Updated June 30, 2010.
Typed from DVD by Sue Fentress Austin in June 2010
Paul: Tell us about the geographical location of where you grew up, of the real early days up Cason’s Point (Pt) Road (Rd) where you grew up.
Nita. I want to say first that this is the very first time in my whole life that I have been able to out talk Paul Brumley, but I’m going to be doing most of the talking today and for good reason. One reason is I’ve got to get him into this world before I can even introduce him because I was in this world a long, long time before Paul so he’s going to have to keep quiet here beside me. Now before I say something about the school systems of North Carolina (NC) I want to say that I have met four people in my life that were responsible for what I have done in education, if you want to put it that way. Without those four people there would have been no way I could have done what I have done. Two of them were my parents, Ed and Minnie Brumley which always backed me up. They meant good in what they did. And the other one was my husband, U. J. Dixon, Sr. He didn’t know anything about Woman’s Lib but he always looked after me, and I owe him a lot of credit for helping me. And another one is Mr. Joseph P. Knapp. I will speak more about him later on but he was very important in my life in growing up. Now first I want to say something about the natural, geographic conditions of Knotts Island (KI) when I was growing up. It was so different from what it is today. Yes, we were on an Island and at that time it was a real Island ‘cause we were isolated, even from the mainland, Currituck. Currituck didn’t know much about KI and KI didn’t know very much about Currituck. There was one time when we always got together and that was when a political campaign thing was going on. Then the people on the mainland found out what KI was and you know we often laughed about it. They found a way to get over to KI and I heard one man say one time they’d find a way each time even if they had to swim across the Currituck Sound.
Paul. Most of the time it was at the Homecoming at the Methodist Church.
Nita. At the Methodist Church, yes.
Paul: That they always came to.
Nita: Yes, they always came. They were always there. They found us at those times. But the other times we had to provide for our own selves. Now when I speak about the natural geographical location that was a big help to the people of KI. Of course we didn’t know it then. But we had some great people to be raised on KI. They were great people to know how to live on an Island that was isolated like it was. And when I say “isolated” now I mean from the lack of transportation and communication. Now I won’t take up those headings today ‘cause it could be a book almost written on them. But we were isolated and we couldn’t run down to a ferry and cross there or get in an automobile and go through Princess Anne County as it was called then. We were really isolated. We had to take care of ourselves. And because of the lack of transportation and communication we had some strong KI people to grow up here . These people learned to care for themselves, and I want to call them great pioneers and they were. Now I want to give you some instances of where those people really cared about their community. We still have evidence of their caring. First they had two churches that were started by the people of KI as early as the 1800s. How could they do that? And the population I don’t know what it was at that time, but there were not many people when we lived over here. That’s evidence of what great people they were. And they loved those churches and the churches made progress. Now I want to say and what I am talking about, big things don’t usually come all of a sudden, all at once. They usually start with little things. And when I think of KI today there is nothing like…
Paul: Now these churches - we had to go to church on Sunday morning at the Baptist Church and then the Methodist Church had their services start at 2 o’clock in the afternoon so that was twice a day on Sunday that we had to go to church back then.
Nita: And a church meant a lot to us too because we loved to go and I may say something about that later on. The people of KI learned to care for themselves and to care for other people. They were great people and cared for other people or we couldn’t have survived KI, because after all, to be cut off from the mainland and from other people, we survived. I think that says a lot about our parents before us. Now, as I said I was going to say something about the schools because that’s what I spent most of my life in either one way of the other, and it was due to these four people that I have just talked about why I was able to spend over half of a century in the school system, either going to school or being in school one way or the other. I’m not going to say it was easy but I spent more than a half a century connected with school. Now I know about the two one-room schools on KI, I know about them. I’ve heard people say. But I’m not going to talk about them because I didn’t go to neither one of those schools. I went up a little step higher when I got ready to go to school. Now when my first year in school my parents lived on what is now known as Cason’s Pt Rd in the old Brumley House. As far as I know it is still owned by Frank Hughes, Jr. Now I’ll let you judge the distance. A little 6 year old girl, walking from that house on Cason’s Pt Rd on down by Mr. John Jones Store, on down the road where the Parsonage, the Methodist Parsonage is today. Now that was the school where I started. And I remember that school and the hill that came down. It seemed like it was up on a hill. I don’t know what’s happened to the hill, everything changes, it’s not there now. But the hill came down to a dirt road and I’ll say something about that later. Most people call that school the three room school so that’s the way I’m going to speak about it. Now my first year in school was in 19 and 19. Now I don’t care if you know how old I am. I’m proud of my age, and when I think of how many of my friends have passed on, I feel like I’ve been left here for something but I don’t know what yet, and until I found out I’m going to keep on going! And I’ve said that, something about that to my daughter the other day and a storm came up, and I ran to her house to get out of the storm and I said to her well I’m here for something but I don’t know what I’m left here for. She said she knew, you’re here to be in my home, to be with me when a storm comes up. So she settled that. Now when I walked from Cason’s Pt Rd please bear in mind there were no hard-surfaced roads on KI. They were dirt roads and sometimes they were very muddy. Now my parents were never able to go to school much. Not a fault of their own. But I think as young parents they were determined that their children were going to have a better chance than they had. And even before I started to school they were talking about what changes can we make so that our children can have a better chance of going to school, something that we missed. They knew how to deal with life though. They knew that they didn’t have a formal education. Well anyway I walked down to the school whenever I could on that dirt road. Now you can guess I didn’t go to school very much. And there was another problem that I had on walking that distance, and it was animals on the road. At that time in my life the animals could run around at free range and they did. Well when I saw a cow or a bunch of cows on the road I was scared to death. And I can remember I would run in the woods, I would go anywhere I could to get around those cows. And I was afraid of them. Yes, I felt like a little ant on the road that was going to be crushed at any time. There I was, alone, and there was no transportation. Once in awhile there was somebody who would pass in a horse and cart and if somebody did, they would ask me to ride. But they had no right, no business to really be on the road for, not like cars are today. So now I walked down the road to the school. Now the one thing that did give me a boast when I was walking that distance was if someone happened to be out in their yard. They’d wave at me and I’d wave back, and if I could get both hands up, I would wave both hands as long as I could see ‘em. I guess it made me feel there was another human being around.
