an oral history, part I

Tuesday, January 12, 1982

The setting for the interview is Liz and George Malgran's home in Belmar, NJ.

The first interview is with Liz.

Q.

On my mother's side, I can go back to my great-grandfather. His name was William Wade Hopkins. He was an MD in the Civil War. His wife was Martha Elizabeth Stokes Hopkins. Those are my great grandparent on my mother's side.

My grandmother on my mother's side was a McQuary, born in Chester, South Carolina. We think that her family came from Scotland, because of the spelling of her last name. Her name was Ida Elizabeth McQuary Hopkins. She was picked up as a child on the street in one of the South Carolina towns that the Yankees burned during the Civil War. She was wandering around and only knew her name—she was hysterical—she had lost her whole family. And a family by the name of Williams, ironically, picked her up and took her to Mississippi and reared her.

And there in turn she married the son of William Wade Hopkins, the doctor. Her husband was a traveling salesman. He sold notions to the various stores, by horse and buggy. Later, when things were bad, he hitch-hiked to get around. They had two children and educated them well and lived in Laurel, Mississippi. So on both sides my grandparents were affiliated in some way with the Civil War, my great grandfather being a doctor and my grandmother being an orphan.

Q.

Nothing. My mother tried to go through this Williams family and find out what they knew, but evidently everything was burned and destroyed—that was the end of it.

On my father's side my grandmother was Julian Victoria Lancaster Williams, an Indian, we think of the Choctaw tribe. My daddy thinks she was born in Oklahoma, but my Aunt Minnie thinks she was born in Duck Hill, Mississippi. Her family owned land in Oklahoma around what is now the town of Lancaster. Her brother David was the only one able to claim the land (because he could afford to make the trip from Mississippi) during the depression when ownership was being disputed. That was the area where oil was struck.

My grandfather's family came from France and we think that they were fur trappers. He fought in the Civil War—he enlisted when he was sixteen—and was in the Battle of Vicksburg. He married and had three children with his first wife; Luther, John and Ella. Then he married my grandmother. They lived in Duck Hill, Mississippi and had twelve children, including two sets of twins. The oldest set died in infancy. William David was the oldest boy and Lulu the oldest girl, the lone surviving twin. Next came Etta, Lon, Robert and my Aunt Minnie.

They farmed cotton and raised all their own food. The children worked in the fields, but it was a fun-loving family and they loved to sing and dance and laugh together. I can remember as a child the fun we had when we got together. We enjoyed the music from their old Victrola—the wind-up kind.

My grandfather was born on December 8, 1844 and died at 101 on January 28, 1946. My grandmother went to her bed the day he was buried and stayed there until she died of grief on March 28, 1946. She was about 82 years old.

My father, Robert Alexander Williams, was the manager of a plantation near Jonestown, MS called Eagles Nest when he and my mother met. She was a bookkeeper in Clarksdale. They married and lived there [in Jonestown], and that's where I was born. My sister that died was born there too.

In 1927 we moved to Dundee, MS to a large plantation that my father managed and my sister Dorothy Emanuel was born there that first year. A drought in 1930 devastated the crops and the plantation owner went bankrupt. My father took a job on a small farm for the next two years, where my brother Robert Alexander, Jr. was born. Daddy farmed and milked the cows and my mother was employed by the WPA managing a sewing room where they made clothes for poor people. Then she became a bookkeeper for a plantation owner and we rented a farm on the levee at Austin, MS. They made enough money to rent a larger farm near Tunica, MS, which they bought in 1956 for $15,562.50.

During my childhood I remember that we never wanted for food, since the farm provided all or most of our needs. But we didn't have much in the way of clothing or other material goods. I can recall my father sewing the soles of my shoes that became floppy with the leather from the horse's harness.

Q.

My Dickie adored my father. They'd go for rides together on the tractor or in the truck and spent many happy hours together. They fished together—the way that George enjoys fishing with his grandsons. And my mother was so proud of Dickie when he graduated from Rutgers, that she gave him a new car—a yellow Rambler convertible. He loved that car. Of course, that was only three months after my father's death, in March 1967. My mother died in January of 1979. According to her wishes, the farm was sold in September of 1980, auctioned off.

Q.

I was the secretary for the Commander of the base near Meridian, Key Field. [George and I] met at a dance. We both loved to dance—still do.

Q.

You can imagine him in his combat boots and Private's uniform, and a Yankee! But my parents were quite good about it. They just wanted me to be happy. When he was sent to Panama, I waited for him for thirteen months. They were down there with wooden guns. If the Japanese had ever attacked, they wouldn't have had a chance. But of course I didn't know that then. One day he called me from Texas and said he would be in Mississippi in three days and could we get married and go north to meet his folks? I arranged everything. We had a lovely candlelight ceremony in the Chapel, the day he arrived. My family came and we left after dinner on the 1 a.m. train heading north. It was so crowded that we had to stand. Finally, as we passed through Virginia, a sailor got up and gave me his seat, and the fellow next to him gave George his seat too.

Q.

Very warm and loving. As you know, his mother and I became very close and she taught me how to cook all the Armenian dishes.

Q.

Well, she never told me how much of anything to use—a pinch of this, or a handful of that, but I learned from experience.

Q.

Yes, and don't forget, it was winter. I had never been out of Mississippi before and George left me with his parents and was sent to Chanute Field, near Chicago. He became very ill there, I think it was a very bad cold, probably because of the change in climate.

Anyway, I went back to Mississippi and worked until March, 1944. George had been sent to the Air Base near St. Joseph, MO, Rosecranz Field. He looked up an Armenian family from the phone book so that he would have and Armenian contact nearby, and we became good friends. They had a business and owned a three-room cottage on their property that was not being used, which George offered to fix up if they would let him rent it. At that time, I had gone back to Mississippi to have my baby and returned in March of 1944 when he was six weeks old, by train. I had the crib shipped up and George had done a wonderful job of painting, wallpapering and digging up furniture from different sources for our little house. The Service made it possible for us to get a gas stove, because appliances were very difficult to get, and the house was heated with space heaters. We lived there until November of 1945, when George was sent to Paterson Field in Ohio to be discharged. I went back to New Jersey and stayed with his parents. We lived in their house on the first floor—the two rooms in Union City. Our apartment had no heat, so we only slept there and ate our meals upstairs, where I also spent my days with the baby. I spend a lot of time with him at the park, to give us both fresh air and some exercise.

Then George's father bought a six-family house in West New York, with the idea that we would have one of the apartments. It took almost ten months to get the tenants out of there. We had a four-room apartment until our little boy was about five years old, but towards the end of that time George's mother, father and sister moved in with us, because he had sold the house in Union City. There were six of us in that four room apartment. I couldn't wait to move. We drove to Hackensack to look at an apartment that was for rent. I was three months pregnant. We loved that apartment—it was a two-family house with a yard and the school across the street. We lived there for two years, until we bought our house in Woodridge in January, 1953. Suzanne was about two years old then. The day we moved, there was a terrible snow storm and George had gone to work, thinking the movers would help us shovel a path to the house. But they just sat in the warm truck and I, along with a neighbor, shoveled out the driveway and a path up to the front door. It was a very nice neighborhood and the people were wonderful. It was close for George to commute to New York too.

We've had a lot of hard times, but they only made the good times better. We've had a lot of fun too, and have some wonderful friends and great memories.

[end of tape 1]


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