Oral History Interview with Emma Sharp

CARROLL: Tell me a 1ittle bit about yourself?

SHARP: Well, I’m Emma Sharp, I was the first daughter born to Mother and Dad at Sumner, Kentucky. Two brothers were older than I am. One of them died at age three, he had diphtheria. I grew up and went to a one-room school for all eight grades. When I was in the grade school, I had typhoid fever, which affected me from then on, I suppose. But, when I was in the fourth grade, my teacher gave me a book by John Fox Jr. and that was the first book I owned that wasn't a textbook. It made me want to read from then on and I had always loved to read and tried to write in school.

SHARP: My brother thought I was the teachers’ pet. He would eat peaches or apples and put the core over on my side and tried to get me in trouble. Eleven of us in my family then and only eight grew to adulthood. And one of my first years of teaching, I taught my sisters and one brother, and my baby sister wasn't old enough to go to school, but she followed us anyway and oftentimes, mother would bring our lunch to us in big water bucket and a jug of buttermilk. Sometimes the children would run home to get something to eat then when I was teaching in ‘48 and ‘50 in school and I taught one room schools for three or four years before I started teaching primary grades. For fifteen years, I’ve taught primary grades. I

taught 7th grade for five or six years and then I taught in high school for eleven years. Anyway, the total was 31 years, so I was with children most of my life and married Josh Sharp in 1953, August 11, and we had one daughter Jolly Kay, and she was born December 22, 1954. She is now going to school, and she has two children, Jessica Ruth, and Joshua Paul.

CARROLL: How old was [were] you when you had your first child?

SHARP: I was forty.

CARROLL: Did you have any miscarriages or anything like that?

SHARP: My first child was stillborn.

CARROLL: When was that?

SHARP: That was in 1939.

CARROLL: What did you feed the baby?

SHARP: Breastfed

CARROLL: How did you wean her?

SHARP: She weaned herself about 8 months.

CARROLL: How did you know what to feed the baby?

SHARP: She ate both, we tried to follow our doctor’s recommendation and we fed her some baby food and got so she didn’t like it at all, she had to eat off the table to eat, so she ate a lot of stuff from the table.

CARROLL: What did she like to eat?

SHARP: She liked her potatoes, and she liked the beans, as she grew up, she liked cabbage by itself and carrots by itself, but if you mixed anything together for her, she wouldn’t eat it. She had to have it separate, she was very particular about her jellies and jams, she would not try new foods, she would want the same things over. She wanted what her daddy ate, ham, sausage, redeye gravy and hot biscuits and things like that.

CARROLL: Did yous [you] all eat together?

SHARP: Yes, we did.

CARROLL: Where there times when you didn’t have enough food, like during the Depression?

SHARP: Well, that was when I was back at home with mother and dad and we had a garden and we didn’t have much else, we ran a store, we made do. We had enough to eat, but we worked hard for it in gardens and things. We--Josh and I got married, from then on, I was teaching and he was working and we had plenty to eat all the time.

CARROLL: Did you daughter have any illnesses?

SHARP: She had tonsilitis and had trouble with her tonsils when she was in the grade school, she went to school at Boston Elementary. Her first years, she didn’t really enroll in the first grade at all cause her daddy and my mother and I played with her here at school. We had educational games and I let her visit with me when she was five years old. She enjoyed it so much she wanted to go back, she cried so much to go back, we let the babysitter go and then her teacher said she had adjusted enough in those four or five weeks that she should go in the second grade with the same group the next year and that’s what she did. And we told the teacher, “just let her try out and whatever she thought,” and the teacher said, “by all means, let her take it,” because she was very good. So, she enrolled in ‘60 at the age of five, she was six the last of December. So, she got in that year, and she went to the second, third, and fourth [grade] and then she got sick because I told her I wasn’t going back no [any]more. She was sick all summer thinking that she didn’t want to miss going back to Boston School, but she started in over here at the city school and made friends.

CARROLL: Did she have like colic or diaper rash, diarrhea or colds what was [were] your favorite home remedies?

SHARP: I really don’t remember, but I remember we took her camping, and she got mosquito bit and we never liked to cleared [clear] that up, we had to put some kind of purple stuff on it.

CARROLL: Today, kids have hundred[s] of different toys and things to play with, what kind of playthings did your baby have?

SHARP: She had mostly homemade, a few bought toys and her Aunt Josie Carr made her several dolls, and she enjoyed them a lot and played with them. Her daddy got her a little rooster, one time I got her a bride doll. After she grew up and she looked at—and [what] that was about [and] all, she didn't care a whole lot for it, she liked her homemade dolls.

CARROLL: Could you describe how you played with your daughter?

SHARP: We played with games, flashcards, and things like that, and she liked the piano and I showed her a little bit about what I knew about it and so she learned to play the piano and she plays in church often, now she just plays in the children[‘s] choir and sometimes in church.

CARROLL: Did you read to her?

SHARP: Oh yes, we read to her all the time, and she enjoyed books so much, she always liked to read.

CARROLL: How did you dress your baby?

SHARP: Well, [at] the beginning, we had a package of diapers given to us, I think, but they were so hard to keep washed and cleaned all the time, I Just had to make [them] out of just whatever I could get. Maybe sacks or sheets, whatever.

CARROLL: Did you have a crib, playpen, walker, stroller, highchair?

SHARP: We tried to put her in a playpen, but she wanted out so much that we let her out and then we put a gate up and she would climb up and walk across it, she didn’t like to stay in a playpen.

CARROLL: How did you potty train her?

SHARP: I had a small round potty with a little handle to it, she didn’t really like [it] but she did [it].

CARROLL: Did she take a nap and go to bed at a certain time?

SHARP: That was one of the problems I had. She needed me to reach over and hold her hand in her bed each night and my hand would really give out reaching from our bed over to hers trying to hold her hand till she went to sleep but, otherwise she had her naps all right.

CARROLL: Who helped you with your baby?

SHARP: My husband helped me at home and then I taught while she was little, and my mother babysat part-time, and her aunt babysat some for her. When mother was babysitting, it seemed to me she liked mother a little bit better than she did me and then she was just two or three when mother went to Germany, and she always hated to see an airplane for a long

Time, she thought that big bird took mother off and she didn't want her to--she didn’t want her to go.