JANIE GOULD

Leona Law Carlsward came to Vero Beach in a covered wagon in 1921 when she was 3. She and her parents and seven brothers and sisters moved down from Jasper in north Florida.

“Daddy’s brothers told him fishing was real good, that he could make a lot of money,” she said. “He packed us up on that wagon and brought us to Vero Beach, Florida. Every night we had a meal at the campfire. I didn’t like liver sausage, but we loved our daddy, and he let us sit on his lap and he would feed us. I was eating liver sausage because my daddy was feeding me!”

Her father, Nick Law, died unexpectedly in 1931, leaving her mother, Mary, to raise the large family.

“He left us with a good house and a little bit of money,” Carlsward said. “They always had money. They farmed tomatoes one time and made a fabulous amount of money. They were not educated, but they had a head full of common sense — I call it horse sense. One thing they taught us, you don’t go into debt to buy anything. If you can’t pay for it, you can do without it.  If they got a dollar, they didn’t spend it unless they had to. They taught us that and I thank God that they did! I don’t owe anybody!

“They taught us not to borrow anything from anybody unless we absolutely had to have it. There was an old couple who lived in our neighborhood.  The old man had a shovel. My mom needed the shovel real bad and she didn’t have one. She sent me over to Grandpa Johnson’s to borrow the shovel, but wouldn’t you know when she started to use it she broke the handle, and it almost broke her heart!  She went over there and told him about it, and said, I won’t bring it back until I have a new handle. Somehow or other she got a new handle, and then she took the shovel back.”

“We didn’t have a lot of nice furniture. We had good beds to sleep in and we always had plenty of food: a lot of fish, collard greens, corn bread, turnips, mustard greens. Our utility bill was just about the only bill we had.”

Q: “Well, I was going to ask if you had electricity.”

A: “Yes, we had electricity, but we just had lights in the ceiling. We didn’t have any electrical equipment.”

Mary Law washed the family’s clothes outside, using a rub board and tub.

“She hadn’t had a chance to wash because it had been so rainy, and I needed a clean dress. She went and got me a hand-me-down dress and she cut me out the best little dress I ever had.”

Q: “She took a dress and cut it down to your size?”

A: “Made me a cute little dress out of it, and she didn’t throw away the scraps! She made a lot of quilts. She could do just like a man. She planted sweet potatoes one year. When it was time to dig them out of the ground, I thought, what’s she going to do with all these sweet potatoes! She dug a hole and she filled it full of straw. She put those potatoes in there and not one of them rotted!”

Eight decades later, Leona Carlsward still remembers the kindness of people in Vero Beach after her father died.

“The Baptist church – the big Baptist church downtown — the ladies there made some of the prettiest dresses you ever saw. Sometimes people would leave groceries on our front porch.”

Mary Law struggled to support her children by taking in washing and mending. Reluctantly, she agreed to meet with someone who represented a new agency called Social Security.

“She got $80 a month from Social Security! She couldn’t believe it! She said, is it all right for me to cash the check?”

Leona Carslward and her late husband, Arthur, had four children. She worked the night shift for 27 years as a switchboard operator at Indian River Memorial Hospital. She still lives in the same neighborhood in the heart of Vero Beach that her parents brought her to more than 90 years ago.

This interview was first heard on Janie Gould’s award-winning Floridays series on WQCS radio/88.9 FM. To hear other Floridays shows, go to wqcs.org and click on News.