Born Montgomery Alabama, 416 Finley Ave, Montgomery, Alabama the house my father and mother bought, they did not even go on a honeymoon, they went right to this house that daddy had bought.  We lived there, I was the fourth child.    My oldest brother Oliver, my sister Susie, my brother Frank then I was born.

Susie died when I was 4 years old after we had moved out to Mt Meigs, which is out from Montgomery, on a farm.  Daddy wanted to try living on a farm.  So we , Nell was born in Montgomery, there at home, she is 4 years younger than I am.  When we moved out to Mt Meigs, my mother’s father, O. J. Nix he was known as, Oliver Judson Nix, moved out with us, he bought a model T Ford.  We moved about 1916, the War had started or was going on.  We lived out there, Grandpa Nix drove into Montgomery, Oliver and Frank went to school in Montgomery and they waited at the library until Grandpa picked them up to come home every evening.  Grandpa Nix did office work and collections at Vesuvius Lumber Company.  We have a picture of him with stacks of lumber, he was a good looking man.  While we were living at Mt Meigs, my sister Susie had diphtheria and died and I well remember all of us going to have the shot, the antitoxin.for diphtheria.  No one else in the family had it.  I remember faintly the funeral, she was buried in Montgomery in the plot of my Grandfather Nix where his mother and mother’s aunt were buried.  I don’t know where my mother’s mother was buried because she died when mother was 4 years old.  Grandfather’s sister, Aunt Sue Nix had lived with my mother and grandfather to look after mother.  As mother said they didn’t have a home, I guess it was almost a boarding house, they lived at Mrs. Shaw’s house in Montgomery which is a historic house that has been restored.  The Shaw house was where grandfather and Aunt Sue lived.  We were always friends of the Shaw family.  I slept in that house many times when I went back to Montgomery.   My father thought that he was going to have to go to the war [WWI].  I faintly remember standing on the sidewalk in Montgomery watching a parade of soldiers who were going to have to go to war.  Daddy was marching in the parade carrying a flag which we had for many years, but I don’t know whatever happened to it.  But the war ended in time that he did not have to go. 

This friend of the family in Whaley, Mississippi, wanted daddy to come over there and run his plantation.  So we moved to Whaley, MS, when I guess I was 5 years old because the one room schoolhouse needed me to start to school at 5 years old because otherwise they did not have enough children to get a teacher.  So I started to school in this one room school.  We had a nice house.  The river was right across the road from our house.  The river would get up almost to the road.  Mother was very nonchalant about us.  Having been a Latin teacher and having no brothers and sisters she just let us run wild.  Frank and I built a kind of tree house in this tree across the road from the house in the woods.  Also when the river got up, we would go swimming in that river.  I well remember that I could not swim, but Frank said just get on my back and I will swim.  Frank was 11 at that time.  I got on his back and we went down to the bottom but we got out. 

Mother said that the bottom dropped out of the cotton market.  We moved to Decatur Alabama where Daddy’s brother Murray was in the insurance and real estate business.  When we moved to Decatur my cousin’s grandparents had a house that we rented next door to Uncle Murray, and Aunt Francis and Madeline and Arthur , our cousins.  I was in the 3rd grade then.  This was very different from the one room school in Mississippi where I was the only one in the 3rd grade.  Mother said that I came home one day and said that I didn’t need to know all the answers all you had to do was hold up your had for the teacher to call on you.  So that was the end of my studious education.  We lived in Decatur until I finished High School.  Daddy had bought a house further down on the same street where we had been renting.  We moved further down the street on Line street in Decatur.  Oliver had finished high school in Greenwood, MS , about 14 miles from Whaley.  He stayed with a family that had a son his age in the same school.

I finished high school when I was 16 years old and in the fall I went to Montevallo, Alabama College for Women, where my mother had taught before she was married.  Evidently the president of the college knew that mother had taught there and One day I got a note to come to the president’s office.  And went down and he talked with me about mother teaching there.  Then the depression came along.  I finished high school in 1929 and it was all we could do to send me to college.  So I went 2 years to Montovallo, then I went back home, since we did not have the money, seems like it was just $150 per term.  But I went back home and lived at home.  My Uncle Murray died and Arthur his son graduated from college and came into the business and I worked in the office.  (Uncle Murray reportedly died from Bright’s disease.)  Then Arthur died and Daddy bought out Madeline and made it an incorporated business.  I was president, and mother was vice president and Daddy was secretary and manager or something like that.  Nell had graduated from college and was teaching school in Demopolis AL and she was not getting paid.  They gave them certificates so Daddy was having to send her money to live on.  So she resigned and came home and we both worked in the office.  We collected rents, there was not any buying and selling of real estate because no one had money to buy anything.  We did have the insurance business, fire insurance and car insurance.  That carried us through.  When Daddy died in 1938, I believe, (actually Oct 1939) Nell and I took over the business as partners.  (P. F. Dix died of liver disorder, suspected to be the result of damage suffered years earlier when he had malaria.)

