November 13, 1979, Tuesday Aunt Estelle wrote

Clear, cloudy.   Curt was here awhile.  I took Aunt Rosalee to grocery store.  Helped Randy in the tobacco part of the evening.  They took it off tonite.   


Footnote:    Curt is her brother-in-law.    Aunt Rosalee is married to Uncle Millard Baker and he was a half-brother to Estelle's mother, Lula Baker Reasor.    Does anyone know if Mamie Reasor (Lula) had a middle name?    Never heard it if she did.   Randy is the sharecropper who helped raise the tobacco crop.  He will share in the money received from the sale of the tobacco.      I remember my Daddy saying the men who came from the tobacco companies "just stole our tobacco".  He said the big company officials  never thought it was worth as much as the poor farmer thought it was.  There was a huge building in Pennington Gap, called the tobacco warehouse and this is where all the local farmers would bring their trucks loaded with baskets of tobacco .   The officials from the tobacco companies would come to the warehouse, inspect the tobacco and then bid on the lot.   I remember being in the warehouse just once and seeing the rows and rows of tobacco laid out in an orderly fashion and the smell is something to never forget.