Buried a full size school bus on their property to use as a bomb-shelter. Lived atop a hill in Henderson, Ky in the country and always had a big garden...lots of beans to snap. Papa Dickie loved to play washers. He would always win and was very competetive. Mama & Papa Dickie loved to play Scrabble and were members of Church of Chist.

Papa Dickie was a night watchman on the C&EI Railroad and was transferred every two or three years so the family lived in Dawson Springs, Princeton, Uniontown, Sturgis and Morganfield, Ky.

Mama & Papa raised their own chickens, cattle, pigs and garden and lived off the land. Mama made their own lye soap and kept one of the girls home from school every Monday to help with laundry since the clothes had to be scrubbed on the wash board and boiled in a large kettle over a fire outside. The clothes had to be wrung out by hand and hung on the line and starched and ironed with a flat iron heated on the stove. The pillow cases has to be ironed on the wrong side so the embroidery would stand up. They canned and gave away their vegetables. They had an outhouse and used a Sears & Roebuck catalogue as toilet tissue. In the house at night, they would keep a "slop Jar" under the bed as a toilet to keep from going outside to use the restroom. In the morning when we got up, we had to wash in a bowl of COLD water. So much cold wash water was thrown out that in cold weather, the kids would bo out and skate on it. They had a Model T Ford at one time and later drove a pickup truck and the kids always wanted to ride in the back of the pickup. Their children studied their homework by lamplight. They had coal stoves and water would freeze in buckets on the other side of the room. The children would have to take baths behind the kitchen stove in tubs. The kids either walked or had to ride in horse-drawn covered wagons to school. Before Evelyn was born, Mama had to walk to the bottom of a large hill to get water out of the creek in order to get water.

At one point they purchased a Model T Ford. One time shortly after they bought it she needed to turn around, but didn't know how to work the reverse, so she drove 20 miles out of her way from Sturgis to Uniontown Kentucky to find a place where she could turn around. :)