going to do. So that's where he spent those war years.

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Then she had the second child and she said to the nurseóof course, everything was done at home in those days, there was a doctor but he'd leftóbut anyway, "Boy or girl?" and the nurse said, "A darling little girl, Mrs. Werlein." "Thank you, very much."

The third child, "Boy or girl?" "A darling little girl." "Thank you very much." Still not smoking.

Fourth child, a little boy, "A beautiful little boy, Mrs. Werlein." "Thank you, very much, give me a cigarette." And she went back to smoking. But she was a woman of great discipline because if she wanted to not smoke, she didn't smoke. And she had a very good rule which made it possible for her to achieve a great dealóthe rule was to do for yourself what nobody else can do for you, and by that she meant rest, eat properly, get recreation, go to the bathroom, the things that you have to do for yourself. After that you can organize and deputize, and she did it.

Ritchie: First you take care of yourself.

Carter: You take care of yourself.

So I had those two influences, my mother with the theosophyóLorraine, the second child, and I went to the theosophy Sunday school for at least a year down in the Maison Blanche building where we learned about auras and transmigration and reincarnation, I guess. And my grandmother, with her very strong Bible teachings and "Do not read the comics on Sunday" but finally she let us do it.

And for the third strong influenceóbut not reallyówas the governess that we had, the nurse, because Mother was so active and thank God she had Mamadee. Mamadee was Elise Wagner, a German woman who came to Mother as her personal maid when she was first married and then she had me. But by the time she had the second child she put Mamadee in charge of the children. And Mamadee was a wonderful woman but really a rather ignorant woman. And she talked French to us because she had been a ladies' maid in Paris. So it was not the best French accent, whatever French accent I got was later at Newcomb, from the point of view of correct.

So I would come in and start teaching Lorraine the creed which Mamoo had taught me, "and I believe in the holy Catholic church." And Mamadee was a Roman Catholic and coming from Germany, where the fight between the Protestants and the Catholics was still going on strongly, and say, "You have no right to teach a child that, you are not a Catholic." And I said, "But it's not the same."

So anyway, I learned from those three women that you do not accept the first thing you hear. You have got to hear the other side of the story because there was always another side of the story. However, Mother's rule was, if you differed with her, you could differ, but when she gave an order, you did it immediately and you could discuss it later. And she was right. If she had four little creatures all rising up, saying, "No, no, no," she could never have gotten through it.

Well, after she was so active with the war, then she became active in the French Quarter in New Orleans, helping to establish the little theater, Le Petit Théâtre. And something else down there.

And in the meantime, early in the 20's, she bought property in the French QuarteróI'm telling you too much about Mother, but it's very importantó

Ritchie: She was an influence?

Carter: Oh, Mother was the person. In fact, you should be interviewing her. Ah-ha, but you can't! Unfortunately.

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her bed one day, and by invitation we came in, and that's where she gave us the facts of life. Nobody does it that way any more, but she was so far ahead to have done it at all. I don't know how I got on to that.

In New York Mother was with this crowdóbig financier typesóand they were investing in German marks, so she invested in German marks, which was nothing for a widow to do. So by the time that Philip came along, she decided it was more important for the girls to go to the girls' school, the private school, because the boy needed to know how to carry on in the world with everybody, so she sent him to the public school. He also went to camp, to get away from all the girls because, you see, there was Mother, Mamadee still with us, just adoring the little boy and doing everything for him, and the three girls. So it was a way of getting Philip away from all those women.

Ritchie: Was that unusual to have a German governess?

Carter: It's interesting. I've thought about that. Of course, Mother considered her French because she talked French to us. Down in the Garden District, thinking back to it, most of those families had white nurses. They had Irish girls. And I have one cousin who has the most horrible accent to this dayóshe's about two years younger than I amóand it goes right straight back to the Irish nurse, Nellie. The Whitneys lived across the street, they had white servants. The Bucks had white servants. And an interesting thing, thinking back to it, I don't know anybody in the Garden District who had colored nurses, but maybe there were some, and maybe the white nurses had to sit together so you only knew the children who had white nurses. Maybe.

Ritchie: You went out with them.

Carter: Yes. So Mamadee stayed on and was supposed to be the housekeeper when we were older and she was wonderful.

Ritchie: Your mother was fortunate, then, after your father died not to have to worry about working.

Carter: That's right, she didn't. But she did lose a lot of money. After that she had to worry somewhat. She bought a house in the French Quarter, in about '23, I'm making it up. And she later becameóthis had nothing to do with the French Quarteróthe Sainger Theater phoned her and asked if she would be head of the movies in the South under Will Hays, to do censorship within the industry.

And so for six years she had that title and traveled all over the South because they were putting inóa lot of states wanted to put inócensorship because the movies were so terrible. Looking back on them, they were pretty bad. But also, were they any worse than they are now? Probably not.

Mother was level-headed. She understood what could be done and what couldn't. And she traveled all over. She came to Greenville onceóI'll get to that later. Mother had that paid job until about '32, I guess it was, or '31, and then after that she devoted all of her time to the French Quarter. Even earlier, she helped to get the amendment to the state constitution passed by which that section of the city is set up as an historic district. And in the book called Preservation Comes of Age put out by the National Trust and published by the University of Virginiaóin the first chapter there's the statement that the most prominent of the early conservationists/preservationists was Elizebeth T. Werlein.

Ritchie: I believe I read in one of the travel booksóis there a home in the French Quarter where she owned or lived?

Carter: Yes, yes, right.

Ritchie: And they recognize her as an early pioneer.

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Well, anyway, I did not get to be an archaeologist, and in Frenchóat Newcomb I majored in French, minored in history and Spanish and was going to translate when I was graduated. Monsieur Durel thought that I would be a good translator. But he didn't know that Hodding Carter was in the wings.

Ritchie: In high school and in college did you do any writing? Did you have any journalism?

Carter: No. In high school I sold ads for the Spectatoróthat came out twice a year. You went to the family, to the father of girls in the school, and sold the ads. Big to-do. But it was a learning thing. And at Newcomb, I was the Newcomb correspondent for the Tulane Hullabaloo so I had to get in a column occasionally about what was going on. No journalism training. And my English training consisted of freshman English, which was required, and I think maybe sophomore English. But I was so busy with French, history and Spanish that I didn't do any more than that.

Ritchie: Did your sisters follow you to Newcomb?

Carter: Lorraine went to New York to study sculpture and Evelyn made her debut.

Ritchie: So all three of you had differentó

Carter: Different interests and ways of looking at life.

Ritchie: Do you think your mother favored any one of the three paths that you took?

Carter: No, I do not. If she did, we didn't know anything except that she loved us all and we loved her. And we would go in the summers to Amite, Louisiana, while she had the paid job. We couldn't go anywhere else, it had to be close. Mother would come and we'd beóin college then, not too youngóin fact the summer that I met Hodding stillóon the dark porch, listening to the frogs and the night sounds, and Mother would sit with us and we'd take turns sitting on her lap! You know? Just sweet, wonderful. But the whole time she was very much in charge of the situation.

[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Ritchie: Was there ever any thought that any of the girls would go into the family business?

Carter: No, no. None of us showed any interest in that. And then, of course, it was dedicated, it was understood from the beginning, that my little brother would, which, of course, he did. So he grew up and he was president. Shortly before he died he became chairman of the board. And his son is not interested in that sort of thing at all; he's into Zen and nutrition. He's absolutely marvelous on health foods. He did not go [into the family business]. But his sister, Philip's sister and my niece, is now president of Werlein's.

