Settling in Marietta

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"We lived there for a year and then moved up here. My husband got a job with Lockheed. He was a flight line mechanic. [Marietta was beautiful.] It was quiet. No traffic hardly. The Big Chicken was there, and it was a Chick, Chuck, and Shake back then. And Marietta, I lived in East Marietta, off of Powers Ferry, and it was just very pretty. Powers Ferry was a two-lane road, and it had woods. It was just beautiful out there. The Chattahoochee River, when you went from Powers Ferry to cross the Chattahoochee River, it was a swinging bridge-- one lane-- and people took turns going across, which wouldn't happen in this day and time. But it was very, very pretty around here.

The first place we lived was a duplex. Actually, the girl that I was with when I met my husband married the guy that he was with, and they ran into each other at Lockheed. And I was living in Carolina then, because we couldn't find a place to live up here, and they had a duplex-- told us it was empty-- so we moved up here and lived in the duplex with them, basically. And then we moved off of the square in Marietta on Fraser Street, and then we bought our house off of Powers Ferry in '57. So that was our first home, and I'm still there!

It's just a small two-bedroom house with a pine-panel den, and we have a basement that, when my daughter came, we didn't have anywhere to put her, so we built the basement in, because I had three boys, and we were able to keep them all together, but when she came along we didn't have anywhere to put her, so we built the basement in. Which I stay down there all the time now because it's dark.

We've had good neighbors. Most of them since the '60s. Of course a lot of them have passed away since. And now we have younger neighbors than we used to have, but for the most part we had very good neighbors back then. Everybody was from somewhere else. Nobody was from Georgia, because of Lockheed. So we were all kind of about the same age back then, and we'd just visit each other, and I got everybody drinking tea. So when I'd go to any of the neighbors, the first thing they'd do was put on the kettle, and we would have a cup of tea, so it was very nice."