Nancy Ayers - Rented Rooms
"Well, I guess you could say my mother and father were married in ’29. He couldn’t keep a job, you know, there just weren’t that many. He was in sales, and he simply couldn’t support her or me. So they divorced and so my mother and I lived with my grandparents. Then my grandfather died when I was four. Then it was kind of tough. We had a big house and had lots of bedrooms upstairs, so my grandmother rented out rooms to the performers that performed in one of two dinner and nightclubs in Phoenix in those days. It was right across the street from us at the end of Central Avenue. That is some of my fondest memories. We had a grand piano in the living room and so these performers would sleep all morning and would come afternoon and they would rehearse in the living room or on the front porch. What I liked the best was the tumbling acts! They would come and they would do that on our front porch, and it was fun to watch."
Nancy Ayers - Margarine
"The margarine was in a block and it was white. It was called NUCO and it came with a little packet of coloring. You opened the little packet and you squirted that into the white and you mixed it up so that it would look like butter. It was margarine, but it was called NUCO. That was my job and my favorite. We had steam heat, steam radiators in our house, and it was hard work, because you really had to mix that. It was really hard. OH, I got better things than this to do. So I go put the bowl on the radiator. I would probably forget all about it. Two hours later or the next morning, my grandmother would say, “What did you do with my margarine?” OH – it was soup. Anyway that was my regular job. A pain in the neck!"
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