Galloway, Marilyn

              ORAL HISTORY OF MARILYN GALLOWAY
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
June 21, 2011
 
Mr. McDaniel: This Keith McDaniel and it is June the 21st, 2011, the first day of summer, and I am in Oak Ridge at the home of Marilyn Galloway. Thank you for taking time to be with us.
Mrs. Galloway: My pleasure.
Mr. McDaniel: I want to go back to the very beginning. Tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family and where you went to school.
Mrs. Galloway: Okay, I was born in a little town called Sunbright, Tennessee, north of here. My father and grandfather were country doctors up there and I had an older sister, I was the middle girl, and I had a younger sister. But, my parents started having 
problems and they were divorced, I guess, when I was – well, my young sister was eighteen months and I was a little over two years after her, so you can imagine a poor lady being divorced in those years with three little kids under five having to make it. 
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, what year was that?
Mrs. Galloway: I guess it was about ’41, somewhere there. She moved to Harriman and got a job there. We rented a house there and lived for a little bit. I have just a little memory of that. I remember going to sort of like a nursery school and I guess my sister was going to kindergarten at that age and then Oak Ridge opened up and mother was blessed to be able to get in with the Atomic Energy Commission as a secretary and this was in ’43. I imagine it was in the Fall. I knew it was a little cool and I remember the blackouts then.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about the blackouts. 
Mrs. Galloway: It’s just the fact that because we were at war and especially – well, they didn’t want any towns to have lights, but especially Oak Ridge, so all lights had to be off after dark. In case any planes came over, they couldn’t see anything.
Mr. McDaniel: You know, I’ve interviewed over two hundred people about Oak Ridge and that’s the first time anybody’s ever told me that.
Mrs. Galloway: Really?
Mr. McDaniel: Uh-huhn.
Mrs. Galloway: Well, my younger sister told me – I’ve talked to both my sisters – and she said, don’t you remember Patty, my older sister, how scared she was because she was always terrified when we had the blackouts.
Mr. McDaniel: So you had to turn lights off at certain hours?
Mrs. Galloway: Yeah, when it started getting dark, and I remember moving.
Mr. McDaniel: So in ’43, that’s when you came here?
Mrs. Galloway: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: And how old were you then?
Mrs. Galloway: Five, I was going on five, born in October. I was ready to start kindergarten.
Mr. McDaniel: And it was your mother and then you and two sisters?
Mrs. Galloway: Right, older and younger sister.
Mr. McDaniel: Where did you live?
Mrs. Galloway: We were fortunate. We didn’t have to go to the Guest House. A “C” house, because mother had three kids, you know, you were assigned houses according to the number of people in the family, and so we had the corner up off Michigan, West Maiden Lane. We little maidens lived on Maiden Lane and –
Mr. McDaniel: On the corner of Michigan and Maiden?
Mrs. Galloway: And Maiden, right. West, there’s a “C” house right there in the corner, and if you went west on Maiden Lane, there was Pine Valley School, so we didn’t have that far to walk. We had to go through the woods just a little and the boardwalk to get around there. If you headed across Michigan and headed east on Maiden Lane, you go through the woods a little more and come out at Chapel on the Hill and Jackson Square. That was our little world.
Mr. McDaniel: And you had boardwalks going to both, right?
Mrs. Galloway: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, and that was your little world, huhn?
Mrs. Galloway: That was our little world with no cars, and then, of course, we could make our way down to the Tennis Courts and that was our play area, you know, bicycle, skating. If they weren’t playing tennis, we had our skates, a nice surface to skate on and I remember them – because they were still bringing in those prefabs at the end of West Maiden Lane. The first part are just the regular “A”, “B”, “C” houses and I remember them bringing them in a piece at a time and they’d be going up. Then that became our play area too; they’re on stilts like. So we’d play tag and hide and seek. We’d be playing in the twilight under these little houses, too, down close to Pine Valley.