Ritchie: Is she the first woman to do this?

Carter: Yes, yes. The first overtly because I feel that my grandmother was there all along. Certainly she controlled that while she was there.

Ritchie: Tell me about when you first met Hodding.

Carter: Whee-e-e! Well, when I was rushed Pi [Beta] Phi there was a girl [Corinne Carter] who came down from Hammond and she was rushed Pi Phi and Kappa [Kappa Gamma]. She was very pretty, big blue eyes. And she went Kappa and I went Pi Phi. But when we got to physics, freshman year, you had to have a laboratory mate. So we chose each other. We were the only people who knew each other. She was extremely

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Amite was where we used to go for the summer while Mother had her paid job. An antebellum house with the drop cord light and the bats would come down the middle of the hall, and we'd try to get them with our tennis racquets, never did.

So I told Corinne I was having a birthday party, and to try to come and to bring some men. And she said, well, she couldn't come, she was going to Portland, Oregon, to visit her relatives but that she would try to send her brothers. Only one brother came, Hodding, who was the one that I wanted to have come. Her younger brother was very much dating a girl whom he later married, so he didn't come but Hodding brought another man with him.

I had seen Hodding by then becauseómy teeth were being straightenedóI had to go to New Orleans during the summer to have them tighten the braces. And one day coming back on the trainóCorinne was on the train, and she said, "Hodding's going to meet us." So I looked out the window and I saw him. And he saw me. And he asked Corinne, "Now who is that cute girl?" And she said, "Oh, that's Betty Werlein, but there are a lot of girls who are cuter who are Kappas."

He liked me when he met me. And I thought he was very attractive but the trouble is that he sat on the front porch talking to Mother all evening, except he came in and danced with me three times. And then we had a date and he took me to the Deke [Delta Epsilon Kappa] boat ride. And that was so wonderful because it got cool. And he took his sweater off and put it on me. I could have swooned, it was so marvelous.

But that had taken a long time, from July until September, for him to phone me for a date. But he was busy with all these more sophisticated girls.

Ritchie: You were a bit younger than he was.

Carter: Yes, I was three and a half years younger, but very much younger in some ways. The kind of girl whose mother had told her everything so scientifically that when I heard a dirty joke I didn't understand it. And my good friend Virginia had to interpret the jokes for me under the chinaberry tree at McGehee's. They would tell these stories and I would ask the other girls, "What does that mean?" I didn't understand a thing. If they'd used good words like penis, I could have understood, but with dirty jokes, you've got to understand the jargon which I wasn't old enough to do.

So that's how I met Hodding and he dated me all my sophomore year and my junior year and my senior year. And by my junior year I was very popular and dated up three weeks ahead. And I just realized that Hodding Carter wasn't going to wait around for me. If I wanted him I'd better quit all this foolishness. So I quit having dates with other people.

And then my senior year he was workingóhe taught first at Tulane, thinking he wanted a Rhodes scholarship which he didn't get from Bowdoin because they didn't realize he was as serious as he was, I think that's what they said. So now you had to have an academic connection if you did that. And Cleanth Brooks and he roomed together at Mrs. [Paul] Capdevielle's, she had a place where Tulane students, post-graduates could room. And he and Cleanth were both accepted to come for the orals, to be interviewed for the Rhodes. But by then, Hodding had heard that you couldn't be married if you had a Rhodes. And he had decided, he said, that I would never wait for him.

Ritchie: If he went off foró

Carter: Yes, for two years. Cleanth's girl was Virginia "Tinkum" Blanchard. Cleanth said, well, "Tinkum" would wait. So Hodding drove him up to Baton Rouge and Cleanth got it. So Cleanth has always said that he had me to thank for his Rhodes scholarship.

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So Hodding said, "You are a goddam liar," and he rose up and knocked the manager down. And in the scuffle, the typewriter fell overóoh, and the other man in the office was Hart Bynum from Baton Rouge, also a friend of Annette's whom Hodding had met through Annette. So Hodding knocked down the manager and he ran down the steps saying, "I resign!" And Hart ran down the steps behind him, "I resign!" And the UP manager got up and said, "You're fired!" So we don't know which came first, whether the resignation or the firing, didn't matter, he was out of a job. It was the spring of '31.

So we couldn't get married although I graduated. So then I went to Chunn's Cove Camp near Asheville. I guess that was my second year. And I taught tennisóI never had a tennis lesson but I did play tennis.

Ritchie: Like your mother with the sewing.

Carter: That's right! Only she did take the lessons the night before but I read the book. I would tell the children in my cabinókiosk, or whatever we called itóI would tell them these stories about my youth, how I had been a Russian princess and how I rode my little pony, God knows what I told them, but they adored it.

And I was in charge of the annual magazine that the school put out. So that was my literary training. And Hodding went out to the farm to visit with Mr. Carter. And he and Hart Bynum were both out of jobs, '31 was the year, a bad year financially for the United States.

So they started writing short stories under the name Carter Bynum. And they would divide the profits. They sold one story which was actually written by Hodding; it appeared in Collier's or one of the magazines. And they got $300 or $500 for it, I think $300.

Ritchie: It was a good price.

Carter: It was very good. And they wanted more stories from Carter Bynum, war stories about Marines in Haiti, but they had gotten materials from an interview with a Marine in Haiti, and there weren't any more materials. So they never were able to write another story about that.

And I was at camp, and we wanted to get married. It was $500, because Mr. Carter and my mother both thought that though it was very, very iffy, we could get married with the $500, live for a year in Taxco, Mexico, where Mother's good friend Natalie Scott was and where Bill Spratling was living. Now, Bill Spratling had been part of Mother's group, much younger than Mother, and he was in the architecture field. Spratling had gone to Taxco, where he revived the old silversmith work and told the Indians to come back to their original designs, not to be making the cheap reproduction stuff.

So they said we could live there for $500 and we were going to do that and Hodding would write. But about that time the Associated Press offered Hodding a job in Jackson, Mississippi, to be their bureau manager. Well, that was a whole lot surer, according to Mr. Carter and my mother. And so the decision wasóand that was at $50 a week. Well, that was a lot of money. I mean, a lot of girls I knew were getting married on $25 a week and we were $50 a week. So we were rich.

So we were married on October the 14th, 1931, and we moved to Jackson, Mississippi.

Ritchie: You were married in New Orleans?

Carter: Yes, at my grandmother's house.

Ritchie: A small, family wedding?

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I was terrible; all I did was I went up and would listen, I was introduced on the floor which is something that I'm sure they do in all legislatures, but it's very nice.

Ritchie: You were introduced as a guest?

Carter: Yes, as the wife of the AP correspondent. "There she is, up in the balcony, how do you do?" I went to theóparticipated inóoh, the Welcome Wagon came to call and they said, "Are you Episcopalian or Presbyterian?" I said, "Well, we aren't going to do much about either church but I'm an Episcopalian and Hodding is Presbyterian." So the Episcopalians came to call and asked me to come to the Guild. They had two Guilds. And one was making a patchwork quilt and the other was playing bridge. So I decided to play bridge which I had done a little of. And with Hodding in the special session, and it was meeting morning, noon and night, in time, sort of near the end of our Jackson period, I was playing bridge morning, noon and night.

