INTERVIEWER: ... are there any, just sort of special experiences you remember as a young teacher or that stand out in your mind. You know like little anecdotes that happened or any special..
FLOSSIE: (Laughs)
INTERVIEWER: But don’t mention names.
FLOSSIE: Well there was one at Box Iron. I’ll tell you (laughs). The only way you could get rid of those mosquitos, they were like yellow nippers. Oh, they were the largest. I don’t know if you were here at that time, they were the largest mosquitos. And from my section of the country we didn’t know what a mosquito was.
INTERVIEWER: Out in Missouri you didn’t have?
FLOSSIE: Oh no. We didn’t have, no, we didn’t have screened in porches.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, I think this summer I will go to Missouri.
FLOSSIE: (Laughs) Those mosquitos would set me crazy. So, the lady where I was boarding, she said, “Well you have to make a smother.” And I said, “Well what is a smother?” She said, “You take a large bucket, put some rags in it, and papers, rags and paper, and put plenty of rags you know. I forget, I think it was a little sulfur. It was real comical, but I would go up and down the road with a long stick under the handle of the bucket to keep the mosquitos from biting me. They would just drive me crazy. So, one day, we kept, then we always kept a smother in front of our building.
I told a boy, one of the boys, I don’t know what he was thinking, to empty the smother. I think it was getting near closing time.
INTERVIEWER: Mm-mm.
FLOSSIE: And I told him to empty the smother. And instead of emptying the smother in the spot that we had always emptied it, he goes out into this man’s woodland and sets the woods on fire. (The men) they came from everywhere. If they hadn’t, I would have been in trouble.
INTERVIEWER: Isn’t that something.
FLOSSIE: That would have burned up the woodlands. Oh, it was blazing. It was a good day for fire to burn.
INTERVIEWER: Oh my gosh.
FLOSSIE: Oh, and the children didn’t know what to do, but those men they were wonderful. They came in trucks. One, seems like, notified the other, and they put that fire out.
INTERVIEWER: What were your salaries?
FLOSSIE: Well at that time, now when I first came, I was getting only a $70 a month. And later they raised me, according to my qualifications, to 80, and of course they kept going up.
INTERVIEWER: Now, you paid for room and board?
FLOSSIE: Oh yes. You had to pay. Yes, yes you paid for your room and board.
INTERVIEWER: oh my. That didn’t leave much, did it?
FLOSSIE: Oh no indeed you didn’t get very far (laughs).
INTERVIEWER: Were you able to be married and teach when you came here?
FLOSSIE: Oh yes.
INTERVIEWER: I remember earlier you couldn’t be married.
FLOSSIE: But you could when I came. Uh-huh. You could be married.
INTERVIEWER: When you were teaching at the one room schools did you have supervisors come visit?
FLOSSIE: Yes, we had supervisors. We had state supervisor’s and all.
INTERVIEWER: State supervisors.
FLOSSIE: Oh yea. Mr. J. Walter Hovington was the state supervisor and later of course his nephew took it over, younger man. ...J. Walter Hovington. He used to smoke a pipe. Everybody remembers him.
NTERVIEWER: ... Let’s go back to Box Iron. The seafood industry was oysters and clams?
FLOSSIE: And crabbing.
INTERVIEWER: And crabs.
FLOSSIE: Course crabbing was more in the spring. That’s when they did their crabbing.
INTERVIEWER: Alright, now did the blacks as well as the whites?
FLOSSIE: Oh yes. My husband had his own boat. He was in the business.
INTERVIEWER: Okay.
FLOSSIE: Had his own boat. Now there weren’t too many blacks. Maybe one or two. Not a large number. Most of them were white. Mr. Levi Truitt, I don’t know whether you know him, he was one of them that worked. He lives on the road that goes to Public Landing in that big yellow house.
INTERVIEWER: Oh yea.
FLOSSIE: That’s Mr. Levi Truitt.
INTERVIEWER: Now the boats, I mean the trucks from Crisfield came..
FLOSSIE: Came to buy their seafood products.
INTERVIEWER: Came to buy.
INTERVIEWER: I didn’t know that.
FLOSSIE: They were sold to them.
INTERVIEWER: Did you um, was there any recreational boating during the summertime?
FLOSSIE: Well, yes, if anyone wanted to you know, go out in their boats they could and individuals would take them out in their boats. Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Did you go out?
FLOSSIE: Oh yes, I used to go out quite often. Then there was some of them now, Mr. Scott, who is dead now and lived at Scott’s Landing for years, He had his own big houseboat, where you could, they had bunks and all on there and we used to go down there and stay on the boat.
INTERVIEWER: Did you really?
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