[break in recording]
Mr. McDaniel: So you and your sisters and your mother were living on the corner of Maiden.
Mrs. Galloway: Maiden Lane.
Mr. McDaniel: West Maiden?
Mrs. Galloway: West Maiden Lane.
Mr. McDaniel: West Maiden Lane and so it was between Pine Valley School, where you went to school and Chapel on the Hill, the other direction.
Mrs. Galloway: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, was Cedar Hill – that’s on up the hill.
Mrs. Galloway: In fact, after we started to school for a while, they changed us and sent us to Cedar Hill. I had to walk up that hill. We were not happy about that. Thank goodness they finally moved us back to Pine Valley. We finished up. So, I went from kindergarten all the way through sixth grade.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay, at Pine Valley?
Mrs. Galloway: Right, my sister got in junior high, started there before we left.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, tell me about what it was like for you and your sisters and your mom, you know being a single mother in the city?
Mrs. Galloway: I know.
Mr. McDaniel: But she had a good job.
Mrs. Galloway: She had a good job, but still with three kids. I remember her coming up, walking up that hill on Michigan Avenue with high heels carrying two loads of groceries. Of course, now we know that’s good forced exercise, but I mean it was hard work for her. She often said later, she said, “You know, I never would sit down when I got home because I had three love starved kids all over me.” But we had fun; we made our own fun. We got into play acting and my sister was real good at piano. My other sister and I took piano lessons, but when you’ve got an older sister that can play by ear and you’re struggling along – so I made a deal with mother, could I drop piano and take violin because those schools were big on the arts and mother wanted us in the music. So I took violin and enjoyed that.
Mr. McDaniel: Now how much older was your older sister?
Mrs. Galloway: Eighteen months, so it was just a year when I –
Mr. McDaniel: Now, what would you do? Would you come home to an empty house and just wait on your mother?
Mrs. Galloway: No, there was a housekeeper.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay.
Mrs. Galloway: And I didn’t know until later, though, that part of the time – my sister said that the neighbor across the street would watch over her before she’d start to school. She’d go across the street. But I do remember, my sister was saying, too, I remember this housekeeper showing us, because she was a smoker, she got white cloth and she’d breathe through it and we’d saw all this dark. She said, “This is why I don’t want any of you to ever start cigarettes.” Now, this is the early ’40s and that stuck with us. My sister said, “I would never touch a cigarette after that.”
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mrs. Galloway: But, no, it was either housekeepers or some neighbors for the most part that looked after us. And Sarah said that mother kept her back a year because she was small for her age, too. But when I asked my sister, “What do you remember about Oak Ridge?” she said, “All I can say, those years were the happiest of my life.”
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right.
Mrs. Galloway: And we look back and we think, how unique, because especially we moved from there back up to this little town, Sunbright, and you knew rich and poor. We didn’t know that. We had someone living beside us in a smaller house, top scientists with just one child. They got a smaller house. Dr. Crews lived right up behind us on the next lane. His kids were our playmates but it was just an even plane and I think that’s neat too. Of course, we didn’t know about Scarboro or any of that; that was way west. It was later that we learned about all of that.
Mr. McDaniel: But you knew about your little neighborhood and at that age, that was all you needed to know.
Mrs. Galloway: Right, and I think back to afterwards and I thought, you know, it was sort of safe for my mother because Daddy couldn’t just come pop in anytime. She had to give permission to get through those gates.
Mr. McDaniel: That is true. But did he come to see you all or did you go to see him?
Mrs. Galloway: He did especially Christmas and of course we thought he was the most wonderful thing. Of course, he wasn’t struggling with three kids.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. Galloway: But he came with gifts. He could afford all this – big Hershey bars.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course, those big ones.
Mrs. Galloway: And mother had dated someone else, a couple of people and we said, oh, no, no, we want our daddy.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course, yeah.
