Reverend Robert Hartenfeld’s father ran a small country store in northwestern Ohio. In this episode, he explains how watching his dad interact with customers in an intimate and personal way taught him the importance of listening—a skill he would come to appreciate in later years as a Lutheran minister.

In 1983, Hartenfeld came to Long Beach, Mississippi, to help establish a new Lutheran congregation. He describes the anxiety of being a Yankee in the deep South and falling in love with the Gulf Coast. Again, it was his ability to listen and offer support that helped him to gain acceptance and respect in Mississippi.

After Hartenfeld retired from fulltime ministry in 1992, he began volunteering with the Back Bay Mission in Biloxi.  As coordinator of the Loaves and Fishes soup kitchen, he feels his most important job is listening to those in need.

PHOTO: St. Paul Lutheran Church, Dailyherald.com

In 1917, Mississippi passed the Bone Dry law, prohibiting the sale and consumption of all forms of alcohol. In this episode, LeGrand Capers remembers Vicksburg’s fifty saloons, and how the city reacted to their closing. After alcohol was outlawed in the U.S. in 1920, bootleggers began making and selling homemade liquor. Capers describes Vicksburg’s moonshine marketers and how police looked the other way.

Until it was shut down during WW I, Vicksburg was also home to a thriving red-light district. Capers recalls the city’s ornate palaces of gambling and prostitution. Born in Vicksburg in 1900, Capers came of age as the glory-days of the red-light district were waning. He discusses selling shoes to the ladies of #15 China Street as a boy, and spending time there when he was older. 

May not be suitable for young historians.

PHOTO: Washington Street, Vicksburg, 1915

On August 7, 1975, LeGrand Capers sat down with the Center for Oral History for the first part of a two-day interview. A lifelong resident of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Capers or “Doc” as he was known to his friends, was considered the town historian. His natural curiosity, love of the Arts, and memory for details made him the right person for the job. Born in 1900, Capers knew many Civil War veterans and folks who had survived the months-long siege of the city President Lincoln considered essential to a northern victory.  In this episode, Capers remembers the hours spent as a young man, listening to stories of battles fought and hardships endured.

The Vicksburg National Military Park was established in 1899 to commemorate the siege of the city during the Civil War.  Capers remembers the construction of the various state monuments and searching for relics on the battlefield as a boy. In 1916, a movie about the Civil War was filmed in the park. Capers describes joining the Mississippi National Guard in order to work as an extra on the film. After filming was completed and the country prepared to enter WWI, Capers’ father had to pull strings to get his under-aged son’s enlistment in the Guard struck so he could return to school.

In 1917, a joint reunion of Confederate and Union veterans was held at the national park in Vicksburg. Capers recalls the raucous arguments between the former foes and one old-timer who was a little too frank for polite company. There is a bit of profane language in this last story so parents beware.

PHOTO: larry-jan-tvc.net

Prior to the end of slavery in the United States, educating African-Americans was discouraged or prohibited by law throughout the South. After emancipation, opportunities for blacks to attend school were still scarce, but began to improve during the Reformation. Lounett Gore’s father was born a slave, but emancipated while still an infant.  In this episode, she describes how he was educated by his mother’s former master.

As the youngest child of a sharecropper’s family, Gore was kept by her big sister while their parents worked.  She remembers sitting in a classroom, as a toddler, while her sister attended school, and learning along with the older children.

During WWI, many African-Americans migrated from the southern states, northward, in search of better jobs.  Gore recalls how her father went to St. Louis and earned enough money to buy his own farm. This gave them the chance to: improve their diet by growing their own food, keep all the profits their farm produced, and raise their standard of living.  Even so, because black children were needed during planting and harvesting, their school year was only three months long.

PODCAST EXTRA: Prior to WWI, Home Demonstration Clubs were established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These clubs taught young women food preparation and other homemaking skills. Gore explains how belonging to a Home Demonstration Club gave her the opportunity to attend Tougaloo College—a historic black school, founded just north of Jackson, Mississippi in 1869 by New York–based Christian missionaries for the education of freed slaves and their offspring.

PHOTO: The Mansion at Tougaloo College, Mississippi. http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/FreedomNow/scans/TJ0071.jpg