Mrs. Murret. $1 to feed the family; yes sir. We ate beans and rice and spinach and vegetables and bananas and things like that, but we didn't have big household expenses, you see. We didn't have a gas stove. We had a furnace and things like that. There were no electric lights. In the very beginning there weren't, and all of those expenses, you see, were out.
I have no bitterness toward my life as a child. In fact, I like to talk about it, because we were always so happy. We went skating. We had skates, and when we were teenagers, we would go skating around Jackson Square and the French Quarter, and so forth, and my aunt would let us take up her rug any time we wanted to dance, and she had a piano and we would go over there and dance and play the piano, and I might say that Marguerite was able to do different things. She was very entertaining. She could sing very well, not you know, to be a professional singer, but she had a good voice, and then when we had a piano that my father bought for $5 she learned to play by ear on the piano, so we really had a lot of fun.
We cooked our beans and ate our beans, and drank our coffee and ate our bread, and the rest of the time we didn't have to do all that children have to do today.
I find children today are under a great strain. Their parents want their children to grow up long before their years. They don't let them just take things in stride any more like they used to. Now, they go to the Blue Room and places like that, and they apparently think that's the thing to do.
Mr. Jenner. What's the Blue Room?
Mrs. Murret. That's in the Roosevelt Hotel.
Mr. Jenner. Is it a place of entertainment?
Mrs. Murret. Yes; entertainment, and of course they have to go bowling and they have to be baton twirlers, and they have to go to dances and all kinds of school events, and it's constantly going and coming all the time, and they just don't ever seem to relax like they used to.
They have children in my block who never stop. They have poor people around there, but they never seem to relax. They don't know how to relax apparently. My own children, well, I'm glad they didn't live like that either.
Mr. Jenner. All right now, when John Edward Pic was approximately 2 years old, your sister, Marguerite, married Mr. Oswald; is that right?