TRANSCRIPT

JL - 'Big' John 'T-Bone' Little, interviewee / LR - Lyn Royce, interviewer

LR: Tell me a little bit more about growing up. Tell me a little bit more about your house - I know you said it was a shack. What was it like living in that?

JL: [laughs] It was as shack, I'll tell you; we were so poor, we couldn't pay attention! [laughs heartily] Well, we ate a lot of oatmeal.

LR: You ate a lot of oatmeal - okay.

JL: Yeah; and, uh... 'Course we grew our own garden, too.

LR: Okay...

JL: We had individual... but then all around us, there was like, right behind us was a grapery. And then across the road was a, an Italian lady, she had a big, big garden, tomatoes and cucumbers and all that kinda stuff, and she always supplied us with lots of stuff.

LR: 'kay...

JL: And then down the road there was another lady had potatoes and that... oh, they always, they always, they always give us... But we always had to... we, we, we always had t' wash, wash our clothes, you remember the old... Uh, we had a machine; the damn thing; we used to hook it up to the water, when we finally, we had water in the house, we used to put a hose on the water, you know, and run this washing machine, 'cause once we got water, and every time, every time the thing would start, it would go 'klootchem, klatchem, klootchem, klatchem;' [chuckling] we called it 'Klootchem Klatchem,' you know? And so the thing would go 'klootchem, klatchem, klootchem, klatchem.' And we'd put our clothes in there, you know, with the...

LR: Right...

JL: ...remember that, uh, Sunlight soap?

LR: Okay, yeah...

JL: We put that in, cut that, chip it up to make soap like that [mimes 'cutting' small soap chips] and then we used to have a scrub brush... We had, we, we, we didn't have any rugs on the floor, we just had a board floor, and we used to scrub them floors... sometimes they used to gleam; you know the boards and that would gleam, and we had to walk, 'cause you'd get slivers sometimes; all we had them just boards gleam... And then we had, uh... but other than that, you know... We had an old stove, an old stove in the corner and we used to go down the railway track and pick up coal when the trains used to, you know?

LR: Okay, yeah...

JL: Before it, like before it got really cold, we'd take a sack and we'd walk miles up and down the track, pick up little pieces of coal and we'd pick up 200, 300 pounds of coal in a sack, and come back home and put, store it in a little shed and, uh, sometimes we almost had enough coal to last all winter, with the wood and that, you know. And then we had some soft coal, remember the soft coal? Used to smoke like the devil but you know, it kept, it burned a lot slower...

LR: Keep it warm...

JL: Yeah.

LR: Did... And, and... In the... You said you had to go down the yard to go to the bathroom...

JL: Oh yeah, around the back. Yeah.

LR: Around the back...

JL: 'Specially at night, you [indecipherable] COLD! That little path; if you stepped off the path you were in trouble - you went up to snow up to your hips.