Navigation
Volumes
|
(Testimony of Mrs. Lillian Murret)
Mrs. Murret.
store and buy some material and sit down and make herself a dress by hand, with what she had left from the $1, because whatever was left out of the $1 he gave us, if we had anything left, it didn't matter. We could buy anything for ourselves and so forth, that we wanted.
Mr. Jenner.
You mean he gave $1 to each of you each day?
Mrs. Murret.
$1 to feed the family; yes sir. We ate beans and rice and spinach and vegetables and bananas and things like that, but we didn't have big household expenses, you see. We didn't have a gas stove. We had a furnace and things like that. There were no electric lights. In the very beginning there weren't, and all of those expenses, you see, were out.
I have no bitterness toward my life as a child. In fact, I like to talk about it, because we were always so happy. We went skating. We had skates, and when we were teenagers, we would go skating around Jackson Square and the French Quarter, and so forth, and my aunt would let us take up her rug any time we wanted to dance, and she had a piano and we would go over there and dance and play the piano, and I might say that Marguerite was able to do different things. She was very entertaining. She could sing very well, not you know, to be a professional singer, but she had a good voice, and then when we had a piano that my father bought for $5 she learned to play by ear on the piano, so we really had a lot of fun.
We cooked our beans and ate our beans, and drank our coffee and ate our bread, and the rest of the time we didn't have to do all that children have to do today.
I find children today are under a great strain. Their parents want their children to grow up long before their years. They don't let them just take things in stride any more like they used to. Now, they go to the Blue Room and places like that, and they apparently think that's the thing to do.
Mr. Jenner.
What's the Blue Room?
Mrs. Murret.
That's in the Roosevelt Hotel.
Mr. Jenner.
Is it a place of entertainment?
Mrs. Murret.
Yes; entertainment, and of course they have to go bowling and they have to be baton twirlers, and they have to go to dances and all kinds of school events, and it's constantly going and coming all the time, and they just don't ever seem to relax like they used to.
They have children in my block who never stop. They have poor people around there, but they never seem to relax. They don't know how to relax apparently. My own children, well, I'm glad they didn't live like that either.
Mr. Jenner.
All right now, when John Edward Pic was approximately 2 years old, your sister, Marguerite, married Mr. Oswald; is that right?
Mrs. Murret.
That's right. Now, there's something else that happened during that time. She told me this, and I don't know whether it's true or not, but I guess it's true because I have never found my sister to lie about anything.
Mr. Jenner.
You never have?
Mrs. Murret.
No.
Mr. Jenner.
Have you ever found her to have hallucinations, that things didn't actually occur that she thought had occurred, or that she had a tendency to exaggerate or overstate something?
Mrs. Murret.
I would say, when you put it that way---I would say if she expected a person to do what she was thinking and a person didn't do that, well, then that was the wrong thing.
Mr. Jenner.
When that happened, did she get excited about it or angry, or show any emotional trait at all?
Mrs. Murret.
No; I don't think so. Now, maybe she may have appeared excited. I don't know if she was excited or not. I just always felt that she was really too quick. She would fly off too quick, and if you didn't think the way she .did about anything and you tried to explain to her, you would Just be wrong. You just couldn't get along with her if something would come up like that. Of course, it could be you who was at fault, so I'm not saying that she was at fault every time or anything like that. Maybe she was right, but you just couldn't reason with her if she thought she was right, and I don't think anybody can be right all the time.
|
Found a Typo?
Click here
|
