My name is Frank Williams, and I was born about a quarter of a mile from where we were sitting here, and I'll be 86 by next birthday.
This was a cotton country. Acres and acres and acres of cotton. The griffids that you did with the store only owned thousands of acres of cotton.
When I was little, this land right here was five bucks a acre high. The land that had been plowed and had a family using it for livelihood, it was 35. And now it's 10 to 30,000 dollars.
We had a sharecropper farm on my grandmother's acreage, and I'm the baby of seven kids.
And it was tough back in the 20s and 30s and 40s and so forth. Four letter word of that day was work.
It was our moms and dads that had the tough time. I was born in 29, and it was no dollar a day. My dad made a dollar a day, working from early in the morning to late at night.
Well, I wasn't big enough to work until I was six or eight or ten, and a boy was spoken for when he got to be six or eight years old, working field. So, with my brother and sister, we went through that.
This was cotton country. Acres and acres and acres of cotton. The griffith that you did with the store only owned thousands of acres of cotton.
I moved to Gerald when I was 14 when I left. We didn't have any convenience, no running water. I put the logs in in the 20s or four hours later.
I was surrounded by working people and good people, and everybody had respect for each other, and the kids were made to respect their grandmothers.
We could get in more trouble by saying, huh, grandma, correct? You didn't expect your grandma, you, with a huh, or an eye roll in the middle, or whatever.
My name is Frank Williams, and I was born about a quarter of a mile from where we were sitting here, and I'll be 86, that's worth it.
My name is Frank Williams, and I was born about a quarter of a mile from where we were sitting here.
