High School

During my junior and senior year in high school, I worked part time at the Coca Cola bottling plant. Ben Garrison was operating the franchise and I would work six days a week in the summer months and when school was in session, I would skip school on Friday afternoons, and we would bottle on Friday afternoons and Saturdays. I made $2 per day working at the plant and thought I had struck it rich, just to be able to work there part time.

Older brother, Eugene graduated from High School in 1934 and he had lettered every year, both in junior high and high school in football, basketball and track. He was also a good baseball player and while there was no high school baseball team, he did play on the "town team" after he graduated.' He was quite an athlete. I played a couple of years of high school basketball but never spent enough time at it to be too good.

My older sister, Edna graduated in 1936 and while it was not financially feasible for her to attend college, she served an apprenticeship and became a beautician. She later met and married Harrison Perry from Savannah, Tennessee where they later became successful in the furniture business.

My sister, Nina Maude, who is two years older than T, graduated from high school in 1938, She worked for Moore and Henley law firm as a legal secretary for about a year and also as a secretary for the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad. In 1940, she took a Civil Service examination and went to work for the War Department in Washington, D.C., where she later became personal secretary to the Under Secretary of War. Later on she also worked as a personal secretary for Senator Maybank of North Carolina, when he was Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

In 1940, 1 graduated from high school and went to work as a fountain clerk (we called ourselves soda jerkers) for Sims' Drug Store. Since it was not possible for me to attend college, I took some commercial courses in post graduate work the following school term.