Mrs. Galloway: And so, yeah, he did come and see us some, but country doctors are busy. It is seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. I remember when we moved back, someone got the long ladder and Pat and I were sleeping upstairs and they knocked on the window, “Doc Sam, Doc Sam! My wife’s having a baby!”
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my.
Mrs. Galloway: You know, and there’s no one, like now, you’re in practices, you take turns and all that. So it was hard too. But I look back, I thought, even that was unique, my country living, feeding the chickens and the pigs that we had and all that.
Mr. McDaniel: But it’s interesting that you can look back, even that young, and compare your childhood in Oak Ridge compared to your childhood outside of Oak Ridge, even though it was just a few miles away.
Mrs. Galloway: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Well, what was school like? Do you remember your teachers?
Mrs. Galloway: I remember some of them, right. Kindergarten, Miss Visker was one of them. Miss Cunningham, or Cummings I guess. I do remember them. I remember the second grade, and I was always a shy girl, but bubble gum had come into being, and the teacher had had enough of popping bubbles and she said the next one would be sent outside. Well, I had learned, someone had told me to make a bubble inside and I was trying that, sure enough it popped on me and I was sent out to the hall, nearly died, because my sister came along with her class right by, had to see me sitting out in the hall. That was a big punishment then. But, no, school I enjoyed. I loved it. We had a young lady, I guess straight from college was our Phys Ed teacher, big on Phys Ed, and we all admired her. She wasn’t married and that’s what I wanted to be.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Galloway: I just wanted to be a Physical Education teacher, but I didn’t end up that, you know, later, but in those young years, things catch your eye.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, they do. 
Mrs. Galloway: And I remember talking about Pine Valley – of course, we had that playground when mother was at work or our housekeeper, we’d go down to that playground and play and it’s close. But across the street on New York Avenue there was a drug store and some other stores and those drug stores, that’s where I learned malted milkshakes. Oh, how –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Galloway: That was always a special treat if we behaved ourselves. We could go get –
Mr. McDaniel: Go get a malted?
Mrs. Galloway: Yeah, milkshake. Mother saw to it that we had dancing lessons, ballet and tap dancing, and that was over at the high school, that was over by Jackson Square at the time. You know, it’s nothing but the field now that you have, but we would go over there for our dancing lessons and have our little recitals. I remember going through – oh, going through the woods to the Chapel on the Hill, and up in the woods was a big tree with these big vines hanging from them, and we could go up there, grab a vine, swing. Oh, we’d all get in line and take turns swinging.
Mr. McDaniel: Acting like Tarzan and Jane, wasn’t it? Now let me ask you, so this was ’41?
Mrs. Galloway: Well, ’43 when we –
Mr. McDaniel: I mean ’43. So from ’43 to –
Mrs. Galloway: To ’50.
Mr. McDaniel: – to ’50. I guess you didn’t have a TV?
Mrs. Galloway: No.
Mr. McDaniel: You had radio. Do you remember if you had radio?
Mrs. Galloway: Oh, yes, the Hip Parade. Yes, I remember that.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. Galloway: And we didn’t have doll houses. We made our little houses with toothpicks on the floor. We would design our little living room and all that and make the little dolls and walk through that and we’d put on our shows for the neighbor. Pat with her piano and me with my violin and Sarah was taking dramatic lessons. So there’d be three of us and Pat would go out on the porch and hang up sheets or something and we’d invite the neighbors.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, how funny.
Mrs. Galloway: But that’s what you did. You made your own fun.
Mr. McDaniel: So your years in Oak Ridge were good.
Mrs. Galloway: They were.
Mr. McDaniel: It was a good childhood.
Mrs. Galloway: It really was.
Mr. McDaniel: Even though your parents were divorced.
Mrs. Galloway: Right
Mr. McDaniel: But I guess you’re right, and there was no crime. 
