Transcript

Lu Ann Jones
What kind of farm did you all have?\

George Dyer
We had a pretty good farm, 125 acres of land. A lot of it was in timber. My daddy sold a lot of timber. He cut lumber in the wintertime when he couldn’t farm. That’s how he made some money, and then in the summer, he’d raise crops. He’d raised just about all the food we need.

Tessie Dyer
Coffee was about the only thing you had to buy.

George Dyer
Coffee and sugar and stuff like that. Money was hard to get hold of like I was telling you. My mother sent me and my brother to the store with eggs. We’d get all that sugar and coffee.

Lu Ann Jones
You’d barter the eggs for the sugar and coffee?

George Dyer
Yeah. There wasn’t no money back then. My daddy worked for the lumber company, he’d get paid off in chips. They had the amount of money on that chip, and you’d trade that for clothes and stuff like that in a clothing store—general store like they come to, they’d have everything. They called them commissaries back then. They had everything you wanted. Didn’t see much money. I never will forget the first fifty cents I’d seen when I was eleven years old.