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The following is a spontaneous interview videotaped by Leon Goodman, Jr. and conducted
by Eva Castle Goodman with Margaret and Leon Goodman on
their 60th wedding anniversary July 28, 1994 in their home on Honolulu
Street, El Paso, Texas. Although it is transcribed, we have tried to be
faithful to their speech patterns.
Eva: First,
tell us what today is.
Margaret:
Go ahead, Daddy.
Leon: I
don’t remember, (laugh).
Eva: What’s
today...your anniversary?
Leon:
Oh, yeah, this is
the...we been married how many years? … 50?
… no, 60!
Margaret:
Sixty!
Leon: Sixty
years!
Margaret:
That’s
a looong time.
Eva: Tell
us about 60 years ago.
Leon: Oh,
sixty years ago…can’t remember that far back …That’s
a long time.
Eva: You know what? We need to go a
lot farther back than sixty
years ago today. When did
you first meet?
Leon: How did we meet?
Margaret:
Well, I was at a dance with my Daddy and a
girlfriend of
mine. Daddy always took us to dances. And so when we went home, we
always went
home with Daddy.
Leon: He used to throw you around
like you was a rag doll.
(laughs)
Margaret:
We
won the dance contests.
Eva: You and your father?
Margaret:
Me and my father. We would enter all the dance
contests, and we would win. And then some friends,
they were both of our friends, the men worked at the shop with Leon, and I went around with his sister when I was in high
school, and they came by and Leon did not have a date that night, and
they came
by and wanted to introduce me to Leon and wanted me to go on a date.
Well, my
policy was, when I was with this girlfriend and my Daddy, I always went
home
with my Daddy. So, I didn’t go with him.
Eva: So how old were you then?
Margaret:
I was fifteen. Then
I didn’t
see him for a long time. Then
this girlfriend … I had a date and we were
looking for a date for her, so we called Leon. And after we called
Leon, we
went out to a dance and Margie was my girlfriend and she came to me and
she
said, “Margaret, your date Jesse is taller
than you are, and Leon is shorter than I am,
and you’re short, why don’t we swap dates?” (laughter)
So, we went out to
get in the car, she got in the front
seat with Jesse, and I went to the back seat with Leon, and that’s how
we
happened to start going together. Then in the meantime, one of my
neighbors had
a boy that was older than I am and we started to chumming around
together and
Leon, he didn’t fit into the picture at that time, but later on, this
other
boy’s mother broke us up, so he said, “I’m not going with Margaret
anymore, why
don’t you go by and see her?” So Leon called me and we started going out and we been going out for over a year and I
was sixteen by that time and then we went out for a year after that and
I
turned seventeen and we got married on the 28th of July 1934. And that
was the
beginning of the end. (laughter)
Leon: When were we living on Cotton Street?
Margaret:
Oh, that was when
Leon was born. We were living on Wyoming Street and there was a big
palm tree
out there, and we always called that our ‘date’ palm. It was a palm
tree, but
we called it a date palm because we always parked the car by the tree,
and so
we called it our date palm. It was where we sat and talked. When I was
sixteen
is when I went to Los Angeles with my mother
and brother and sister and friends, and then we went up to Utah, and you were just finishing
your apprenticeship with the railroad, and I expected you to be moved
to
Florida with your mother and brother and
sister. But, you wrote me a letter and sent it to Utah and you said you
would
still be here when I got back. So then we moved out on Octavia street.
Eva: Did
you have your own place from the start?
Margaret:
No, cuz right after
we got married he got laid off from the railroad. He finished his
apprenticeship, but he got laid off, so...
Eva: Wait,
let’s go back, tell me about your wedding…
Margaret: Well, we went out
that
morning and picked some wild geraniums on the sand hills and picked
some roses
and came back and decorated the house, and Bishop Arville Pierce
married us and
Leon’s grandfather was at the wedding and he
signed our wedding certificate when we were married.
Eva: Who else was there?
Margaret:
My mother
and father and his (Leon’s) mother
and grandfather and we had
refreshments and opened up some gifts…
Leon: At that time my mother was
running a boarding house to try
to put food on the table and that’s where we would live.
Margaret:
She rented out
these rooms and
we had this one corner room,
but we went to the motel that night and the next morning we got up and
didn’t
stop for breakfast and we went to his mother’s for breakfast. As soon
as we
stepped into the house he said, “Margaret, you’re no guest around here
anymore.
Now you’re family, so get busy.”
Eva: What was the motel?
Margaret:
It was the
Franklin, of all
places.
Leon: Well, it was as good as any.
Margaret:
Well, it was a
pretty nice
motel at that time. The first
night at his mother’s
house we had to move some of our stuff up there,
and I have a little cedar chest, I still have it, and when we put it on
the
dresser he said, “Here’s the money we have
left. Here is ten dollars. Put it in the cedar chest and if you need
it, you
use it and if I need it, then I’ll use it.” So, that’s what we had. We
started
out our marriage with ten dollars.
Leon: I
thought it was twenty.
Margaret:
Well, we gave ten
to the
motel…(laughter) Then, he got laid
off and took a job on the bridge gang.
Leon: Y’know the company was very
good to us. If you got laid off
of one place they could make a place for you someplace else. It may be
less
pay, but it was something to do.