Paul: How many years did you go to that school?
Nita: Five years. I’ll get away from there after awhile.
Paul: Well, you started to school in 1919 didn’t you say?
Nita: 1919. I was 6 years old.
Paul: You went there. The new brick school opened in 1925.
Nita: Yes.
Paul: That’s when you changed and went there.
Nita: Yes. But now I didn’t go to school enough to count the first year I went. I didn’t get a report card. I’ve had people ask me how did your sister younger than you are get in the class with you? Well I didn’t start. We both started together.
Paul: You said something at one time about that bell , that bell.
Nita: Yes, I’m coming to that. I want to bring in that bell. Now as I’ve said, the people helped me a great deal by waving at me. They never knew they did, but they did. But anyway, back home my parents were still talking. What can we do ? We’ve got to make a change. No transportation and I don’t know how they did it. But through some way, I can’t say they bought the place. But they handled it in such a way that my parents were able to move from Cason’s Pt Rd from the old Brumley House there to what is now Brumley Road. And they moved before school was out the first year I was in school. How happy they were that they could send their children to school. Yes, we walked to school and walked to church, but it was a walk that we could live with, we could get along with and in fact, we had a nice little path through the woods that we didn’t even have to go around by where Mr. Eddie Munden’s Store is now, by Mr. Floyd Williams who had a saw mill there. We could stand that walk. Our parents were so proud that they could send their children to school, in other words, how more of an advantage than they had had. As I said, it was something we could live with. When you put a bunch of children together, hundreds of things are going to happen. I can’t go into all those details, but I want to mention new things that I remember at the old three teacher school where the Parsonage is now. One thing when Adell and I started the next year, we both started together and we were put in what was called the “bell room” in the three teacher school where the Parsonage is located now. And there is one thing I can remember about that “bell room”. There was a tower thing up in the top and up in there was a bell and to ring that bell, no electric bells, to ring that bell you pulled a rope. So ever who rang that bell pulled the rope and rang the bell. And I always thought that was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard in my life. It was just music to my ears. And I was told that that bell was the result of the kind and dedicated work of Mrs. Vandelia Bonney. She was a neighbor of my family. I was told that she walked from house to house to collect money to buy that bell, another showing of how much people of KI cared at that time. She got the money, I don’t know how much it cost, and the bell was used there at the old school until it….
Paul: She lived there at what is now Martin’s Farm.
Nita: Yes, that’s right.
Paul: That was Mr. Ferd Bonney’s , his farm.
Nita: Yes, you know more about that. Well, anyway Mrs. Vandelia got the bell as I say. Now there’s another thing that I want to remember, that I want to speak of about at the old three teacher school. You can call it anything you want to, but to me it was like a picnic that we had every day when the weather permitted. We took our lunches from home, biscuit sandwiches. I didn’t know anything about loaf bread. We had our biscuit sandwiches and when the lunch period came when the weather permitted, a bunch of us would go out under, what I want to call, the “picnic tree”. And there we had our lunches. We sat around and like a bunch of kids would do, we’d talk and we’d socialize and we did all the things children do. And we had, and it was more enjoyable than the best restaurants that you could go to now.
Paul: Who was some of the people that you went to school with in that old schoolhouse? What were their names over there?
