Pass the Word

The staff of the Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer interviewed residents in the Owensboro area about their lives in the first half of this century. The interviews were collected to be excerpted in a special oral history series, A Generation Remembers, published in 1986. Topics include the floods of 1913 and 1937, the winter of 1917--1918, the 1918 influenza epidemic, World Wars I and II, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the introduction of electricity to the area, and accounts of the first telephones, automobiles, airplanes, and televisions. Narrators talk about farming (including tobacco), coal mining (including mining accidents, labor unions, and the United Mine Workers of America), trapping, bootlegging, clothes, iceboxes, water, curing meat and preserving food, work, music, recreation, religion, education (including one-room schools), funeral practices, marriage customs, work, and transportation (especially trains). Other topics are medicine, illness, childbirth, home remedies, crimes, hangings, night riders, race relations, discrimination, segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, "possum hunters," nickelodeons, general stores, women's suffrage, women in politics and sports, and German prisoners of war during World War II on Daviess County tobacco farms.