Margaret:
He went to Three
Rivers on the bridge gang , and I went out one weekend and it was cold,
and we
had a little house that wasn’t very well heated and we liked to froze
to death
that night and then when I came home I stayed with my mother and
father, and I was
going to go to school. By the time he left to go in the bridge gang he
got a
check for forty five dollars. He gave his mother fifteen and he gave me
fifteen
and he took fifteen with him onto the bridge gang. That’s what we were
living
on and I used the fifteen and started taking a cosmetology course. So,
I
finished that and I worked at Martins and I got pregnant. About the
time I got
the job I was pregnant, I couldn’t work over the…they thought I ought
to sit
around more so, they put me on the manicure table and I couldn’t stand
the
smell of the stuff, it made me sick so I had to quit. A friend of mine The state board was on for the next year
and
I didn’t go get it because I didn’t have the money to pay my way to
Austin, so
I didn’t get my certificate or my license. Later on I had a friend that
said
she would have helped me because she was a state examiner and she would
have
helped me get my license if I had only told her about it.
Then he got laid off from the bridge gang and Leon
was born and he didn’t have a job. Then he came in one night and said
he had a
job for fifty cents an hour cutting up gondolas. They were sent to
Japan. and
came back to us as bullets.
Leon:
We knew that at the
time.
Eva:
What are gondolas?
Margaret:
It’s kinda like a
coal car.
Leon:
It was a steel car.
Y’know we talked about this, about the war coming up. We all knew it
and so
eventually the Japs….
Eva:
When was this?
Margaret:
1936, no 1935, so,
we had our first Christmas with Leon, Jr. in our new apartment. We got
an
upstairs apartment over a grocery store, and then he came home and said
he got
another job and he went back as a machinist and he was getting 86 cents
an
hour.
Leon: That
was the wage at
that time. It sounds awfully small, but that was the standard wage for
this
work as a machinist.
Margaret:
And then we saved a
little money and made another move and moved out close to the shops and
when
the five minute whistle blew he left the house and went over and
clocked in. We
stayed there 'til Leon was about 16 or 17 months old. We left him with
his grandmother
and we took a trip down to Mexico City and Veracruz and we were on our
way to
Guatemala and we had to wait for the train, but when the train came in
from
Guatemala, the people looked so haggard from the heat, cuz this was in
July and
it’s hot down there. (laughter)
Eva:
Was this a delayed
honeymoon?
Margaret:
No, we were with
Elmer and Clara Hatfield. They were living downstairs in this house by
the
shops and we were living upstairs. It was just a vacation. Leon was a
year old
when we went to Mexico. By July we bought a house on Luna Street, and
that
house we paid $1800 for with $200 down and the payment was $20 a month.
We paid
that out and sold it for $6,205 (10 years later).
Leon:
We found out a way
to make money even when you’re sick (laughter)
Margaret:
We began to save up
money and bought a Model A Ford for $100. But,
in 1937 we sold that and bought a 1937 Chevrolet, but we drove that
'til it
fell apart, almost, in fact we put it in a garage one time and we
didn't have
enough money to buy extra anti freeze and that night we had a hard
freeze and
the next morning the freeze plugs were sticking out on a chunk of ice.
Leon: I took that engine out and got
a new engine so we had a car
with a new engine.
Margaret:
We drove that thing
until up to
the 50s and then bought
when we turned that in and bought a 1952 Ford. In the mean time we had
John.
John was born 5 years after Leon was born, then Bill was about 2
½ to 3 years
after that and Jim, 15 months later. When Jim was about 1 ½
years old we bought
a place down on the farm, because all we had was a bedroom, a sleeping
porch
and a basement. Then we bought the house on Glenwood and later on in
1955 we
began to remodel that and put an apartment in the garage and then a
year later
we built a duplex on the lot.
Leon: She got a job and she had
enough money to pay ½ down on
this duplex.
Margaret:
Everything I made,
we saved…
Eva: What kind of job?
Margaret:
Well, I started out
working with Stanley Home Products in 1950. By 55 we had this duplex
built. We
rented that, it paid for itself. The house we lived in, we moved out of
it and
bought a house on Edith and rented the big house on Glenwood and then
we paid
it all off. Paid off the house on Edith and in 1984 bought this house
on
Honolulu. We’ve been here 10 years and this is our 60th anniversary. I
don’t
know whether I could go through all that again. (laughter)
Eva:
What would you say
is the significant landmark in your 60 years together.
Margaret:
Well, one thing was
having the children. We had John and he went to Guatemala on a mission.
Leon
went down to meet him and they toured all around Guatemala.
Leon:
To me that was a
kinda high point. I went down to see him after his mission and he was
not
released yet. They were saving him for a translator. (not only Spanish
but the
native aboriginal language)
Margaret:
They got home and
Leon’s mother was sick in Brownfield and Leon went to Brownfield to see
her. By
the next January she was really in bad shape. She died December the
31st. We
went up there in the snow, it was so deep up there and I was working
with Popular
Dry Goods at that time, and Jim went with us up to Brownfield. (looking
at
Leon, Jr.) You were living in Los Angeles at about that time, John got
off his
mission and went back to BYU. Bill and Jim were going to college and
they
graduated in 62 and 65. I may have all these dates a little bit off.
Then we
started to go and visit grandchildren.
Eva:
How many
grandchildren do you have?
Margaret: At least 14 and I’ve got 4 great grandchildren. Leon, Jr. had a daughter, Dee Anna, and she had a daughter and that is one of the oldest great grandchildren, she’s about 15 now and lives in Spokane, Washington. John got married about a year after he got off his mission and he had seven children, now they’re having children, so that’s where my great grandchildren come in. Leon married Janie and she had two children, Kim and Steve and he had Dee Anna. Now Steve is married and he has two children (plus two later) … counting grandchildren…eight great grandchildren So, we really started something! (laughter)