Nita: Better not ask me too many names right off the bat. Bad now, my brain doesn’t work. Meriam Waterman, Lucille Bonney, Harold Jones, Melford Grimstead, and some of them that have passed on, I hadn’t thought about that, so my mind works that way, and I’m not going to try and name too many. I might name the wrong person. Anyway, we went to the picnic lunch under that old tree, and as I say you’d be surprised at how we looked forward to that. We didn’t have a chance to go to a restaurant, didn’t have any McDonald’s, or anything like that. So we enjoyed it. There’s another thing I want to speak of, which I say, I can’t talk about all of ‘em. But at that time we didn’t have playground equipment, but don’t you think we didn’t have games that we could play. We engineered our own games! We thought up our own games where we could have a good time. And one thing that I used to enjoy doing, as I say where the Parsonage was, the school seemed to be up on a hill, and it went down, into a dirt road. Well a bunch of us would get together in front of that school and somebody would say, “One, Two Three, Go!” and running just as hard as we could and running to when we got to a place the hill went down into the road, we’d jump and see how far we could jump. And then we’d get down into the road and discuss it….Well Vivian you did a little bit better – I’m going to beat you the next time and we’d sorta talk to our friends like that. And then if we had time we’d jump and we’d run back and form it again and do the same thing over again, beat our friends. One thing I especially remember, my mother got so she wouldn’t buy clothes for Adell and myself , unless she could get two thing just alike because we fussed over them . If there was one blue sweater, we both wanted it. So she settled that in a hurry. Shoes too. Well, I went home one time – most of the time we only had one pair of shoes. I went home one afternoon after school with my shoe sole flapping. Well, we didn’t get a new pair of shoes when the soles got to flapping. My daddy went out to the store, he bought a piece of leather, called a sheet of leather. But anyway he brought it home ‘cause I needed my shoes the next day. And he put the shoe down on the leather and took a pencil and drew around it. And then he had what he called a shoe lasp and he put my old shoe on the shoe lasp, fastened the sole and he called it half-soling and he put a new sole on the shoe. So he was kind of fussing at me as to why I wore my shoes out. He said Adell’s shoes weren’t that bad and wondered why you always wear yours out. So she came right up with an answer- says I know, she jumps too much. So that was settled ‘cause Adell, my sister, was a different type of person from what I was. I was a tomboy and would go out on a limb and she was kind of quiet and it was just her way of doing it. So she knew why my shoes were torn up but my daddy half-soled them. And I don’t know how many more times he had that to do. But anyway, he did them. Now I want to say ‘cause I’m more of less giving some topic subjects that happened in my life . I want to say something about a friend, a wealthy man that we had that came down to KI and bought some property around 19 hundred and 18. He was a God-send and blessing to KI. He not only was a wealthy man but he had an understanding and caring attitude for other people. He seemed to care for people less fortunate than he was. And he was a person who wanted to do things for people less fortunate than he. And he, as I think of him, he was a God-sent blessing. He did a lot for KI as I will say later on. I want you to understand, I know that he did a lot for the mainland too. But I really, I have always thought that Mr. Knapp had a soft spot in his heart for KI. When he came down here and he saw the Island people doing the best we can and getting along, he seemed to want to do something for us. Maybe he felt a little bit sorry for us. But anyway, as I say I’m skipping a lot of calendar time here. As a result of his understanding, and his caring attitude, we were able to move into a, what I would say, a wonderful school in 19 and 25. We left the one where it was close to the Methodist Church and we moved to our new school. Now I tell you I don’t know how we felt, we just didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Well we were not used to bathrooms in the school. We didn’t have to run across the dirt road anymore. We were not used to lights on a dark day in the classroom. We were not used to classrooms being heated by a radiator, a heated radiator. The old, big old heater was not in the middle of the classroom anymore. Well I guess we felt like we were in Buckingham Palace or somewhere. We were just completely lost at first. It was just such a wonderful, wonderful place to be. Now you may not be able to understand that, but we did. And I want to say about myself and I think I can say it about most of my classmates, we were so happy to get to that school of a morning. It was so different from our homes. We loved our homes but our homes didn’t have all those things in it. And it was so comfortable in the school that we were glad to get there in the morning and I’m going to say that sometimes we hated to leave that nice warm school and go to our own homes in the afternoon.
Paul: Do you remember when people used to send their potted plants out to the school for the winter months ‘cause they’d freeze at home?
Nita: Yes, that’s right.
Paul: We’d keep them through the winter in our classrooms.
