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A Depiction of My Humble Beginnning...

I was born in Arkansas and I came from a generation after generation of poverty. No one seemed to want to try and better themselves. If I tried to better myself with knowledge, I was told that I was "uppity." It was very tough and I had to fight my way out. It was not easy but I was very determined.

We never knew what indoor plumbing was when I was growing up. Sometimes we had a pump in the yard for water and sometimes we had to go to the creek.

I can remember going to school wearing nursing shoes that someone had given me, and I was in junior high school at that time. Yes, of course, I was embarrassed, but I was determined to get an education. When I was young, my dad insisted on buying me high top boy's shoes, so they would last.

I truly never understood why he never answered the door when opportunity knocked! There were many knocks.

The people in my family were very backwards. Living in generation after generation of poverty in the backwoods of Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee, we always seemed to live at the end of a dirt road, with our nearest neighbor living approximately 3-5 miles away.

I was working as a farm laborer by the time I was 9 years of age. My father was a sharecropper and he always seemed to "owe his soul to the company store." They gave us credit throughout the year, for groceries and some of the necessities for life. At the end of the year somehow, he still "owed money to the company store."

My dad seemed content to be a sharecropper. He had opportunities to better himself, but when opportunity knocked, he never answered the door.

My mother and grandmother would buy flour in cloth sacks (always trying to get matching patterns) and they would make clothes for my sister and me. They made us dresses, gowns, and underwear. That underwear made for some good scratching! We used socks for gloves. If our socks had holes in them, my mother and grandmother patched them. I made a promise to myself, at that time, that when I grew up I would never wear socks with holes in them again!

When I was around the age of 9 or 10, I found an ad in the newspaper, which we used as wallpaper, regarding nurses training being available. I cut the article out and hid it behind an exposed board on the wall. From time to time, I would take it out and read it. I felt that this was my big opportunity and I wanted to be a nurse.

Although, I never became a nurse, I became an entrepreneur! When I heard, KNOCK-KNOCK, I answered the door!