Marie South Williams recalls rural life in southern Illinois and in Springfield during the early 20th century: family and farm life in DeSoto, Illinois, her grandmothers, household chores, homemade foods and remedies, holidays, crops, African Americans and discrimination, early schooling and at Carbondale, her husband, Frank Williams, teaching school, gangsters in Williamson County, Depression and prohibition, Charles Lindbergh, the 1925 tornado, coal mining and the mine wars, and operating a grocery store in Springfield.

6 tapes, 485 mins., 3 vols., 220 pp. Interview by Elizabeth K. Dixon, 1984 OPEN See collateral file: interviewer's notes and photocopies of photographs.