Interview with Winnie Fox

*I conducted this interview with Winnie as an assignment for a creative writing class at Marshall University in Fall 2005.

October 26, 2005

For this assignment I went up to the east end of town to interview Winnie Fox at her home on sixth avenue and twenty-sixth street . Winnie is 85 years old. She has four children and has been an activist, concerned citizen and community leader for over fifty years. The patron saint of Huntington hellraisers, Winnie is never too busy to sit down over a cup of coffee and discuss the status of our world. Although her bones don’t work the way they used to, Winnie is as outspoken as a rebellious teenager and has a mind like a steel trap. In this interview Winnie talks about growing up during the depression on the Kentucky side of the Big Sandy river.

I was born in a place called Torchlight, Kentucky on the Big Sandy river. It was a very small community above Louisa, a coal mining town. My daddy had the store there, and when the depression came he kept feeding people out of the store until he went broke because that’s what people did back then. It’s hard for people to sort out their lives, especially when it was so long since all this stuff has passed.

One of the first things I remember when I was just a toddler was when our house caught on fire. Those old houses used to have a living room and a family room. The living room was where you lived and had the fire place. I remember sitting there with my mother, and maybe I was 18 months old, something like that, and we walked into the kitchen and the whole ceiling was on fire. We had coal oil lamps on top of one of those old coal stoves—boy they made the best food in the world. Corn bread and biscuits to die for. Anyway, my mother called my father and then went up to the attic and started pulling out beams in the roof and throwing them out the window. Her hands were completely burnt and my daddy was bringing her barrels of water that they had around the house since we didn’t have running water.

When I was five I moved to Louisa. My uncle was a locksmith and captained a sternwheeler he’d built by himself in his spare time. Boy I loved that Big Sandy river. He used to take me up and down and every now and then he’d let me take the wheel. I remember going up the Big Sandy in a row boat at night with the moon shining. We were going to see a show boat, and just the idea of it was fascinating. My husband’s uncle’s name was Isaac and he worked on the river and when he was a child he was a Shakespearian actor on one of those showboats.

Back in those days though, times were tough. I had gone to live in Louisa with my uncle because my parents couldn’t keep me. One of my daddy’s best friends in Louisa was Fred Vinson. Daddy had helped Fred get elected to the legislature the first time and I used to go to his house when I was a kid. He lived in a big stone house near the post office. The house has since been torn down but I can still close my eyes and picture it. He was very good to me. He didn’t have any children of his own and I used to play with his grand nieces. They lived on a house on the property with their mom, and had the biggest playhouse you ever saw. It had a miniature kitchen and a living room. My mom used to ride horses with Fred’s wife Roberta.

Of course, fate would take the Vinsons to Washington as Fred’s political career advanced. When I went to Washington during the war to work for the Roosevelt administration, I met with the Vinsons. By that time Fred had become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Fred had a head for politics but Roberta told me she hated shaking hands with all those people she didn’t know. That’s the way they did women back then though. They wanted to keep you pregnant and uneducated. I don’t think it was a very good thing that he was head of the Supreme Court. He must have been rather conservative because someone told me if he’d been alive Brown vs. Board of Education might not have passed. He seemed like a nice man though and always talked to me when I was a kid.

Now before I go any further lets get one thing clear. America is full of shit and I’ll never salute the goddamn flag. Now I’ll salute people who try their hearts out. I’ll support the people that went to Vietnam and Iraq who were lied to. It’s pitiful when the only way some people can get an education is to go into the service. My husband got an education on the GI bill. They said he didn’t have to pay for it. But he paid for it. He paid for it when he was 18 years old in the Pacific and saw flame throwers, and mothers jumping off cliffs with babies and the sky so black with flies that you couldn’t see the sun. All so he could work like a dog his whole life at the nickel plant and then get cancer. Where’s the noble cause in that? No matter what they tell you, there is hardly ever a cause worthy of going to war over. And that’s the truth