Nita: That’s right. Paul knows more about the KI School than I did because I’m gonna get after awhile to leave there when I got to the 7th. And I went there sometime in the 5th grade. So Paul started his schooling at KI. And he really reaped more of the benefits because Mr. Knapp added things to the school and I haven’t gotten Paul into the world yet. But anyhow, he benefited by the KI School. Yes, the plants did come and the short time I was there that did happen. Now I want to say one thing about the principal of the KI School. What a wonderful person she was , but she was really criticized and put down. I know why now but I didn’t know then. She was not only the principal of the KI School when we moved there and I was in the 5th grade, she was the principal, she was a teacher, and she had more than one grade in her room. And she was also the cook. Now she was the – started the first hot lunch that KI School ever had. I don’t know how she managed it but she put on a pot of soup sometime during the night or early the next morning and I remember one special time that was called Hungarian-Potato Soup. Well, when time for school to take in, that soup was on the stove. As I said, I don’t know when she fixed it, but she did all that herself. And when just before school called in, she’d go and turn the heat down real low. Now the soup wouldn’t boil, wouldn’t even simmer when she turned it down. Didn’t even stick to the pot because the heat was so low. And when school called in, she’d appoint a girl, sometimes I would and I loved to do it, for maybe a week or two weeks to go and stir the soup awhile. All she’d do was point at you and at the door. She wouldn’t interrupt the class. You’d get up and go out and stir the soup in the pot and then you’d slip back into the room. No disturbance whatsoever. Well I know now what she was trying to do. She was trying to tell, to teach us. She was so ahead of herself in her methods of teaching that it’s not even funny. She was trying to teach us to like food that was good for us and to learn to eat some things. You know you get used to certain foods and you’re not used to certain other foods that are good for you. She was trying to teach that lesson. This Hungarian-Potato Soup I liked it a whole lot. That was not our full lunch. Remember we were taking our lunches from home, our biscuit sandwich even when we went to the brick school. That bowl of soup, that little bowl of soup was an addition to our lunch. Well at lunchtime you were served that little bowl of soup. Now after a little while she walked around with a little pad, and I don’t know how she checked us but to see how you were liking your soup or not. Well I liked it but we did have one boy in the class that did not like Hungarian-Potato Soup. And one day he had been, we knew what he was doing, the students did. So when he’d catch her not looking, he’d dump it in his friend’s bowl sitting next to him. But this particular day, for some reason Miss Steele was coming down with her little pad, getting close to him, his little bowl was still filled with soup. And you know he got real sick and I mean he was sick, the soup went all over the desk and he bent down, his tongue hanging out. So when she got to him she hoped so much he’d feel better and that kind of thing. When she turned around to go the Coatroom to get some cloths to take care of his being sick, he jumped up and made some funny little faces like little boys will do sometimes. And I tell you the truth, some of us had to put our hands over our mouths, to keep from her knowing what was going on. But anyway, she got him straightened out and things passed on.
Paul: Did she ever find out?
Nita: No, she never found it out. But we didn’t tell on each other. We didn’t tell on that boy. I would call his name, but he’s passed on now. His family might not want me to say something like that. But I’ve laughed about it so many times. Now another thing is that she was greatly criticized about her advanced teaching. I don’t know how she got so advanced in her teaching , but she was. Now for instance I want to give one example of one thing she was criticized so much for and yet it was advanced teaching, good for children but we didn’t know it and I didn’t either. We had taken our body parts, our hearts, and lungs from our health books and studied it from the book, health lessons. She was a good teacher of health, how our hearts worked, our lungs worked, how we should take care of them, how we should rest our bodies, all that kind of stuff. But she went further than that. There was a Mr. Jones who lived close to the school…
Paul: Walter Jones
Nita: Yes, Walter Jones, he was the one who was having the hog killing. Well, she had spoken to him about getting some of the heart, lungs or “lites” as people on KI called them at that time, to help her in her work at school. He was glad to give them to her. So she sent a big pan over to his house one of the days he was killing hogs and the student brought the hog parts back. In the meantime she cleaned off the table in the classroom and put some paper on it to keep it nice and clean. When they came she poured the hog parts on the middle of the table and then she told us, the students, to get around the table, it was kind of a long table, and to stand in a position where we could see the hog parts. Well, we did. But you know we started acting up right away – I was one of them. I was doing my part of it. My sister was not, but I was always in on it. Anyway, we ah’d, we oh’d like we were sick. But we did it in such a way that we wanted to be sure she didn’t see us. But that was the way we were acting up. But it was one boy who was standing kind of “side” of her, like I’m “side” of Paul. He would look at the stuff on the table and he got very sick and he got so sick that his tongue was not only hanging out but he made a little noise. And when he made a little noise, she sort of turned around and he was not expecting that . And he was caught in the act. Well she was kind of quick and she knew by the way he looked that he was not sick so she just did that (Nita reaches over with her hand and lightly taps Paul’s cheek). And when she did, she left some blood and some stuff from her hand, not his blood now, but it came from the heart. And you know that boy got well right then! He was a well boy. And I did too and all the rest. We got well right away and we started paying attention to the lesson that she was trying to teach. When children, when we would go home, a lot of times our parents would say what did you learn at school? What did you do at school? Well when we started talking some of the parents were angry. They said we sent our children to learn, we don’t send them there to take part in a hog killing, they do that at home. What’s wrong with that teacher? Well now I understand, when right today that is one of the methods of teaching. It is one of the best, that you can’t always do it, but if you can bring in the real thing and have children to participate in the real thing than you can teach things that you can’t teach from a book. It’s such an outstanding method today that a lot of our museums have created places that children can go to put their hands on things and handle things. How did she get so advanced in her teaching? It’s beyond me. Well the parents, they were kind of fed up with that teacher. Another thing that she did – we had a little garden at school and we studied plants and how plants were fed and why we had to keep weeds out and all this kind of stuff that goes along. She was teaching a lesson, not just having a little garden. But anyway some of the parents were angry about that. They could do the chopping with the hoe in the field, helping to weed the corn, out in the parent’s garden. They didn’t have to do that at school. What was wrong with that teacher?