And Hodding was covering the terrific session and the major issue was how they were going to pull the state of Mississippi out of absolute bankruptcy. They couldn't sell a bond. The schoolteachers couldn't get paid, nothing. And they were fighting over whether to put in a sales tax. And I believeóand I have not researched this but I've always heard or believed that Mississippi was the first state to put in a sales tax, three percent.

Well, it was a hot, hot issue. A man, a legislator from Natchez, contacted Ralph Wheatley, Hodding's boss in New Orleans, and said that Hodding was writing prejudiced, unbalanced stories. And so Wheatley put on the machine, "Don't file until I get there. Don't send out any stories."

Ritchie: He was coming up from New Orleans?

Carter: Yes. Wheatley used to drink a lot. And several days went by and he didn't come. And here was the UP getting out its stories. And the Commercial Appeal, which was from Memphis, was the big out-of-town newspaper with an agency thereóit was filing. The Times-Picayune was filing and here was the AP not filing. So in order to file, there was a man in the officeóno, there was a man who had worked for the AP bureau, as a printer, just to punch out the stories. So the issue was so hot Hodding didn't see how he could not file. But Wheatley had said he didn't want that man around the AP office. But he knew how to punch out the story. So Hodding told him to come back and he'd personally pay him to punch out the story so Hodding could cover the committee meetings and the hall talk and all the rest of it.

So Wheatley got there and he said, "You're fired because you filed when I told you not to file and you had this man punch it when I told you not to."

Ritchie: What do you mean by "punch it"?

Carter: That's when you put it on the tape, you know. The story had to be punched onto the tape and then you fed that into the machine and it went to the teletype at the other end.

Ritchie: Oh, I see. So Hodding would write the story and give it to this man to punch it.

Carter: Yes. Yes. Now, Hodding knew how to punch it because if you knew how to type there was very little more to learn. But you did have to know how to do it.

Ritchie: But he was busy coveringó

Carter: Covering the committee; he was the AP man.

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[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Ritchie: So we'll start again talking about youró

Carter: Going to Hammond.

Ritchie: Days going to Hammond, that's right.

Carter: So here we are, out at the Carters. And Hodding goes into New Orleans, he tries to see what in the world he can do. And there really wasn'tóthere wasn't anything. And we did have $300 or $500 left from our wedding money. My grandmother had given us some money and I bought that Napoleon desk and a sofa, a chair and a coffee table, that's what we got out of it, and had some money left.

Ritchie: Did you buy those in New Orleans? The desk is a beautiful piece.

Carter: Yes, a beautiful piece. Young Hodding says that's what he wants, he's put his name on it.

So what are we going to do? There was a strong, weekly paper in Hammond, the strongest weekly paper in the state, The Vindicatur. George Campbell ran that and his daughter Mildred sold all the ads. And who was Edna? I cannot remember but she was in on it. Maybe she was his wife or his aide. I don't know.

So we couldn't start a weekly paper. And some man, Sidney Williams, had either started or was thinking of starting a mimeograph sheet. And Hodding said no, that it wouldn't be a mimeograph sheet, it would be a paper. So we decided that we would start a paper in Hammond, Louisiana, daily, five days. It was a tabloid. I would be the business manager and he would be the editor/publisher. I can't remember what date we put out the first paper.

Where was our first office? Our first office has to have been around the corner from the theater because I remember that the first dollar we got, we framed, we hung it on the wall, and within days it was stolen. And we pretty well thought we knew who took it.

But nobody had any money. And we started the paper at the heightóas the strawberry season was coming in and that community lived on strawberries. And that year, at the strawberry auction, the strawberries were selling at less per pint than the cost of the little cups that they put them in. The town was wiped out that year.

So we started it. And I would get out and sell the ads to whoever we could sell the ads to. It was a community that had been settledóit was on the Illinois-Central and a lot of Sicilians had come in to do crop farming, and that was how the strawberries got their good start.

Ritchie: Had Hodding's family been in the area for some time?

Carter: Yes. Hodding's father had gone to Tulaneóhe didn't finish, I don't believe; he'd grown up in New Orleans, he went to Rugby Academy, then he went to Tulane briefly, then he went to Natchez where he was in charge ofóas a young man either in charge or working with the man who was in charge of an oil mill. An oil mill is where the oil is pressed out of the cotton seed and made into oils later sold as Wesson oil and something like that.

Mr. Carter had been there as a young man and he had met Irma Dutart across the river. And she was very popular in Natchez and was in the Natchez carnival court. And they were married, I suppose, in Vidalia, that's across the river from Natchez. And they bought this property in Hammond because he wanted to be a farmer.

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Carter: That's right. And we wrote checks on Saturday after theóhow did that work? I think the banks were open Saturday morning, I think we didn't write the checks, didn't give them until after the banks had closed because they weren't any good, you had to get home to Hammond in time to collect from people who promised you that after the weekend they'd have some money. So then you had to get to the bank at 9:00 a.m. Monday to deposit quickly.

Ritchie: You mentioned that the office was around the corner from the theater. What was the office like?

Carter: Well, that first office and I believe this had to have been the first office. It was, because we had no press and we had no linotype. Now, how did that work? Where did we print it? The first issues may have been printed in Ponchatoula, at the Ponchatoula Enterprise. Certainly they wereóhow did that work? So, we had a room which was off of the side street and that was our office.

Then what did we do? Then we moved into a little tiny room, smaller than the other, right in the lobby of the Columbia theater, one side had candy and things like that for sale and over here wasóit's on the main street, whatever the name of the street was. And that was more prominent. And we went and moved. Hodding bought a press and we brought that in and installed it, second-hand, of course.

That was in that building. And then we would have the type set in Ponchatoula. One day we were coming across the railroad tracks, Illinois Central, and the whole page of type pied so that we had nothing for that page, except one tiny ad which was a classified ad for Hodding's uncle's filling station. He was the mayor of Hammond. So here was Uncle Connie's [Charles Congreve Carter] Texaco station ad. So we put that right in the middle of the page and went back by quickly to tell Uncle Connie not to tell anybody that he hadn't paid for the whole page. Ha, ha, ha.

So after we pied that page, we knew we really had to get a linotype but we didn't for a while. And then after that weóhow soon after that, I don't knowówe began to buy a building on the west side of the tracks. But that's wasn't why we moved there, it was because the building was available. But by shenanigans Hodding figured out how you do this and how you do that.

But the linotypeówe had that now and we had a press now and we had the banks closed. We had no money except the five dollars. But Hodding and I went to New Orleans and we went to Old Southport which was right outside of New Orleans, and that's where all the gambling was. And Hodding said, "I'm going to gamble. This five dollars won't do us any good and I might do some good." So he gave me a quarter and I played the slot machines. And he played craps. There was some man who was hot pitching the dice and Hodding stayed with him. He stayed with him and won $300.

So then we had cashóa Godsend because nobody was going to let us buy newsprint on credit, or ink or anything that you had to spend money out of town on. Then we decided that we would print up these little formsóit was ridiculous, it could have been done by bookkeepingówe'd go in and we'd sell the man the ad. We had these little forms and a picture of Mr. Roosevelt and the amountóa dollar, ten dollars, twenty dollars. And it said, "We Bank on Him." And anything that we had to buy in town and pay our salaries with, we'd give them this script and then they could use that at Mr. Loyacono's grocery store or Mr. [John] Graziano's butchery. And when he had to pay us, he had the script there to pay us.

Ritchie: So you invented a little system?

