TRANSCRIPT

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

LR: You said you were born on Prospect [Street, Niagara Falls, Ontario].

JL: Yea. Born on Prospect Street and it was a cold [chuckles]... I know it was a cold mornin' about 6 o'clock in the mornin' when I was born!

LR: Okay.

JL: My dad told me about that and, uh, I was born in a little 1 room shack...

LR: Okay.

JL: ...and we had a stairway goin' upstairs, that's where we slept.

LR: Okay - How many of you were there?

JL: Well, was my, my mother and my dad and my... my... my younger brother, who's just turned 75, and, um, I'm goin' ta be 80 next year. Next year?!... I'm talking about, this year - November 19 [2008]. Uh, yeah, so we lived there and we had... we didn't have any indoor toilets, we had to go out the back, go out to the backhouse, you know the old famous backhouse, and uh, we were poor but we were happy.

LR: Okay...

JL: You know? And, uh, we had good neighbours when we were growing up there. We were right in the ethnic belt - we had Italian, Polish, Czechoslovakian, German, uh, French, uh, English, uh, uh, Italian, all up there... we all grew up [side by side]. And so everybody helped everybody else back. You know; the Italians used to have the big gardens; and the Polish, they'd... we'd be going down the street and they'd always say 'Hey! You come to my house, I got something for ya.' Take us out the back and fill up our carts with, with vegetables and that for; or give us a couple dozen eggs... always [was somebody to] give you something. It was really good back in those days. And then the war come on... [chuckles] and everything got rationed - that was really interesting.

LR: Do you remember that really clearly?

JL: Yeah, yeah. I remember we used to have the ration stamps . And, uh, you couldn't get sugar; you couldn't get... you know, things like that. Little simple things. You had to get a ration card to go get your butter, and your sugar, and your salt and all... It's just... It was just something else.

LR: So you would have been, what, 10, 11, through the war?

JL: Yeah. Somewhere in there... yeah...