Paul: Yes, we had to go out and weed corn, by hand.
Nita: Yes, and you know that hoe that Mr. Bonney gave you, ‘cause you said you weren’t going to be a farmer?
Paul: Yeah, I’ve heard about it.
Nita: And he was coming over to our house and brought you a little hoe. The real joke was Paul was never going to be a farmer! And he wouldn’t do it if he could get out of it either! But anyway, Mr. Ferd Bonney gave him a little hoe – well the blade was not very thick, been worn and used and used, but Mr. Bonney gave it to him. Said, “Paul, now this is yours, want you to go to work and keep that hoe bright and shiny.” Well it went on for some time and Paul put his hoe underneath the house and that’s where it stayed. But anyway sometime, I don’t know how late it was, Mr. Ferd Bonney was coming over to our house, something about farming. Well Paul heard Mama and Papa talking about Mr. Ferd Bonney coming . He almost tore the doors off the hinges to get outside to get his hoe. Well he got his hoe and a piece of brickbat and he went to work. When Mr. Ferd Bonney came that hoe was bright and shiny. But it weren’t from working his garden! You remember that?
Paul: No, I don’t remember that.
Nita: You did it.
Paul: I’ve heard you tell it.
Nita: Yes, that’s the way Paul was. Anyway, about Miss Steele, and hands-on-teaching. I will come back to that after awhile, what I found out about here later on. Now, yes, I’m going to put the cart before the horse a little bit. But I want to take up something about continuing education at KI. Now as I say, mama and my father it is not a fault of theirs, they never could go to school much, bad weather and then just those two one-room schools. And another thing you take for instance, my father, he happened to be the man of the house you might say at a very early age. I think it was around 7 years of age. His father died mighty young and my grandmother after her husband died, she had a family and my father was the only son. And there was six girls and some of the girls had grown up and were married but my father was around 7 years old. By the time he was about 8 years old my grandmother was sending him across the field from Cason’s Pt Road to work at a club. You might say what could a little boy do at a club like that. Well there were a lot of things a young child could do. He could wipe the mud off the sportsman’s boots when they came in, he could clean up the clothes they wore on the Bay that day, the raincoats and so forth and hang them up for the next day, he could scrub the little deck places off where they had left their boots and that kind of thing. And my father could help to get the water or bail out the boats, a lot of things.
Paul: Wasn’t that old clubhouse over on the beach? Across the bay?
Nita: As far as I know it was a farm or a clubhouse where Currituck Hunt Club was later. Uncle John was supervisor there and just imagine, though, an 8 year old boy having to go out and work like that. While I am on that, I want to say that my father used to say when he came home with his money he felt kind of rich I guess. He said he’d come in, give it to his mother, and to help her ‘cause her husband was dead. She had no child support, how did they do it, I don’t know. But she did it and others in the community did the same thing. I tell you we had some strong pioneers living on KI. Well anyway, he said his mother would give him two or three pennies and he’d go out to Mr. Jones’s Store to get him some candy like he liked. And he felt so proud of himself to go and be able to pick out his pieces of candy. And at that time a penny for a piece was a lot bigger than today’s. And that’s how my father lived. He didn’t go to school. You asked me how he learned to read – I don’t know. And I want to tell you one thing when we brought books home from school, especially his books (indicates Paul) he was grabbing and going through them ‘cause he never had a whole lot of books to study. And I know he’d read a history book and then he’d want to talk about it. Well I didn’t know they ever had a Civil War or what kind of war at that time, I didn’t remember I’d had it in school and I’d slip out the room when he started talking. But he could read and he could remember what he read.
Paul: I used to get him to read the books for me and I’d get him to tell me the story and I’d make a report on that.
Nita: I asked him one time, how did you ever learn to read? He said when I didn’t know a word my Mom would tell me. I don’t know how. But I might say another thing about him while I am talking about him. When he was working at the clubhouse, I don’t know when it was built, I think it was where the Currituck Clubhouse was built after awhile. But anyway, there was a club man from New York, that wanted to take him, our father, home with him. And in other words, he said he’d send him to school and do a good part by him. And he contacts my grandmother and no, she couldn’t let her child go and she said she might never see him, her son, anymore. She raised him the best way she could and that’s what she did. And I think now, she was not going to give up her only boy to go to New York. Yes, she might never see him again. It might have meant a lot to my father. I admire my grandmother being that way. Yes, she raised him and did the best she could. Putting the cart before the horse and got off on this. I want to say something about continuing education on KI.
Gary: Might be a good time to wait until the next session, take a break.
Now it is another day, another session between Paul Brumley and his sister, Nita Brumley Dixon.
Paul: Today we want to talk about requests for anyone who has pictures of the old KI School the old wooden school and the new school when it was first built. You want to take it up from there?
