By Darlene Bush Tucker
News Editor

I finally got around to visiting Marie Pailet. I had only met her once, years back when my husband worked with her son, but I enjoyed that visit so much that I always meant to visit again.

Marie and her husband, James, or "Bullet," live near Winnfield. He's 91; she's 81. Until recently, he still sold watermelons on the roadside here and there. Now he trucks in and sells potatoes from his house. The couple still keeps chickens.

Mr. and Mrs. Pailet have been married 62 years, having raised four children: Shirley (Hail), Linda (Banister), and two sons lost to death: Doug, and more recently, Tommy.

With people thinking about the economy so much, I wondered what Mrs. Pailet would say about growing up during the Depression as the youngest of seven children. It turns out her family's concerns were simple.

"What we worried about was getting food," she said.

The family had cows, chickens and hogs-sometimes. Other times her five brothers hunted or there was no meat. The family grew vegetables, too. They never bought seed though; they saved it year to year.

Milk was kept in a big glass jug, lowered by rope into the well for cooling.

Treats were simple but treasured: blackberry or huckleberry cobblers, or more rarely, syrup. "Sometimes Daddy would grow sugar cane, and a cousin had a cane mill, and we would have cane syrup," she said.

Youngsters made their own fun. "A bunch of kids lived across Beech Creek; we'd go play with them or they'd come over. Sometimes we'd have ball games with 25 or 30 kids playing with a stick and using a ball my mother sewed from a sock."

Family outings often rounded out the week. "Daddy worked five days, making cross ties if someone wanted them, but on Saturday he'd take us all down on Beech Creek. We'd tote stuff like Irish potatoes and grease, and I never will forget, we'd have fried cornbread and fish."

Dressed in a brother's old overalls, she trailed after her daddy when he went trapping or with her brothers to get wood. Her older sister stayed home with their mother and helped do chores like boiling clothes in wash pots and rubbing them on washboards.

The children's one new pair of shoes per year got a workout. They walked two miles through the woods to a schoolhouse where the grades were taught all together. "We would carry our lunch, a biscuit, an egg, maybe a sweet potato," she recalled.

The whole family was used to walking. "Daddy and two or three of the boys would walk to town when things were needed. It was 12 miles to the courthouse," she said.

Children weren't shielded from the details of death as they are today. "I was 5, and I was walking on an old bedstead outside, and they came and told me to come inside, Grandma had died. I remember watching them building her casket," she said.

Her family lived in an old log house roofed with homemade cypress shingles on Tom Hudson Road (named for her daddy). Marie, her sister and her parents slept in two double beds in a front room that had a fireplace; the five boys were split among three beds in a back room.

There was a kitchen with a wood cook stove for which green pine was cut and dried. Marie began stacking wood when she was 6 years old. She was 14 before her family got electricity.

Christmas gifts were rarely anything more than candy and an apple, though her brother once bought her a rubber doll with money he earned making cross ties. In a blurry family photo, taken at the height of the Depression, Marie clutches the doll tight. "You got something back then, you was proud of it," she said.

The main problem with society today? "People live too fast and want too much," she said. "I tell my grandkids, 'You just don't know.'"

Darlene can be reached by email at bustuc58@aol.com\par

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