Summary:
Eunice Brashear Collins describes her family’s long-standing ownership of land at Scuddy (subsequently a coal mining community), Perry County, Kentucky as well as her childhood and youth there in the 1920s and 1930s. Ms. Collins touches on her high school and early employment at nearby Vicco, as well as an early teaching job at Scuddy. In the later recollection, she briefly discusses race conditions in Perry County, including one particularly violent episode. Collins vividly recalls her two years at Alice Lloyd College at Pippa Passes, Kentucky, and the forces that eventually persuaded her to migrate to Louisville as a single woman, where she sought further education and held a series of World War II jobs. That work included employment at the Jeffersonville, Indiana U. S. Army Quartermaster Depot, the Charlestown, Indiana powder plant where she worked on the bagging production line, and finally as a business teacher at a Bowman Field recuperation facility for wounded soldiers. Collins describes how she met Bill Collins, whom she married just before he was shipped out for three years of military service, and the early difficulty he faced in the immediate postwar period when he settled in Louisville. Finally, Eunice describes her educational preparation and career advancement to principal of Chenoweth Elementary School in the old Jefferson County Public Schools and the special role she played in the mid-1970s in a merged system responding to a court-ordered desegregation plan.
Topic(s):
World War, 1939-1945, Teachers, Jefferson County Public Schools, Busing for school integration