Nita: Yes, I didn’t request that before, but anybody that can give me the date of the first year that the old school was occupied I would appreciate that. I haven’t been able to find that out. And if anybody has a picture of that three room school that was built where the Parsonage was, I’d like to have copies of the picture if you would. Now there was one other thing that I skipped in my last visit here that I do want to mention. I talked about that old bell that was put in the three room school, the “bell room” where my sister and I started the 1st grade. I told you about the bell. Now I forgot to tell you that that bell was moved to the KI brick school in 19 and 25 and I wonder whatever happened to that bell? Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody could find that old bell in the attic or down in the basement . I hope somebody can. Where can it be? Let’s see if we can find that old bell. I do know that it was moved there. And I wanted to make those requests. Now the last time we were here, Paul said something about the two churches. Well I told him I was going to talk about the educational system but anyhow the stories that I want to tell about, a preacher we had on KI. Now this preacher – I copied these dates down from a bulletin. I usually just give you things that I remember but I do think these dates are right, from a church bulletin. I have that this preacher was over here in 19 and 24 and 19 and 27 and he hurt a leg and was gone for awhile. He came back in 1932 and 1936. Now everybody just loved that man. And if you were to see him, he was a huge man and he was the very picture of health. And of course at that time he was young, and he was a good preacher too. Now he had other churches other than KI. Now one day he was over here, coming through what they called the “cut through” then. It’s a hard surfaced road now, but it went by where the KI Post Office is, back of the church. And he came across a man trying to walk down the road and the man was zigzagging. So Preacher Harrell stopped and asked him to ride with him. The man wouldn’t do it. No, he didn’t want to ride with the Preacher. So anyway, Preacher Harrell wouldn’t leave him. I guess he thought of the Good Samaritan. He got out of his car, and being the man he was, and he wasn’t zigzagging, the Preacher wasn’t. He put him in his car and took him home. He knew the man and knew where he lived. Well when they got home, the man wouldn’t get out of his car. So Preacher Harrell went up and talked with the man’s wife and we don’t know what he said to her. And then he went back out to the car and he got, I’m going to call him the zigzag man, I won’t call his name. He went out to his car and took the man out of his car. He took him into the house and he took him and put him to bed. And when Preacher Harrell left there he knew that the man was safe in bed. He didn’t leave him on the road to be hurt. Well KI was a mighty small place at that time and I don’t know how there was so much gossip but there was. Somehow or other news would get around, get around, get around and this thing did. And somebody went to Preacher Harrell and told him, says that there are people talking about you on KI, riding around with the zigzag man, only they called his name. And Preacher Harrell asked him some questions about it and they talked about it. Anyway, the next time Preacher Harrell was over to KI Methodist Church he got up in the pulpit to deliver his sermon and he told what he had done. He didn’t call the man’s name but he told what he had done. And he says, now I guess I am like the weather, I don’t care about criticism, I know what I did. I have no apologies to make whatsoever and says I’ll tell you one thing if I find anybody else zigzagging on these roads like I came up on with this man, I’m going to do the same thing so watch out for me. So after that the story goes that sometimes they’d get kinda zigzaggy around the country store and they’d want to go home and they’d say to each other have you seen the preacher? Somebody would say yes, he went down the south end and they’d sit around the store ‘til they saw Preacher Harrell’s car leave the Island and then they’d start home. But the point I want to bring out is that Preacher Harrell taught a wonderful lesson there without a sermon. He did it by his own acts in life. And I guess that helps a lot of people on KI because they knew Preacher Harrell would do exactly what he said he would and that he was man enough to do it. And they trusted Preacher Harrell . And I want to say that this zigzag man after that, he loved Preacher Harrell for some reason. You’d better not say anything about Preacher Harrell around the zigzag man ‘cause he’d take it up. And when Paul said that I just couldn’t resist telling you that story of the Preacher ‘cause everybody did love him. I was just a child and a teenager but I do remember him.
Paul: Well when Roy White and I were talking we were talking about the pond that used to be in our front yard and I can remember as a little boy having a boat and Preacher Harrell would come up and visit. And I would shove the boat on the opposite side of the pond and Preacher Harrell had a rope that he’d tie to his automobile and he’d pull me across that pond with his automobile. I guess that is why I remember Preacher Harrell.
Nita: Well he took a lot of time with people, he cared for people and that was a great asset that he had. And he did get hurt, crippled himself, but people really did appreciate him and they loved him. Now I’ll go back to education on KI. Now first I want to talk about the continuing education on KI. The first people that we had to leave KI to further their education, I want to speak about them first. Now I can’t tell you just where the break came in these two teacher schools – I didn’t go to neither one of them. I started to the three teacher school but anyway we did have a few people who left KI to continue their education. And I don’t think it was very founded on grades, it was the material they had to use I suppose. And now we’ve finished with you and you don’t need to come back next year. Well some of the parents could afford to send their children somewhere else, but you know not many people could do that. But I do want to mention a few of the people that did continue their education. One of them was Mrs. Pauline White Munden and another one was Mrs. Belle Simpson Cullipher. Also Mamie. Pauline was sent to Poplar Branch and boarded at Poplar Branch, at a home down there.