Mrs. Galloway: No, the only thing came close, Sarah Jane when she was little with the housekeeper, so she must have been three or four, she wasn’t in school yet, and they were going through the woods. I think the housekeeper was getting groceries, and halfway through, they had these big wood stacks through the woods, I guess with broken limbs and several things, they would just stack it up in a heap, a man popped out, totally nude.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Galloway: And the housekeeper, of course, took off running dragging Sarah and Sarah said, “I just remember gawking. I’d never seen a naked man before!” But see, she remembers she went to the police to report him. She said, “I’m sure they got him in jail.” I said, “Well, no, they wouldn’t.” In Oak Ridge, there were no jails. They might have shipped him to Anderson County or Clinton or somewhere if they caught him. But that’s the nearest thing and all the other thing, you know, getting through the gates, I remember this. Pat said, my older sister, going with her scout troop they went on that road up off Outer Drive, and you could go by the fence, I’ve gotten it written down, G Road [Key Spring Road]. And so Pat was wanting to take us there later so two little sisters followed Pat up there and we were going down these paths and you came to the fence, and there was this man standing on the other side. He’d asked if we’d seen any horsemen go by and Pat said, “Yeah, he just went by.” And Sarah said [whispers] “Pat, don’t tell him anything!”
Mr. McDaniel: He was sneaking in.
Mrs. Galloway: He was trying to get in and that’s when we said, “Pat quit talking to him.” Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Because the horsemen were the guards because there were troublemakers.
Mrs. Galloway: Right, and this was up towards Oliver Spring area. And so we ran out of there and Sarah remembers that we hid behind bushes and we saw him crawl under and he did come in. So there were a lot of holes in the fences. If they could watch, you know, the horsemen going around. But that was the nearest thing, I guess you could say, to crime that we experienced.
Mr. McDaniel: Was the lady who kept you at the house, your maid, was she black or was she white?
Mrs. Galloway: White.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. Did she live in Oak Ridge and have a family or do you remember?
Mrs. Galloway: I have no idea. One time we had, it was a family friend’s daughter that came to stay with us, she lived in Lancing, but I don’t know where, I think her name was Edna, I don’t remember where she was. Mother later had to take in a boarder to make ends meet. We three girls stayed in one room and she rented the nicer room to the boarder.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. So what did your mother do? You said she was a Secretary at the Castle on the Hill?
Mrs. Galloway: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: Who did she work for, do you know?
Mrs. Galloway: I’m not sure if it was the engineer. If I heard the names, I would know but I can’t off – it’s been too long.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay, that’s all right. So you went through sixth grade at Pine Valley?
Mrs. Galloway: Correct.
Mr. McDaniel: And then did you move?
Mrs. Galloway: Yes, my parents remarried, so we moved back to Sunbright.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, your parents remarried?
Mrs. Galloway: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay. So you moved back to Sunbright.
Mrs. Galloway: We got our father back.
Mr. McDaniel: You got your father [laughter]. There you go. And then when did you return to Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Galloway: Oh, I returned to Oak Ridge after we were married for a while. It was in 1963 after I finished my internship. I had graduated from UT going into the field of dietetics so I did my dietetic internship at St. Mary’s Hospital in Knoxville. So after my three years was up, we wanted to start our family, and we decided by then we’d saved enough to make a down payment here, so we moved up in Georgia Avenue, a little “B” house. So that’s when I moved back and that lasted about three years and then we moved on until 2002, end of 2002. When we retired we came back to the community.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came back here in 2002?
Mrs. Galloway: Yes, this is where our family still, you know, we have sisters and brothers and aunts and cousins here and both our kids were traveling here and there. We’ve got one up in Iowa now and one in Florida. So we’re not chasing after kids, you know.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, exactly.
Mrs. Galloway: We just decided we grew up here, we felt comfortable here, we wanted to come back here.
Mr. McDaniel: Right. I guess those memories, even as a young child, were pretty strong.
Mrs. Galloway: Right, and made friends when we lived here those three years in the ’60s, that we’re still friends – keep up with people’s Christmas cards. And when we come through town to always see the grandparents, so it’s nice that we’re still friends and they’re here and we’re back so we can enjoy friendships.