Carter: We did. It was probably illegal. But it doesn't matter. And it could have been done by the bookkeeping. But it was a gimmick. And we didn't look on it as a gimmick, we thought it was very clever and that this was the way to get money to be able to pay our men. "Our men" were probably two, the linotype operator and maybe the pressman, I don't know.

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United States mails. So we had to go through with nail scissors and other scissors and cut out of the paper every one of those little offers for the lottery. Well, that took a while.

Now, another thing is that our press was an old thing that went like this. [Gestures with arms to indicate press movement]

Ritchie: Closed up and down.

Carter: Yes. And I never did learn to use the press but it was very slow. And we printed page 2 and page 3, then the whole thing had to be turned over so that you could see to print page 4 and page 1. And one, of course, was the last page you'd print. So everybody would have to help with the turning of the pages.

Ritchie: And how many copies would you be printing?

Carter: I don't know. And it was small, just remember, it was small. I'm saying a thousandóI'm making that up. I don't know. There aren't any books, not that I know of. They may exist, it would be fun to find some.

Ritchie: Did you save copies of any of the papers?

Carter: Those papers turned upóSoutheastern [Louisiana University in Hammond] has the file. After we sold the paper in 1936, somebody saw those files just sitting there and took them over to Southeastern. We didn't have anyóat some point, we got some because I've given those to Mississippi State University. When I finally sold the house, I just phoned Mississippi State and I said, "Come over and get everything." So they took everything. So I'm sure, whatever we had, they have.

Where am I, what do you want me to say?

Ritchie: Well, let's talk about Huey Long for a little while.

Carter: Yes. Well, you see, he would come to town. And when he came to townówell, by then we were in town. We went in, we rented a houseódarling little cottage, a little cottage, and we didn't have a stove so the Episcopal rectoróthey'd been given a new stove so they gave us their kerosene stove. And it didn't have an oven, it had a little thing you put over the top of it. And we didn't have a refrigerator so if you opened a can you had to use the whole thing.

We were a block from the railway station. And people would be riding the rails, so we had a lot of people who came by for a sandwich, including Al Friendly and his brother. And they were out of college and decided there wasn't any point in just sitting there, so they were seeing America and they came to the house. And Mr. Carter gave them a job picking strawberries, which is a terrible job, talk about stoop labor!

So, we were fighting Huey and he would come to town and there was a bandstand opposite the old post office. And he would come and give his talk at the bandstand. And there was no other entertainment except movies so everybody went whether you were for Huey or not. But the main thing is that Huey was fun. You know? He was a good speaker. He was wild.

Ritchie: So it was free entertainment.

Carter: It was. So you would go, but hating him with a passion. And everybody would figure how they would kill him. And I had a good one. I said I was going to get a nail and file it very, very thin. Then I was going to get the chair that Huey was going to sit on when he came to the grandstandóbandstand,

Page 22

Huey Long announced that she was the Democratic candidate for his post. And Hodding's position wasóalthough the Carters and Kemps had been friends for generationsóHodding's position was that in those days when the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election you couldn't say that she was the Democratic nominee, you had to have a Democratic primary.

So, the judge in our area, Nat Tycer, announced that there would be no election, that it was illegal, no primary. And then he said, "It's a poor judge who doesn't see that his rulings will be enforced." So he deputized a lot of people, including Hodding and a lot of them.

So now the press of New Orleans, the AP and UP, all come to Hammond for the showdown. And they'd come by the house, and I'd have supper or hors d'oeuvres or something for them. And the time comesówe heard that the ballots were on their way from Baton Rouge by truck to be put around at the different precincts. And all of them had only Miss Lallie's name on them for this special election. And no other name.

The men all went out. And they went to the bridge down the road, between Hammond and Baton Rouge, and I think they got the truck to turn over. And they blocked that election. And for a long time I had some of the ballots that were burned, you know, charred remains and that sort of thing.

Ritchie: So then, theó

Carter: The election was not held.

Ritchie: óLong forces weren't there toó

Carter: The Long forces had come by truck and were defeated. That whole period is well done by Ken Burns [in his film "Huey Long"]. But for all that we were fightingó

Ritchie: Were there other newspapers in the state that took the same stand?

Carter: Yes, there were some but they slowly had disappeared into the moonlight somewhere. And the Literary Digest said that Hodding Carter was the most articulate of the Louisiana editorsówe loved that. Hodding was writing piecesówhich is a way of getting cashófor the New Republic. He did two about Long. He did one for some other magazine and then he did one for the Review of Reviewsóthat was a good name. We counted on that to pay for Hodding our son's birth at Touro Infirmary.

Ritchie: What year was he born?

Carter: Born in '35, April '35.

Ritchie: So you were busy then with the newspaper and starting the family.

Carter: Oh, yes. But I'll tell you, I worked, sold advertising up until two months before he was born, and he was born April the 7th. But by then I was pretty big, I kept walking the streets of Hammond. Now, who sold advertising after that, I don't know. Maybe Bert did. But I did until I couldn't.

So then we had the baby in April of '35. And that was the hottest summer you could ever imagine. And looking back through the Daily Courier which Hodding had to do for some reason once, it was very interesting the two themes were the heat and the mounting tension against Hueyójust terrific. You could see it going on. And we went on a picnic for the Daily Courier early in August. And it was 105 and we had our linotype operator, Roy Lamus and his wife and child and Hodding and I. And the little girl, who was a fifteen or sixteen-year-old, a retarded little girl who was in charge of our sonóoh, I forgot to tell you, I'll go back to thatóand the pressman was there, Mills, and Bert Hyde. Now, that was the organization.

Page 24

Carter: In New Orleans. And Mother wasóMother knew all these people through the Little Theater and through all of that. And Dave Cohn was one of the young men just like Bill Spratling. And so he had met me through Mother. Now, the rule at Mother's was children should be seen and not heard. So we learned a lot but we couldn't talk. Maybe that's why I talk so much now.

Hodding and Dave got out on the fire escape at the hotel. And Dave told Hodding, "You're just"óthis is in April of '35, "You're just knocking your brains out for nothing, you could never beat Huey, and you ought to come to Greenville, Mississippi, which is the bright spot on the Dun and Bradstreet map." The reason it was was because they were building levees, thanks to the 1927 flood, and the Flood Control Act of 1928. So Hodding liked the idea but he says, "I can't leave Louisiana until Huey's out of the picture."

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Carter: So HueyóHodding had heard about this place called Greenville and Dave saidóso after Huey was out, Hodding and Dave got together and discussed whether we would come to Greenville. And there was a paper here that was 50, 75 years old, whatever it was, so that didn't sound too good. But the idea was that that paper never took a stand on anything and that it would be good to have a strong paper; because of changing times they needed something, that Hodding was a strong man who could do it.

So Hodding and his father came up to Greenville and looked at the situation, stayed at Will Percy's and met people who might be interested in putting up money. But we hadn't sold the paper; we had no money. But to figure how we would manage to come if we ever did want to.

So then we sold the paper. And now we had maybe $15,000, which was fantastic. That was certainly equity capital that had been built with sweat and tears.

So then, the paper sold, we went up to Maine, what else would a good Carter do? And coming back we went through Bennington [College, Vt.] because Mr. Grayówhose first name will come to meóhad taught at Bowdoin and he thought that Hodding would make a good English teacher for Bennington. So we went to Bennington, looked at it, and we loved it. But all the little girls sat around at the feet of the master in shorts, very short shorts.