Paul: I think her sister, Edith, went down there also, didn’t she?
Nita: Yes, I think she did too. And Belle Simpson Cullipher, her parents boarded her at Oceana. She had relatives there. Mamie Waterfield Harris - I don’t know where her parents boarded her, but away. Now there were others, but I want to mention those three people because I knew all three of them. Mrs. Pauline, of course, lived close to where I lived. Her husband kept a store. I had the good fortune of working with Belle and Mamie at Creeds School for just awhile and it was wonderful to work with those people. Both Belle and Mamie cared about every child in their room. Every child they were interested in. And they were very dedicated teachers. And now one thing that I would like to say and that was a sad thing to me, for the parents to have to give up their children and send them somewhere else, board them in another home, away from them, and it was bad for the children too. And they were young at that time and I’m going to call them children. I expect there were tears at night when they were in bed. They couldn’t come back to KI very often because of a lack of transportation. So they were there and had to stay in order to continue their education. Now that was the first step as I have said before. Most things in life come step by step by step. A big leap and you are there, but most don’t come in leaps, leaping you are there, but this was not the way in the beginning. Now the next group of children on KI to think about education went in an old automobile and I’ve heard it called the Old Ford. There were five of those children that went in this automobile to Creeds School. That was a step up ‘cause they could come home at night. But remember that group went on a dirt road. The old Creeds School that I speak about is not the one now. It was an old school near what is called the Creeds Market. There were five of them. Now you think they must have left home very early and got home late. It was a full day to go to Creeds School and back, over that dirt road and back in the old Ford. You can imagine sometimes the road was muddy and in my mind, they had to shove that car sometimes! They were due a lot of credit. Now the next group of children who furthered their education from KI did have a small bus. I don’t know how many children went on this bus but you see, they were going up. Another step up. They had a bus. This bus was paid for and furnished by Currituck County. It was a bus, it didn’t have a heater, but the worse part about it , I’m going to call it an automatic start on the inside. Mechanics might not call it that. But you had to get out, in the front of the bus, and crank it and crank it . You had to crank it fast enough for it to start. Well the bus driver had a lot of trouble keeping the old bus cranked up and keep that bus running. I don’t know how long that bus did run. But that’s the kind of bus we had to start out with.
Gary: What year was this bus?
Nita: The first bus? I don’t know. I don’t know what year that was. Now I do know the next bus that came on, came on in 19 hundred and 28. Because the next group to continue their education, I was in. So that bus ran until the year of 1927. Our bus was new that year I think. It wasn’t new, but it hadn’t been on KI before. And this bus that I rode did have a starter on the inside but didn’t have a heater. My age group children hated to leave the KI School. As I have told in my other talk, it was a wonderful place to be. The heat, had running water, and all those things that had been put there as the result of Mr. Knapp’s efforts. And we realized it was good. At the end of the 7th grade, my group went there since the 5th grade, at the end of the 7th, we couldn’t go there anymore because they didn’t have high school. So we had to leave KI School and believe me we hated to leave. We hated to leave very much because it was so nice. I want to say when it came time for my group of children to leave the KI School, we were heart-broken almost. We had enjoyed that school so much, sooo much! I want to say that this bus did not go except on the main drag of KI. If you lived on a back road, then you had to walk out to a certain place to meet the bus. Well my group, my neighborhood met at Mr. Eddie Munden’s Store. Now I lived on Brumley Road but then it was a little narrow road that was a dirt road and very muddy. But we went out to Mr. Eddie Munden’s Store and I want to say a word about Mr. Eddie Munden. He was a typical KI – I’m going to call him a pioneer, anything that I want to call him. He was a wonderful person. He was a typical KI man. When we walked out Brumley Rd and some of the students that walked from other places on cold winter mornings, when we got to his store sometimes we had damp feet. And we were cold. When we walked in that store, Mr. Munden had his old heater fired up, plenty of heat for us. And he had enough space, sitting down places around that old heater so we could go sit down. He took care of us. Now Mr. Munden didn’t do it because of the money spent there because we didn’t have any money in our pockets, just a biscuit sandwich. We didn’t have money. He just loved us and took care of us. And I guess we thought of him as a big daddy. Now I do want to say that during that first year of school something happened to Adell, my sister and myself. We got a great big Christmas present the other children didn’t get. Well, when I got up one morning to go get the bus, walk out to the store and go to Creeds School, there was something going on around my house like it never had gone on before. Well I’ll tell you right now I found my daddy in the kitchen, around the stove. I began to wonder. We would starve to death if my daddy had had to cook for us. He couldn’t cook and he was all thumbs around the stove. The only thing he could do in the kitchen was make a pot of coffee. It seemed like his motive that morning was to get us children out of that house and get us off to school. I guess maybe