Mr. McDaniel: Absolutely. Well, good. Well, is there anything else you want to tell me about your childhood in Oak Ridge or even after you’ve been back these last eight or nine years, I guess?
Mrs. Galloway: Can you put it on pause? 
Mr. McDaniel: [laughter]
Mrs. Galloway: Can you put it on pause so I can think a minute? [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: No, hun, you go ahead and take your time. We usually don’t stop the tape.
Mrs. Galloway: You don’t. You can edit it?
Mr. McDaniel: No, we don’t edit. This is a complete unedited conversation that we had.
Mrs. Galloway: I just wanted to look at my notes. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, that’s okay. Here, Jasmine, hand her her notes.
Mrs. Galloway: See if there’s something – oh, of course, we do remember the opening of the gates, that was a very big thing.
Mr. McDaniel: Well tell me about that.
Mrs. Galloway: We went down to Jackson Square –
Mr. McDaniel: Because you were here till ’50, weren’t you?
Mrs. Galloway: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, so they opened in March of ’49.
Mrs. Galloway: And we were here when we saw Rod Cameron on his horse falling off.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, of course.
Mrs. Galloway: And the movie stars and all that and that was just a very big thing, unique thing. 
Mr. McDaniel: That was a big day for Oak Ridge, wasn’t it?
Mrs. Galloway: Right, right, it really was.
Mr. McDaniel: So you would have been about twelve or so.
Mrs. Galloway: Probably.
Mr. McDaniel: Eleven or twelve.
Mrs. Galloway: Yeah, finishing the sixth grade.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were old enough to really remember some of those things?
Mrs. Galloway: Right. But let me quickly see –
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, go ahead.
Mrs. Galloway: – if there’s anything here. I had mentioned of course about the blackouts, but I remember the night we moved in, it was cold. That’s why I think it was the fall, late fall, when we moved in in ’43 and this man that got hired for this truck for him to move her in, I remember him carrying me and putting me on the stove, sitting me up on the stove. But it had to be dark; they just had flashlights and it really was a little frightening.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure.
Mrs. Galloway: A new home and you can’t even look around and see –
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, exactly.
Mrs. Galloway: And of course we had the coal bins, you know, we had to keep those loaded and so forth. Talk about the blacks, the only black we saw was Dr. Crews’s family had a black maid and Sarah especially went up there and played a lot, and of course she was really nice. Oh, and yes, the big pool. Oh, that was a thrill.
Mr. McDaniel: Tell me about the big pool.
Mrs. Galloway: Mother signed us up for Red Cross lessons. She wanted to make sure we learned to swim, so that was just a lot of summer fun, going to that big pool.
Mr. McDaniel: Now during the summer when you were out of school and your mother was at work, I guess as you got a little older you could kind of venture off on your own a little bit, couldn’t you?
Mrs. Galloway: Yes. I still don’t know how we got to the pool because we never had a car so I don’t know if someone took us or if we learned to ride a little bus. I do remember riding a bus like when we had to go to Georgia to see our relatives, we’d go to Rockwood to catch the Greyhound or something. And I know there were little shuttle buses but I don’t remember that much about them. But I do know we got to the pool, however we got there, and Sarah remember too that at night [during] the blackouts, police cars would go up and down each lane to make sure everything was dark.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Galloway: Everyone had their lights out. Oh, and mother, after the parade, when we came back from the parade – 
Mr. McDaniel: The day the gates opened.
Mrs. Galloway: Uh-huhn. Mother discovered someone had broken into our house and the reason she knew is the toilet seat was up and all of us were girls.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Galloway: But she couldn’t see that any one thing was taken.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, sure.
