THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE KNOXVILLE AN INTERVIEW WITH JIMMY GENTRY FOR THE VETERANS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WAR AND SOCIETY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY INTERVIEW BY G. KURT PIEHLER AND KELLY HAMMOND FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE JULY 22, 2000 TRANSCRIPT BY KELLY HAMMOND REVIEWED BY PATRICK LEVERTON GREGORY KUPSKY KURT PIEHLER: This begins an interview with Jimmy Gentry in Franklin, Tennessee on July 22, 2000 with Kurt Piehler and … KELLY HAMMOND: Kelly Hammond. PIEHLER: I guess I’d like to ask you a very basic question. When were you born, and where were you born? JIMMY GENTRY: I was born right here. Not in town; just out of Franklin, in what is now called Wyatt Hall. My family rented that house. I was there, but I don’t remember. (Laughs) So I was born right here. PIEHLER: What date were your born? GENTRY: Uh, November 28, 1924 or 5. Don’t ask me those questions like that. (Laughter) ’25, I believe, ‘cause I’ll soon be seventy-five. That must be right. PIEHLER: And you are native of Franklin. GENTRY: I really am. I have lived in Franklin, outside of Franklin, which is now in Franklin, and now I am back outside of Franklin. But Franklin is my home base, yes. PIEHLER: And could you maybe talk a little bit about your parents first? I guess, beginning with your father? GENTRY: Alright. My father originally came from North Carolina. Marshall, North Carolina, as I recall, near Asheville, and then he worked first for the railroad company for a short time. Then he went with South Central Bell—at that time it was called the Bell Telephone System before they broke it up into sections—and came here and worked from down in Alabama to Nashville, putting up pole lines. [He] met my mother at Neapolis, which is between Franklin and Columbia, just south of Spring Hill…. And so, since that time, they married, and so we have lived in this area the rest of the time. I have nine brothers and sisters, and all of us are living but one. I had a brother that was killed in Italy during World War II, the one just above me, two years older than myself. So, that’s all he did, all his life, is work for the telephone company. My mother, of course, was a housewife. PIEHLER: It sounds like that was a pretty good job to have. GENTRY: Oh yeah, I think so. The benefits from—Bell Telephone Company was generous with their benefits for my mother after his death, so I think it was a good one. Then my brother also, one of my older brothers, spent the rest of his life working for the telephone company. He now has retired, and … one of his sons is with the telephone company, so it gets into a family. PIEHLER: That’s three generations. GENTRY: Uh huh. PIEHLER: I guess now with Bell South. GENTRY: That’s right. (Laughs) PIEHLER: Because in other words, your father worked during the Great Depression. GENTRY: Oh yeah, sure. I can just remember it. I can remember people—I didn’t understand it at the time—bringing food to our house. They were friends of my father, and I didn’t quite understand why they were doing that, but I sure did enjoy it. (Laughs) But we all had a hard time. The thing I remember more about that period of time, being so young, was that one time we lived near a railroad, and the hobos would come up to our house and knock on the door, and my mother would go back, and they would say they wanted to something to eat. She would say, “Well, if you split some wood for me, while you are doing that, I’ll fix you something to eat.” And I was afraid of them, because they were hobos. I didn’t know what it meant exactly, but they were hobos. The word hobo scared me, I think, and I would peep out to see what they were doing, and then finally she would feed them and thank them, and they would leave. And we had that happen frequently. We found out later that they had tied a cloth in a tree at the back of our house by the railroad tracks, so the other hobos would know this was a good place to stop. (Laughs) HAMMOND: Wow! PIEHLER: So this was a pretty regular occurrence, growing up? GENTRY: Oh yeah. On sure. Yeah. You had lots of people—of course, they didn’t have welfare back then, like we do now, and usually people would take care of the other people around them, and their neighbors, and that sort of thing, so it worked out nicely, I thought. PIEHLER: Could you maybe … talk a little bit about your mother? GENTRY: Oh boy! My mama was just like all the rest, I guess. She was the greatest thing in the world. (Laughs) PIEHLER: She was also from North Carolina? GENTRY: No. No. She was from Neapolis, down here in Middle Tennessee. PIEHLER: Oh, okay. GENTRY: That’s where he met her, at Neapolis. Just south, between Franklin and Columbia. PIEHLER: Okay. GENTRY: And so she was not from North Carolina. She had a large family also. Back in those days, it was not unusual to have eight, nine, ten, eleven, dozen kids sometimes. So she came from a large family. She had very little education, my mother or father. Neither one of them had very much an education. The priorities back then was to make a living. It was not to get an education. So she didn’t have an education, and he didn’t have much of an education. But they were all hardworking and great people, and I just loved my mother, and daddy, for that matter. He died when I was eleven years old, so that left my mother with—at that time, I think there were still seven children at home. You hear of single moms now. Well, here was a single mom with eleven children to raise, and we somehow scrapped around and helped her, and she would tell us that we need something for supper—not dinner, supper—and we would go out and catch a rabbit, or a squirrel, or a fish, and that is what we would have. We raised our own chickens, and pigs, and that sort of thing. She was a great cook. I can remember all those things that she used to make in the way of fudge candy, and let us clean the bowl out. You know how that goes. Snow ice cream. And … what I called a teacake. Sugar cookies. Sometimes she would set the table for us to eat breakfast, say, and there would be thirteen of us at the table. We’d have a pile of biscuits, and you couldn’t even see the other end of the table for the biscuits. But we always ate good, and had a close knit family, and she was sort of the center of it, after my daddy died. PIEHLER: How did your father die? GENTRY: He had a heart attack. He was a smoker. I’ve always blamed that on it, but he was a smoker. And back then, you know, they didn’t know anything about that. I remember he rolled his own and all that sort of thing, and he was good to us too. I always loved to go with him. Sometimes he—we didn’t have an automobile, but he had a telephone truck that he worked out of, and he would come by and maybe pick one of us up. He tried to be fair to all of his boys and take us with him on his route. He and one other gentleman were the only two telephone men in this whole county, and so he would take us out all day with him. I just loved that, to be with my daddy. Or he would take us fishing, or take us swimming. So I had a good, happy childhood growing up. Had plenty of playmates, too. (Laughs) PIEHLER: It must have been hard to lose your daddy at such an early age. GENTRY: Yeah. I think he was just in his early or late fifties, maybe, when he had his heart attack. PIEHLER: How—I mean, losing your father, also financially, you said the benefits were good for … GENTRY: The benefits were good, but my mother—I don’t know how she made it. I really don’t know. As I said, we usually raised most of our food, or we caught most of our food. We learned to do things that youngsters nowadays have a hard time believing, but we learned to catch fish with our hands, out from under rocks. We learned to catch rabbits with our hands. No weapon, no guns, or anything. There is a way of catching rabbits … and squirrels with your hands. So we learned to do all of those things growing up, and loved to do it. That was exciting and adventurous. Every day was an adventure for us to go out and catch some kind of animal, and bring it home to eat. Of course, we picked berries, and we robbed honey trees, and all sorts of things. So, I guess that’s how we made it…. Most of our food was—the cost of our food was probably nil, with compared to what it is nowadays. We had to wear hand-me-down clothes.