Ritchie: In the '30's.

Carter: I couldn't see my husband doing that. Very avant-garde. If we wore shorts, we wore them on the tennis court, and they were very circumspect, just above our knees. But here were these cute little things all sitting there, how would Hodding handle that? That was 1935, subtract seven. How old was Hodding? Ought-seven to '35. He was 27 years old. Look what he'd done by the time he was 27. Pretty good, huh?

Ritchie: Yes.

Carter: So anyway, we looked at the Bennington situation and I was not in favor of that at all. Now we have the money, so we could consider the newspaper, so finally we started that in Greenville. So I guess it had to have been in the fall.

Ritchie: In '36?

Carter: Yes, but this is strange because we moved here in the fall of '36. We must have come in the early fall for the final decisionómy first visit. Hodding had decided but I hadn't seen Greenville and it had to have been no earlier than September that I came up because I had a cute little outfit. I had a good-looking skirt and a pretty sweater, and a hat with a big pheasant feather on it. And I still have that. And we drove up and spentówere going to visit, did stay with Will Percy.

Page 26

Carter: That's right. And Mr. Carter was a responsibility because with his wife just deadósuch a sweet man. And he wanted you to sit and scratch his armsówell, that would be half an hour or an hour every evening, scratching Mr. Will's arms, sweet guy.

But they were very sweet to me. And I didn't know I was spoiled, I don't really think I was spoiled but I think I just didn't know anything. I remember writing my mother, she had the letter, that I had bought a dress, the first thing I bought after we were married, the first summer or the second summer and I just had to have a dress and I said it cost 98 cents, "which Mrs. Carter, I know, will never believe, because she thinks I'm extravagant." What was I extravagant on? There wasn't anything for me to be extravagant with. Nothing. It was a good dress, a little blue dress with big white buttons.

Ritchie: And you wore it to work?

Carter: Oh, yes. It was a good dress. You could wear it anywhere. It was before anything was wash and drip-dry.

Ritchie: Hodding's father supported the move to Greenville?

Carter: He thought it was the thing to do. Yes.

Now, he didn't have any money. He was on the board of the bank in Hammond so we were able to borrow money once or twice, small amounts to pull us through but not much because they knew too well how awful everything was.

I'll tell you, we never had any money until some timeóand I guess it must have been about 1960, and Hodding came in on a hot summer's afternoon and I had not been out that day, I don't know what I'd been doing. He said, "Well, I went by the bank and paid up the last of the note." He meant our personal note. And I said, "I think I'll buy me some bath powder." Bath powder! Why? I don't know, except that bath powder is something that people give you when you are sick. You would never think to buy bath powder.

I remember that is something I said and I remember that Will Rogers thing. And I remember also when my father died and we children had to come to the library the evening after the funeral and Uncle Parham [Werlein], my father's brother, told us that my father had died. I went crying out of the room and I said, "At least there's still a Santa Claus." Well, I think, you know, those are little things that summarize things for you, in a way.

So we got to Hammond, got to Greenville, and we brought Mrs. Fielding with us, she was a white woman, I don't remember how we got her. But she was very good and she stayed until she had to leave, I've forgotten why. And I had Hodding and I had Jane. John Carter had a room or an apartment but he couldn't take care of the little girl.

And I'll tell you, getting a paper started is impossible, absolutely impossible. Three times we had the paper ready, all the ads sold, everything ready, and it was to be printed and going to come out in the morning because the other paper was an afternoon paper, and we'd work all night long, and you just couldn't get it out. You couldn't get it out. Don't ask me why. Three weeks later, the same equipment, the same manpower, you're getting it out. But when you start, you can't do it.

Ritchie: So it was like starting all over when you moved here, setting upó

Carter: Oh, yes.

Ritchie: First time.

Page 28

had yelling far into the night! Also, I had once had intercostal neuralgiaódon't ask me what that is but it hurts like mad. A little boy across the street in New Orleans had a bicycle that squeaked and I have never heard anything like that. So I felt that issue personally.

Ritchie: Do you remember what year this might have been?

Carter: No, I would have to see when they were discussing the new hospital. Then when they did put up the hospital, it was put up later, air conditioned, windows closed, and I think by then the ball park had collapsed.

Ritchie: When you mentioned your news boy delivering papers to the stores, did people subscribe at home then?

Carter: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The way we did that was that we put on contests for who could sell the most subscriptions. A Mrs. Ely, Ruby Ely, she was the one who got out and sold marvelous subscriptions. And whoever sold the most would get a living room suite. Well, that was a sofa and a chair, that's two pieces. It was sort of canvasónot canvas, sort of straw that would have been very nice on somebody's porch but a little bit less impressive than the advance notice that we put outóbecause you had to repay for that with advertising in the paper.

We opened in the fall. The first Christmas I worked like a dog to get the principal retailers in town. Tenenbaum was a very nice high-priced women's wear storeóthey still operate under that name, the son-in-law runs it. I finally got Herb Tenenbaum to give me an ad, a full-page ad for his post-Christmas sale. And I got it in, I laid it out, everything was set. Hodding and I went to Hammond for Christmas. There was still Prohibition in the state of Mississippi. The sheriff had picked up some bottles of whiskeyóhalf pints in cases and he gave some of those to Bob Brown, our reporter, and we gave those to our staff as Christmas presents.

Well, the press man had gotten his present and he was dead drunk when Herb Tenenbaum walked in to check his ad. And the press man threw the bottle at him, threw a second bottle at him, took a broom and said, "Get out of here." The ad ran with whatever errors were in it. But that wasn't important, the important thing was that it took months to get Herb Tenenbaum back into the paper.

Ritchie: And that was your job.

Carter: That was mine. And I'll tell you. When I first got to Greenville, Hodding had had a gentlemen's discussion with Mr. Smith, who was the editor of the other paper, the old paper that was there. Mr. Pink Smith, that was Pink Smith. So Mr. Smith very kindly had given Hodding his advertising rate card, which Hodding gave me. So I go out and sell advertising. Well, it was quite obvious that nobody is paying according to the rate card. Well, I've got to compete. I've got to see what is the rate that is the going rate.

So I got to the Goyer Company, which is the big organization that sold to the commissaries out in the countryside and Mr. Edmund Taylor who owned that was one of our supporters, not a major one but an interested oneóa very good supporter. In his office was a fine man named Billy McGehee. So I went to Mr. McGehee to sell him an ad and the Goyer Company was supposed to take a nice big ad. So I suggested the price that Mr. Smith had told us was the going price. And he said, "Not at all; we don't pay anything like that."

Well, I talked and I talked and finally I got down to where I heard what the price was, and I came down to that. And he said, "Now, listen, I'm going to give you the ad and I'm going to pay you what we've agreed to. But if you were working for me, I'd fire you. And what's more, I'm going to tell your father on you." He thought Hodding was my father. He'd heard that this new editor had come to town.

Page 30

Carter: I would write stories as they came up, but not in that period. Primarily I was in advertising. I was the only advertising director at first. And then after a number of months we hired Herman Cohn, who was Dave's nephew, and he came to work as my assistant and so we had him for a while.

Then the only thing Hodding ever did, that looking back on it, really hurt. We decided the time had come that we really needed a really good advertising man, that a man could take over and I'd be his assistant, I'd keep on but he would do it. We got this very good man from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and we ran this front page story. And the story was all about the coming of Rodney Defenbaugh, which was simply great. But nowhere in this story did it say he takes over from Mrs. Carter who has done such a beautiful job. [Laughter.] It really hurt me.

