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Margie Neal 332 Interview done by Mollie Neal with Margie Neal Songer on February 21, 2001. My name is Margie Neal. I was born in Bastain, VA on October 26, 1930. My parents were Roy A. Neal and Louisa Jane Hounshell. My father was born in Bastain and was raised there. My mother was born in Ceres. Roy was a railroad worker and Louisa was a housewife. They were good parents and they had lots of love for their family. My grandparents were Lafayette Neal and Ellen Wynn and my mother's mother and father were William Hounshell and Elizabeth Ida Kitts. They were born and raised in Burkes Garden, VA and in Ceres, VA. They were both dead before I was born so I didn’t know a whole lot about them. My grandfather was a carpenter and I didn’t know what Hounshell did. I don’t have very many memories of them. My brothers and sisters were Dorothy Poole, Ruth Havens, Claude Neal, Mary Gautier, Madeline Kirk, Truela Hess, and Cleta Stoots. They was all born and raised in Bastain. They would always go outside together and play. They would always make their own toys like they would make their own wagons, sleds, and seesaws. My mother made them homemade dolls and they would play with them under the porch. We always dreaded to come home from school because we had so many chores to do: there was water to carry from a spring about a half a mile away, we had to carry wood summer and winter because mother cooked on a wood stove and we kept warm by a wood heater in the winter, there were dishes to be washed, ironing to be done and by irons that were heated on the wood stove, there was sweeping and scrubbing the wood floors because we had no linoleums at that time’. I dreaded every chore that she had to do because none of them where easy. My house was very plain. It was boarded up, no insulation, no storm windows, it was pretty much just a plain house. It didn’t have no running water nor did it have a washing machine. I would always have to wash it on a board. My mother was always trim their hair for them she left it braded most of the time though. We had an outhouse in the wintertime they would always have to bust a path to go out threw there. We had a big garden during the summer time there was always many things to eat out of it. I went to Bastain Elementary School during her school years. Everyone was well behaved because they new better because there was a paddle always setting on the desk. During the summer we would always go close to the creek to play they lived right beside of one. In my early years of dating I would go out with my boy friend, which is now her husband and go and eat out. She said it was a big treat to go and eat out they got married in Wytheville. They had to wake the preacher up and wait on him to get his cloths on before they where married so I guess it was late into the night that they decided to get married. They have two kids now their names are Jennie Lou and Jerry Wayne Songer they still live around here. The weather was very bad in the wintertime it was very cold and it would snow for days she said. I don’t remember too much about the Great Depression she said that she was too young to remember. |
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