Mrs. Galloway: But I remember my sister coming in a big snowstorm. She was out there sledding and it was getting dark. Mother called her in and she said, “Be sure to shut the door good.” The utility door didn’t shut too good. You had to really force it. So Pat got mad and slammed the door. In doing so, the bottom pane broke and fell out, and she didn’t know it at the time. She just was frightened with the broken glass because she knew mother would be on her, but it had split her arm about four inches deep and she said, “I didn’t see that right away. I was fixed on that and as I was going around the corner mother saw that arm and of course she wasn’t a bit worried about the window at that point.”
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mrs. Galloway: She called Daddy and Daddy came up and stitched her up and Pat said, “I remember he had me do three of the stitches and he said if I did three stitches, he’d let me have a Coca-Cola.”
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. Galloway: That was a big thing back then because they never let us drink much of that. Now we know it’s unhealthy anyway so I’m glad we didn’t live on Cokes. We never had occasion to go to the hospital or anything.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, nothing so severe that your dad couldn’t –
Mrs. Galloway: Couldn’t get there in time to take care of, right. And Sarah says she remembers making mud cakes and trying to sell them.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Galloway: She said, I think a few people, probably good neighbors, would pay a little few cents, you know? [laughter] But the music lessons because, again, I told you that the Oak Ridge Schools were big on the arts and I remember them coming in as they were putting in the flattops down at the end of the street, putting in the big culverts and that would take a while, so that was fun. 
Mr. McDaniel: That was fun to go through?
Mrs. Galloway: You could run in and out until they finally sealed that up. But, it was just a different world.
Mr. McDaniel: Now, you were here when the war was over.
Mrs. Galloway: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: What do you remember? Was there any talk about that or were you all just too young to –
Mrs. Galloway: Too young. We knew there was a war going on, of course, because of the blackouts, but I’m sure we were happy. But the excitement was when the gates were opened. That was the big thing.
Mr. McDaniel: Exactly. Now, is your mother – she passed away?
Mrs. Galloway: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Now when you talked to her, I guess, about the time in Oak Ridge, what were her comments or what did she recall or did she comment about it?
Mrs. Galloway: Not that much. After we moved back, I thought, oh, I wish I could ask her this, that, and the other, you know. We’re so busy now with our lives and our kids and so forth. No, my parents’ marriage, second marriage, just lasted five years. She had to come back into Oak Ridge. Bless her heart, she was driving from Sunbright to Oak Ridge for a couple of years and then she bought a house over in Solway and Pat and I were in college at that time so, of course, we’d visit her but our home was always – the homes we knew were Oak Ridge and the little bit was Sunbright.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, I understand. But after her marriage ended the second time, she came back to work in Oak Ridge?
Mrs. Galloway: Right.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, well, is there anything else you want to comment on or talk about?
Mrs. Galloway: No, I don’t think – I think I got most of the stuff in that I wanted to say. It was, again, just such a unique, because you walked everywhere, you know. And it was a different world when we moved to Sunbright.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure. I’m sure it was.
Mrs. Galloway: Daddy took me on a lot of interesting cases too and I learned from the back roads about these homes and so forth. He was a good doctor. People still talk highly of him and my grandfather.
Mr. McDaniel: What was his name, your father’s –
Mrs. Galloway: Sam Jones, Jr. And there was a Sam Jones, III, my little brother came along that second marriage.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, is that right?
Mrs. Galloway: Yeah, living over in Knoxville, but of course he didn’t grow up in Oak Ridge. And of course we spoiled him to death, three older sisters. He didn’t stand a chance.
Mr. McDaniel: I bet. My goodness.
Mrs. Galloway: But anyway, we look back and we just wondered how mother did it and I just have to say, with all the love she poured into us, sacrifices, she was the one that helped put us through college and Pat and I worked. Daddy joined the Navy. They wouldn’t take him during the war because he was the only doctor for miles around up there, so he joined the Navy and he wasn’t that big a part of our lives after that.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mrs. Galloway: I know a lot of people think, well, your father’s a doctor, you had it easy going through college. It wasn’t. So we made our own way and mother did the sacrifices.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Okay, all right, well, very good. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Mrs. Galloway: You’re welcome.
[end of recording]