he got together something to eat but I don’t remember, I don’t remember that. But I just knew there was a lot of commotion around that house that morning. And he…..the bus might leave you, let’s get going, time to go, to go! That seemed to be his motive. Well we got out the house and one thing, my mother didn’t go to the kitchen that morning. But my daddy did. Well he got us all out the house and my sister and I were very confused girls. I tell you we were. We walked out to Mr Ed Munden’s Store to meet that bus. And then we had to take that bus over that dirt road to go to old Creeds School and I must say both of us were very upset and confused as to what was going on around our home that morning. Well we went to school and we were confused girls all day long . We didn’t tell our classmates we were confused but we talked to each other. And when the bell rang that day for us to leave Creeds School to go to KI, Adell and I were ready to go. We had our stuff together and we almost ran to the bus, both of us together to get on the bus and head for KI. Well that was the longest day at school I’ve ever spent in my life. And that was the longest ride home that I’ve ever taken. Well I was so anxious to get to Eddie Munden’s Store so I could get off that bus and run up what is Brumley Rd to my home. But you know, something happened. We didn’t make it to Mr. Ed Munden’s Store. It was an odd thing about KI . We couldn’t run to a telephone ‘cause we didn’t have them. But there was one thing about KI that I can’t figure out, when a neighbor needed help somehow or other the neighbor always knew it. The word got around someway or other. Well before Adell and I got to Mr. Ed Munden’s Store that day, a neighbor stopped the bus and wanted Nita and Adell. Well we got off the bus with the neighbor. She took us home with her. She gave us something to eat and she took care of us, just as nice and kind to us as she could be until it was time for us to go home. So we went. And when we got there, Adell and I, and this was just before Christmas and we talked about it on the bus about what we were going to do during Christmas vacation. We had also talked about how much we were going to miss that wonderful party at the brick school, the Knapp Party, with all that big Christmas Tree and all those boxes all tied up that Knapp had . Well children would say, what is she talking about? We get plenty of boxes like that at Christmas now. Yes, they do now but we didn’t then. And we were missing all that – we talked about all that . But somehow or other that day our minds got away from all that. And when we got home that day we found a baby and it wasn’t a doll baby, It was a squirmy, wormy baby, grunting and with a fat, red face. (Nita points to Paul!) He won’t own up to it but he was the one, sitting right here.
Paul: That’s been a long time ago.
Nita: Yeah, but he tries to tell me and I shut him up about it , about how old he’s getting to be. Well I know he’s not very old, but that’s what we found when we got home. And you know that was our Christmas present because that Christmas I cannot remember one thing that happened. He was born about a week before Christmas, just as we were getting out for our Christmas vacation in a couple days. And I can’t remember one thing that happened around our house except that new baby around there. And we didn’t realize it . Adell and I didn’t realize how much that baby was going to change our way of life. But I tell you one thing, it did change our way of life. And in a few years we started finding out about it.
Paul: Right on up until now!
Nita: Yes, right on up until now. Now in talking about Eddie Munden being so kind to people, I want to go back. Now I just got him (points to Paul) into the world, just been born, he’s got a long time to live, but you know he loved Mr. Eddie Munden too. I went to his house the other day and he had something hanging on his wall, will you tell them something about that?
Paul: Well after Mr. Munden died, I was closely associated with Pauline, his wife, and I wanted something that belonged to Eddie Munden and I asked her for it. So she gave me Eddie Munden’s pipe, he used to smoke a pipe. And he finally quit smoking cigarettes I think, but anyhow he went to the pipe and I have got the pipe mounted on a board, hanging in my Den of Eddie Munden’s pipe he used to smoke back there when I was a little boy. I guess I was in my teens then. But anyhow it was Eddie Munden’s pipe. And I really appreciated it and enjoy looking at it because as Nita says I liked Eddie Munden. He was a fine fellow.
Nita: Well I wanted to bring out the point here of what good people we had on KI. I want to say, too, about meeting in Mr. Eddie Munden’s Store, us kids sitting around that heater, I have got to say something nice about children ‘cause anytime you have a group of children together, that don’t cause trouble – well in the four years that I met the bus at Mr. Eddie Munden’s Store, and got off in the afternoon to go home, do you know I never remember one child misbehaving. Now I think that’s a good thing to say about children. We didn’t misbehave, we loved Mr. Eddie Munden. And I wanted to bring out that point, about another generation (pointing to Paul), that had love for Mr. Eddie Munden. It was not just in my age group children, but it went clear down to him.
Paul: It was all that ever knew him.
Nita: That’s right. He was a typical, good KI person. We had others, but I wanted to mention him because it lasted so long.
Paul: And also, Eddie was in a position, he could help more people than the average person could.
Nita: And he was willing to do it. That made the difference, he was willing to do it. He was a great KI man. We had a lot of forefathers that I want to say good things about, we had a lot who had helped to make KI for some of the things that you people out there are enjoying today. They suffered, they went through it, to get it what it is today. And Mr. Ed Munden certainly did do his part.