Full Text of the Excerpt

JACQUELYN HALL:

What have been the hardest times in your life?

GLENN HOLLAR:

When that flu epidemic was, and they was all sick. That was the roughest time ever. Like I say, people would come up and look in your window and holler and see if you was still alive, is about all. They wouldn't come in. And our aunt finally come over there. I never could eat her cooking, but I put up with it. She stayed with us a while there.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What would you say the best times have been?

GLENN HOLLAR:

I don't know. I've had it pretty good all my life. I've never been sick or anything. I was lucky. And it seemed like I got along pretty good all my life. But the best time, I think, I was around eighteen till about thirty-five. But I never did have it too bad after that flu epidemic.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Do you think your lives have been very different from your parents' lives?

GLENN HOLLAR:

The way things have changed, there's got to be a big difference.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How has this area changed? I know it's changed tremendously.

GLENN HOLLAR:

There used to not be nothing here. I played around in here; it wasn't nothing but woods in all around here. There was nothing but a dirt road. Was all that went through here, to Hickory and all. Conover was a little old dirt road. Had a store up here. It didn't even have a floor in it. Had a dirt floor. That was Ed Herman, an old man, run that store. He had a big old stove setting out in the middle of the floor. Had a couple guys that did that white lightning around here. I didn't know what they was doing then, but after I got bigger I found out.

JACQUELYN HALL:

This was in Newton?

GLENN HOLLAR:

No, this was Conover. They had a couple mean ones( ) around, but I didn't know it till after I got up pretty good-sized. But I went in that store many a time. There wasn't more than about three or four stores in Conover then, I don't reckon, on back.