Ritchie: Because you're the one who built up the contacts.

Carter: Oh, it really hurt. It really hurt me. Because I'd done it. Neither one of us really thought of it at the time but when it came out in print and no mention ofóusually when you put in the new person that takes over you say something about the person who they're taking over from. Well, that's the only time I felt Hodding ever did me a dirty trick but he didn't do it. It just happened. But it was tough.

Ritchie: Did you often read things before they went out?

Carter: Oh, what he wrote, definitely. And if it were reallyóI had a rule that he had, too. I said, "Look, you've got to make your point but you don't have to make collateral people angry. You can make them angry some other day." So you'd read it carefully to see if some other ox was going to be gored. So I think that was a good thing I could do. Everybody worked very closely together.

Now, I wasn't really the business manager at that point, I was simply the advertising manager. I can't know that I was ever really the business manager because when we came back from the war, I wasn't. But I, in a way, always kept an eye on the thing.

[End Tape 2, Side B; Begin Tape 3, Side A]

Ritchie: I thought we might start now with your telling me a little bit about what the town of Greenville was like when you first arrived.

Carter: Well, I'll tell you in terms not of my first view of it which was coming into Will Percy's house that night after we had turned over in the ditch. He was so nice; he was waiting up for us. We had to ask at the police station how to get to his house, Hodding wasn't positive and at that hour nobody was awake. We went on to his house and he waked up, walked to the door, opened it and said, "Come in, you poor children."

The next morning Adah Williams came over. She was a very good friend of his. She said, "Oh, I'm so glad to meet you," and I said, "I'm so glad to meet you." And she said, "I've heard so much about you," and I said, "I've heard so muchó" and Will said, "Come on, now, that's enough of that, let's get on with it." And so we became friends. She was older, considerably than I was, but a nice, very attractive woman.

So what was Greenville like? Well, really, the most important person in that period was Louise Crump because Hodding was about to hire her asóby then, it couldn't have been then, it must have been after we had decided to come and were here and we went to Will Percy's houseónow I'm going to tell you what I saw, in those days.

Before the paper got started, Louise would pick me up and take me for a Coke, Coca-Cola, that was the thing to do at about ten o'clock in the morning. This has to have been before I actually went to work because I had time to go have the Coca-Colas. And you would go to Buehler's Fountain Terrace and you'd sit

Page 32

like in New Orleans, you used to go to the French Market for coffee before you'd go home. In Greenville you went over the levee to look at the riverówell, Lake Ferguson.

What else about Greenville?

Ritchie: What was the political climate like?

Carter: Well, Greenville was very conservative and in Mississippi there was one party, the Democratic party. So it all revolved around the courthouse, with the courthouse crowd trying toóand in the community there were two cliques, there was Will Percy's law firm and Billy Wynn's law firm, and those two were both on our board and the people who put up money. Billy was more the industry side and Will was the old planter side.

So we heard both of those but we were more under the influence of Will Percy because we stayed with him the first four to six weeks when we came to town. Having breakfast in bed at his house, the black man would bring you in a tray, a silver tray with your juice and your coffee. Then that was removed and another silver tray came in with your bacon, eggs and biscuits. And then another tray came in, I don't know what came on that. But you were just getting beautiful tray afterówell, that was very much in the old planter tradition, much more glamorous than most planters ever had, I assure you.

Ritchie: Did he live in a family home?

Carter: He lived in the house that his father and mother had built and I think they built it either late in the teens or early twenties. It looked like that to me because it was that style. [It was] torn down later, after he died. He died in '42, it was inherited by his cousin's children, who were his adopted children, and nobody could afford to heat it and cool it and all those things.

What was Greenville like? Well, there was the white part of town and the black part of town, never the twain shall meet, except in your kitchen, where you certainly expected to have a maid or two. And in Jackson, Mississippi, I'd had a maid, when I first moved to Jackson in '31. She came five or six days a week, until after midday dinner. You paid her three dollars a week. I'm sure that I didn't pay much more than that here. But I did have a maid and Mrs. Fielding was there at first with the children.

There were no supermarkets then. There were one or two groceries where everybody knew the family well, and leading citizens, very nice people. And all of downtown wasódowntown was where the retail merchants were, many of them Jewish, most of them Jewish, and you could depend on them for supporting community projects which you certainly have none of today. There's nobody on Main Street with any money at all. They're all representatives of something else, bottom-liners.

So, what else do you want to know about Greenville? Later on I learned a lot of things but I didn't know it then. For instance, I didn't realize that five times as much was being spent on the education of the white child as was spent on the education of the black child. I didn't realize that a classroom of third graders might have one teacher and seventy-five children. I don't know how they were supposed to learn anything but we didn't know that. We didn't know any of that.

We came to Greenville in '36 and of course what we were struggling to do was to defeat the old paper and force them to let us buy them. And as time went on, they were either going to put us out of business or we were going to put them out of business. So we kept on struggling with that.

Now I must say this, the race issue had not become the issue in the thirties. I think survival was the principal issue for everybody, just trying to make the wheels turn. They had a lynching over in Duck HillóI've never been to Duck Hill, I don't even know if that's the correct name but I think it was. It's in one of Hodding's books. Will Percy telephoned Hodding about 6:30 in the morning and said, "My God,

Page 34

Well, I had worked by then, you see, for practically two years on that, from the fall of '36 until I got sick. After that I had to stay in bed two months, [then] we decided that the thing to do was to get pregnant as fast as I could. So I did and then promptly began to try to lose the baby, so I had to stay in bed a lot. Then we had the baby, then we went off to the Nieman.

And so who was selling the advertising and running that part of it? Well, the man that we had brought in, Rodney Defenbaugh, who was excellent, really good. I don't think I worked during that period. We went off to the Nieman and we came back for a few months. We were here and Hodding had signed up for the National Guard. He did it when Munich occurred. When he went off with the National Guard to Camp Blanding I stayed here, to keep an eye on the paper and to work as Woman's Page editor because I was too fragileóha!óto get out and pound the pavements the way I had done. So [I] just had to see that everything went all right.

We had a young man in charge of circulation, John Gibson, and we had an advertising man, Rodney. We had a good staff of young men that Hodding had put together on the editorial side. We went along, we did pretty well that winter.

In June or maybe May, he was taken out of the 114th Field Artillery and taken to Washington to be in army public relations. He said, "I don't care if we lose the paper. You and the boys have got to come." So at that point, off I went to Washington, D.C., with the two boys. That summer [I] did the research for him on a book called Civilian Defense of the United States. Horrible bookó patched together, just pieced together.

And the paper was left here for the war years with Hodding's brother theoretically keeping track of it.

Ritchie: The one who had come to be the photographer?

Carter: Yes. Right. And John wrote us these lettersó[there was] not so much long distance in those days, and of course you didn't have the airplane flying back and forth, they did but we didn'tóhe would tell us about how things were in terrible shape. Eventually he was drafted or volunteered, I don't know. John Gibson remained as the circulation manager.

Hodding met a man in Washington who had other newspapers, Don Reynolds, captain in the Army. Don entered into a contract with Hodding that he would take over the paper and run it and own 49% and we'd own 49% and two percent in escrow. His staff, his supervisors would see about it. John Gibson sort of kept an eye on it for us while these other people were in charge of the paper.