In the meantime, I had known Ed Sproles when he worked for TVA there in Decatur.  He was working in Philadelphia for the weather bureau.  He came down to see me in 1941?, we went to Birmingham to the Alabama-Tennessee football game and on the way home we stopped and overlooking the river, he asked me to marry.  I told him that I would have to confer with Nell because that would leave her holding the bag.  She said go ahead, which was very magnamous, so we married May 10, 1941 and Ed was stationed in Philadelphia.  When we married we went to Honeymoon Island in Florida for our vacation.  You did not have to pay anything, you just applied to the person that owned the island.   We went there for week, it was a beautiful place.  It is located off of Duneiden, FL, near Tampa.  There was no one on the island except honeymooners and the couple that was running it.  There were just little cabins, separate cabins along the beach and shower and bathhouse, kind of like camping.  Then we drove up through Georgia and Williamsburg, VA and it was so hot that we practically ran in and out of the houses.  So we got to Philadelphia where Ed had had a room with a Mrs. Richer in Sharon Hill, a suburb of Philadelphia.  And Ed was stationed at the Philadelphia airport.  Since he worked odd hours we had a lot of daytime when he was on midnight shift we went to daytime to go sightseeing so we covered a lot of Philadelphia.  We enjoyed going to Fairmont Park, at that time there was a tea house at valley green and we would stop and have a cold drink.  Sometimes the people at the airport were given tickets to the baseball game and we would go to the game.  Also, the concerts in the park.  We went to hear Gertrude Lawrence and some of the other famous people at that time.  Ed was informed that we would be sent to Laguardia airport in New York, but he could not be released from Philadelphia because they did not have anyone to take his place.  Finally, we thought that we were going, but he got orders to go to Atlanta instead., the regional office.  We were delighted because it was like a raise in salary because it would not cost as much to live there.  In the meantime, we had gotten a lovely third floor apartment in Landsdown, PA, we were just in from May to Dec.  A lovely apt, living room, big kitchen with eating space, and a bedroom and bath, furnished in antiques.  The lady who owned the house, husband was in the army in Trindad.  She was French, he had brought her back from WWI.  So we moved to Atlanta the 16 th of December, 1941.  We had to find an apartment.  Our wedding presents were still in Decatur.  We managed to drive to Decatur at Christmas 1941 and bring back these barrels of wedding presents.  I have left out so much.  It was nice to get back and see everyone in Decatur.  We found an apartment, I put an ad in the paper the way we got the one in Landsdown.  Apartment in house on St Charles Ave.  A few years ago a friend sent an article from the paper that this house had been made into condominiums.  We lived there for four years. 

We moved to Miami in December 1945 and Edward was born in January 1946.  Our good friends, Clark and Margaret Farber, good friends from Atlanta found us a place in Miami.  I transferred to a doctor in Miami.  Edward was born in St Francis hospital, Allis Island, Miami beach.  The doctor had all his patients go there , a Catholic Hospital that required you to stay there 10 days or you had to pay for it anyway. 
(Louis Darter, lives in Bethesda, Maryland, his relatives had the plantation in Mississippi.  Mr. and Mrs. O. C. Neil. They had two children, a boy and girl, Phillip and Francis.  We were all in that one room school house.  There was nothing there at Whaley except a general store, a house for a man that worked for the railroad.  And a little station.  There was a big sawdust pile so there must have been a sawmill.  Frank and I played in it with grandpa’s civil war sword, and we lost it.  We spent all our spare time looking for it in the sawdust, and we finally found it.  Floyd has it now.  Along with Grandpa’s civil war flintlock gun.  Oliver stayed in Greenwood, Mississippi, they had a son Oliver’s age.  We were just there 2 or 3 years.   Mrs. Neil was Louis Darter’s aunt.  He called the other day and his daughter brought him over.  He is Frank’s age.)

I doubt that there is much at Whaley.  The Neil’s house burned sometime later.  We heard from the 2 children for sometime from Francis over the years, mother did.  Everybody loved mother, especially the children.  Mary Louise Garate, on my Christmas card in Decatur, said I will always remember mother and how sweet she was to me.  Doug Hayes Sr. said Mrs. Dix is my idea of a southern gentlewoman.

The move from Miami to Washington.
In Maimi we were living in a little guest house at the end of driveway.  Ed got orders to come to Washington for 2 months about January 1947 for a class.  He came back to Florida, and in May we drove back to Washington and mother came with us.  We got a motel in Alexandria and started looking for an apartment.  Fortunately, Myrna Deason and her husband were sent to New Orleans on detail and they let us have their apartment in Park Fairfax.  We hardly slept because I went out everyday looking for an apartment.  We finally found one the week that they were coming back.  We found the apartment in Alexandria, the Abingdon apartments, a one bedroom.  It is a lovely location overlooking the river, I think that it has been made into condominiums.  We were there 3 years, in a one bedroom and then in a 2 bedroom.  They were going to raise the rent so Ed said we will just have to buy a house.  We had no money but we managed the down payment on this house in Arlington. 

We moved in the fall, October probably because we met the neighborhood at Halloween at trick or treat.  You had your fifth birthday in the house on Vermont Street in Arlington because we arranged the birthday celebration.  We took your friends down to Roslyn, to ride the train.  There was a commuter train that ran beside the house on Vermont street, where I-66 is now.  Ed rode the train with the children.  I had called the railroad office and asked how to get the train to stop at our house.  The man said just get out on the track and flag them down.  So the children rode the train to the house and the train stopped and all got off.