01 Treopia Washington: A Fortunate Family

Transcript:

I often talk with my brothers about how fortunate we were to grow up in the kind of family that we did. My mother was a teacher. My mother received her bachelor’s degree in 1924 from Wilberforce College in Ohio. My father was a WWI veteran and in fact, some of the first words that I remember being taught were ‘Parlez-vous Francais’. He spent quite a bit of time in Marseilles and I recall his talking about that. My father probably finished maybe elementary school but was a huge proponent of education and supported everything that the family felt that the three of us should do educationally. My father was a janitor at the post office and the postmistress at that time was the wife of the senator from Arkansas. So whenever Presidents would visit Little Rock, she would entertain them at dinner and would have my father serve the dinner. And I remember vividly, I guess I was about, I don’t know, 4, 5, President Truman visited Little Rock and my father told my mother to bring me over and he told us exactly where to sit in the garden, where President Truman’s car would stop and I recall seeing President Truman in a white linen suit and a Panama hat, and he stopped and chatted with us. And my mother laughed because she said when she was expecting me, President Roosevelt came and the same thing happened. So we’ve had a chance to see several Presidents. My father would always, when there were dinner parties, he knew that my mother and I liked nice pretty things and I remember he served a wedding and while the bride was at the church, he called and my mother took me over so I could see all the beautiful decorations. And I think that was why on every Sunday, we would have, of course, dinner in the dining room with the linen tablecloth and the linen napkins and we grew up and my father was a stickler for china and crystal and silver. In those days, when he served parties he would bring home food. I thought that everybody had filet minion every week, because I had filet minion just about every week. And I can remember one day he brought, unbeknownst to my brothers and me, a lobster and when we opened the refrigerator door, there was this huge lobster staring at us. And I tease my brothers now because during that time, I enjoyed the petit fours, the filet mignon and all those nice things. And my brothers would tell my mother, ‘We don’t want that, we want peanut butter and jelly.’ Of course, their tastes have changed too.