The old woman sits on a roller-walker, parked outside the Birmingham supermarket. Her hair is white. Her sweater jacket, pulled tight. Her shoes, Velcro.
Shoppers hurriedly march past her, in and out, like busy soldier ants. Always doing, doing, doing. Rarely stopping to see what we’ve actually done.
“My daughter’s inside shopping,” the old woman tells me. “You’d better not talk to me. Whenever my daughter sees me talking to strangers, she always says ‘Mama, quit bothering the man!’”
She is 94 years old.
“I may be 94,” she says. “But I have the body of a 93-year-old.”
Ninety-four years ago, the world was a different place. Birmingham would have been unrecognizable to modern eyes.
There was a Depression on. One in every four workers was unemployed. There were Hoovervilles all over town, makeshift shanty towns, tents and wooden sheds, perched on the slopes of Red Mountain.
School was a privilege, in 1932. Not a basic American right. Approximately 20,000 schools in America were closing, due to lack of funds.
The average American income was $1,125 per year. A pound of bacon was a quarter. A dozen eggs cost $0.15. A loaf of bread, a nickel.
You cooked with coal or wood. Local families who couldn’t afford coal sent their children to wander Birmingham’s railroad tracks, searching for lumps of coal that had fallen from passing railcars.
“If you had no coal,” she says, “you ate cold food and you froze.”
The radio was the new American hearth. An escape from reality. Rudy Vallée. Bing Crosby. It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.
In ‘32, the first daytime network serial debuted on NBC: “Clara, Lu, ‘n’ Em.” The serials were melodramatic operas sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive “Super Suds” soap. Jack Benny also made his debut that year.
“We were always listening to the radio,” she says. “Me and my sisters gathered around the radio and closed our eyes. Best shows we ever saw.”
Gas was $0.18 per gallon. The Zippo was invented. So was the parking meter. And a man in Kansas named Charles Elmer Doolin started frying corn chips in his mom’s kitchen. He called them “Fritos.”
“If we could afford it,” she says, “we went to the movies. But we could only afford balcony seats. In the balcony, everyone cheered and hollered whenever the hero got hurt. Down on the floor, people covered their mouths to laugh.”
Theaters still had Wurlitzer organs. And ushers with flashlights. Johnny Weissmuller’s name was on marquees, from New York to Frisco. Boris Karloff was everywhere.
And the Mickey Mouse Club, a new theater-based program, was taking America by storm. The Birmingham chapter was the largest in the world, with over 7,000 members.
Each Saturday, Mousketeers swarmed theaters to watch cartoons, and recite their credo: “I will be a squareshooter in my home, in my school, on the playgrounds, wherever I may be…”
“You can’t say ‘squareshooter’ anymore,” the old woman says.
Vulcan monument, the largest cast-iron statue in the world, was not atop Red Mountain like today, but located in the Alabama State Fairgrounds.
Vulcan’s hands were empty at the time, so they turned him into a billboard. He held a large Coca-Cola bottle, or a massive Heinz pickle jar. Local women’s clubs were so offended by the statue’s bare backside they painted a pair of blue overalls on it.
“Can you imagine?” the old woman says. “Being that offended by a statue’s naked butt?”
During our conversation, the woman’s daughter exits the store. In a hurry. Pushing a cart. And apparently, the daughter is surprised to see me talking to her elderly mother.
“Mama!” exclaims the daughter. “Quit bothering this man!”
The old woman winks at me. “See? What’d I tell you?”