Ritchie: They came and ran it?

Carter: Um-hmm.

Ritchie: Well, it must have been a time when other staff members had to leave, too.

Carter: Oh, they did. They did.

Ritchie: So you went on and you couldn't be certain that they would be back.

Carter: You didn't know, you didn't know. John Gibson was wonderful because he kept an eye on the whole thing and when we came back and had to buy the paper back, he put up some money and ended up as a 25% owner, and a very good business manager. So I never was business manager again.

Ritchie: Tell me what types of events you wrote about for the women's page.

Page 36

Ritchie: Nothing in the black community?

Carter: Nothing, nothing. And of course we had some Chinese, never would cover anything like that. A very limitedóyou just didn't cover those things.

Ritchie: But if there was a major issue, say, as the lynching andó

Carter: Well, but that was overóyes, then you'd write the editorial, Hodding would. And I can't think of any major issues we were involved in, in that period before the war. I think that the Nieman fellowship was a very important development in our lives. However, it was after the Nieman fellowship that we came back and I did the woman's page. I was carrying along in the usual way.

So then we went to Washington for the war and I guess whatever the Nieman had done for me and whatever it had done for Hoddingóbut Hodding was way ahead of me because he had demonstrated for Sacco and Vanzettiówell, I never thought of doing anything like that. But I think that the war sort of opened up a lot of things.

After Pearl Harbor came, I had done that stupid book for Hodding which he had done with Colonel [R. Ernest] Dupuy who was his superior. So the book is by Dupuy and Carter. Hodding had had trouble with his eyes at Camp Blanding, a palm frond did something and he didn't have direct vision in his right eye after that. He was about to be put out of the Army when Pearl Harbor came but he fudged it and was able to stay. We had more notes at the bank than he was making as a second lieutenant so we knew that I had to go to work.

So I went out and got a marvelous job with the Office of Facts and Figures, which a few months later became the Office of War Information. And worked with a fantastic group of people. I was a researcher. The writers were people like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Milton MacKaye who did a lot of things for the Saturday Evening Post, McGeorge Bundy, William McNeill Lowry who didóis still, I think, alive and was working with the Ford Foundation. The researchers were all great girls. They had come from Time and Life and they were referred to as the [Henry] Luce women. So when I came, they had to call me a Luce woman, too, although I had never worked for Luce, and for fun we changed the spelling to Loose.

Archie MacLeish was the head of the Office of Facts and Figures but they threw him out. Congress thought he was too liberal. They converted it and called it the Office of War Information and Elmer Davis came in.

Ritchie: So you would researchó

Carter: I did a lot. I wrote speeches and I did research.

Ritchie: On what was happening with the war?

Carter: Yes. In the Office of Facts and Figures, they assigned you a certain topic and I was assigned to Nations United. My deputy was Chris Herter. In doing some reading to try to find out what to do, I read where the Dutch were the first to salute the American flag. So I said that since that was true, we should salute the Dutch and we should have Princess Julianna come aboard a ship of the line and be piped on as a sign that the Netherlands fight on and they were not alone, that we were all still fighting, together.

So I told that to Chris Herter and he said yes, so he had to get permission. We went down to the Philadelphia Navy Yard and went on board the South Dakota. We got a half column in the New York Times. They had to say "at an eastern port a ship of the line," they couldn't say which, "had saluted Princess Julianna in honor of the fact that the Dutch fight on." We talked to Captain Thomas Leigh Gatch (later Rear Admiral) and he said, "Well, what do you want done on the ship when she comes."

Page 38

So that was part of the different point of view which led a lot of them to resign. Now, I didn't resign. I went over to see Elmer Davis and I said, "Look, I've done advertising." And I said, "I don't object to getting people to doing the work any way you can do it. But you can't tell them, when the levee is breaking, to fill the sandbags to make your waistline trimmer. You've got to tell them it's to save the levee."

So the upshot of that was that when my group all broke up, then I hate to tell you I was put over in theóI don't know what they called it, the public relations department. I was in on security of information with Ken Beirns. He went on to be a big shot for Revlon and married the sister of one of the big movie actresses, Rosalind Russell.

I enjoyed doing the security of information. Then I did radio programs for children before TV, not programs but fact sheets regarding war work for childrenóhelping with the saving-fat publicity, writing the fact sheets to send out to all the radio stations about that and how the kiddies could help. Saving the fat and we had a big one onógood Lord, what was it?

Well, what had happened was that they couldn't get kapok from Southeast Asia because it was cut off by the Japanese, so how were we going to make our life jackets for our brave soldiers, sailors and marines? They told the kids of the Northeast, to gather milkweed floss because someone in the Department of Agriculture had discovered that milkweed floss made a wonderful substitute for kapok in life jackets.

Ritchie: It had the right consistency.

Carter: So we put on a big campaign. I really learned my lesson because we put on the campaign and the kids gathered the milkweed floss and they had to hang it on fences in summer and over clotheslines to dry.

Ritchie: Because it has that white liquid.

Carter: Yes, and they had to get it to dry. Then school was about to take in and what were they going to do with the milkweed floss. Well, they couldn't do anything with it. All over the Northeast they were telegraphing in, "What do we do with it?" They hadn't made the proper arrangements to gather it in. So that was really a flop.

And about that timeóI don't think it was then but I'm not positive whenóMary Lou Mickey had been a researcher. She went to work for Bernard Baruch as a confidential researcher. Her husband was hurt on the Franklin when the Kamikaze came and went right straight down the funnel and blew up the ship and so many were killed and they went limping back to port. And she wanted to be with Bill.

[End Tape 3, Side A; Begin Tape 3, Side B]

Carter: So she wanted to be with Bill when he came in to the West Coast and she recommended me to Mr. Baruch. So I went [and] because that was deemed war service, I was able to resign from OWI and went to work for Mr. Baruch as confidential researcher. Any question that he had, he would never give an answer until he had the facts. And believe me, that makes a difference.

I came to hate Clare Luce with a passion because she would answer, "No, that's globalony." Well, that's a beautiful line but she hadn't gotten any of her facts correct, at least from my point of view. And I thought thatówhatever her first name was, Chase Smith, the senator from Maineó

Ritchie: Margaret.

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They said, "We think you'd be good, would you take it?" And I thought, "Good God, I'd love it." But I also knew that I had a husband and two children. I said, "I'd love it but I can't possibly."

Ritchie: And the war was over at this time?

Carter: The war was not yet over but they were getting ready. Everybody knew in the long run it would be over. And we didn't know anything about the Manhattan Project but Hodding knew about it. But I never knew a word about it. It was over in the War Department. He knew, because he was in intelligence or something like that. But I didn't know anything about it. And the only thing I ever came near it on was that we got a memo that said, "Under no circumstances discuss heavy water." I didn't know what heavy water was and I certainly wasn't going to discuss it. I didn't. But after the Manhattan Project was known, then I began to understand.

So, I didn't go to Australia. I was in bed, I'd just had Tommyó

Ritchie: He was born in Washington?

Carter: Yes. He was born March the 28th, 1945. Mr. Roosevelt had just died. My second sister was up there and she took the children to see the funeral parade. And all of the crowd went out to San Francisco for the founding of the United Nations. So I felt very close to all that although I was not there.

The Army had told Hodding that his eye was in terrible shape and that he had to get out, that he couldn't work any more, and that he should go down and spend his life on the beach in Florida. Well, he didn't like that idea but we went up to Maine and we were up there that summer.

Well, what had happened was that his superior officer, Jack Stanley, who had been his superior at Yank in the Egypt days, wanted to have a vacation and Hodding had said go to Maine and see Ham Hall, Hodding's cousin. And while he was up there he bought a little house from Mrs. Bok, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who owned a lot of property up there. She owned the Saturday Evening Post, of course. When Hodding's eyes were so terrible, sometime late in that winter of '45, he went up to Maine to see Ham on a vacation. He bought a house, Hodding did. The first house we ever owned was in Rockport, Maine, right next to Camden, and right next to the house that Jack had bought.

So now comes Hodding's being put out of the Army. We don't know if we're coming back to Greenville or not and we didn't know if we could, if his eyes would be good enough. We went on up to Maine and lived in this darling house that was fully furnished, thank God. We certainly couldn't have furnished it. Hodding came on back down to Greenville to see about the paper and how we could get it back and ran into all this to-do. Don Reynolds had bought new presses and lent the money to the paper to buy them, so we would have to buy him out on that in addition to his half of the paper, his 48%ó49%.

Ritchie: So while he made it possible for the paper to continue during the war yearsó

Carter: Yes, he was going to keep it. The only way that Hodding got it back was that Hodding outsmarted him in a poker game. Not actually. What he did was that heóuntil the last minute the deal was set up, whoever made the offer, I could buy your part, I would offer to sellóhow was that, maybe buy or sell, and you either buy me at this price or I'll buy you at this price.

Well, that was fair except that we would still owe Don all this extra money that he had invested. Hodding had to pretend that we weren't coming back so that this man would make the price low enough so that we could come back and could buy him. And Don did. We were able to scrape that money together and come back down. We came in the fall, in time for the beginning of school, and had to buy a house, bought the house there on Arnold and got settled there.

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Carter: Oh, yes, a very economic situation. So that went on. And what was I doing at that period? I was president of every organization in town that a woman could be head of. I think the theory was that I would prove that we were home and that we didn't have horns.

Ritchie: And that you were really part of the community.

Carter: Part of the community, very much so. As president of the Junior Auxiliary, I made a stand for what we would have as our major project. I don't know what they wanted but I decided we should have, work for a day nursery and we voted to have it. We had a very good day nursery, all white.

About that same time Ruth Brentó[Tape interruption.]

Now, I learned a lot from the day nurseryóand also I want to go back to Ruth Brent. What I learned from the day nursery was that these were all white children from very poor families, they didn't know one thing. They didn't know about toothbrushes, they didn't know washcloths, some of those children came from homes outside the levee, on the river side of the levee, where they went to the bathroom on the floor in their homes and then the mother would just put the food on the floor for them, there's no telling why they didn't have everything in the world. But we taught those kids a great deal, they learned it. And the second year was a lot easierówe had a paid woman in charge, a very good young director.

Now at the same time that we were doing thatówell, we got that started by the fall of '46óin about '48, Ruth Brent, a good Methodist over at Trinity, tried to get a day nursery started, or day care center for the children of black families because, she said, "We want those women to work for us but they have to have a place to leave their children." It was a very good, sound, conservative way of putting it.

There was enough money available in the state to have one that would get a little federal subsidy. She went ahead and couldn't get anybody to help with it. First she thought she had her Trinity Methodist crowdóbut black children? Then she thought she had the Junior Auxiliary but they showed interest but not to go and work. Finally she got it going and the Greenville Day Care Center was the first nursery for black children in this area.

Now, I had nothing to do with that. But Ruth was my friend, became more and more my friend, we became friends over the years. And she did that. And we went toóthere was about that time, there was an organization calledóand there is an organization called Church Women United. Have you ever heard of it?

Ritchie: Yes.

Carter: Have you? Well, at that time it wasóit wasn't Church Women United, they twisted the name later to Church Womenóit was under the National Council of Churches. Ruth was active in Church Women United. It was a white organization and I was very active in it.

After the '54 Supreme Court decisionóthe National Council of Churches took positions on things and the organization was ready to collapse in the South from the point of view of the white participation. But we already had a few black people participating and they said they would go right on meeting. And Ruth said she had no objections to meeting for the worship of God with anybody, so she continued and I continued. And I think that Ruth held it together, and I helped. And we kept Church Women United going.

And in those days, the first time in Greenville that I can rememberóit was not a Church Women United meeting but Ruth was trying to drum up support for the day care center and we went over to Josephine Haxton'sóshe's a writer who writes under the name of Ellen Douglas. We went over to her house, a group of

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to have him as a reporter but that we had to have a different editor. So he resigned. What would you do? So he did.

So then who was my editor? I looked around the newsroom, who would I choose as the editor. So I had to work that one through. And I'll think of his name in a minute. Foster Davis. So I said, "You're the editor." Well, that was like on Saturday. And on Monday morning I came down to the paper early to see how things were going and how my editor was taking over. He wasn't there. And I said to the girl on the desk, "Sally, where is Foster?" She said, "Oh, he's at the air base. There's a group of blacks who have taken over several of the buildings out there."

Well, the air base had been given up as far as being an air base but all those buildings were there. Throughout this section of the country the planters were saying to the tenants on their places, "You either work at the price that we'll pay you or you get off the land, we don't want you on the property, you've lived on the property as a tenant but you're not a tenant, get off."

So they had no place to go. Unita Blackwell had organized a group and they planned the whole thing. On Monday morning in the cold night, dark, they went out, they broke the lock on a gate and they went in and took one of the buildings and they were in that building. So I rushed out there. Well, by then, Foster was getting the story for the Democrat but nobody knew anything. All we knew was that there was a group in there that had taken it over. We put it on the wire and immediately the press of the world converged on Greenville, Mississippi. Bishop Moore arrived, and everybody arrived so it was a big to-do. Then the question was how to get them out of there without bloodshed. It all was worked out finally. They went out and had to find a place to stay and they went down south of town and developed what they call Freedom Village.

But anyway, so my being editorówell, I wasn't editor, I was publisher at that pointóstarted under difficult circumstances, so that was an exciting period.

Now another thing that I did that I thinkóyou're talking about my life as a newspaperwomanóit really had a lot to do with using the paper as a tool. [I] felt that education was so important. Governor [William] Winter had these ideas for improved education. We got out and we put on a mass meeting at the new convention center. We had about a thousand people. The temperature was about five below zero, it was unbelievably cold. We had snow and ice on the ground, Mrs. [Elise] Winter was supposed to come but how would she get hereóand she said she'd come by helicopter if she had to. Well, she got here.

And the school band couldn't make it but the Head Start children were put into a bus and they were brought. The band didn't come, how were we going to have any music? And I looked around and I said, "Can you play the piano?" and she said yes, whoever she was. And I said, "What march can you play?" She said, "Oh, I can play the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic.'" So we got two little boys to carry the American flag and the Mississippi flag, took them off of the stage, Mrs. Winter on the arm of the mayor, and all the little Head Start children behind, and we all stood up and marched in to the tune of "Mine eyes have seen the glory."

We had wonderful speakers, which I had rounded up, and we had every legislator from this area. Governor Winter got his program through because he built a groundswell and we were part of the groundswell. The legislators said, "Well, he can call a special session and we have to go, but we can end it without doing anything." But they got there and they couldn't. So we got a good educational reform package.

Ritchie: So once again you used the paper as a tool for community change.

Carter: Right, right.