Nancy White, age 86, and her family all played significant roles in the shaping of the community today.
She has been a loyal reader of the Athens Messenger for over the last 80 years. Her story leading up to why she is still one of the newspaper’s loyal readers is a beautiful one to be told.
White was born about a mile and a half outside Albany and has lived there most of her life.
During the World War II, she lived in several places, including St. Paul, Minnesota, Cincinnati, and Covington, Kentucky, as well as other areas in Kentucky.
White’s education began in Louisville, Kentucky, where she went through kindergarten, first, and second grade. The summer after second grade, World War II ended and White and her family moved back to Albany.
White finished out high school and started her college journey with a year and a half of education at Ohio University. At the time, White’s family was running low on money, so she chose to drop out.
White moved to Columbus, where for many years she worked, married, and had her first son. White’s marriage did not work out, so she divorced and brought herself and her son back to Albany. She continued to stay with her family in Albany until her son started school and she went on to be a fourth-grade teacher for 30 years.
White’s family played a big role in the village of Albany. Her family had always lived in Albany. White’s uncle was the postmaster for many years, and her grandfather was a butcher by trade.
White recalled the story of her grandfather’s shop being robbed in 1910. She said her grandfather stayed late at his butcher shop every Saturday night. One particular night, a man came into her grandfather’s shop with a gun and robbed him, taking everything her grandfather had prepared for the upcoming week. A few weeks later, another robbery occurred in the same way, this time White’s grandfather was cutting pork chops with a cleaver.
White said her grandfather threw the cleaver at the suspect.
“The cleaver was stuck in the door behind the man,” she said. “He let out a blood-curdling shriek, turned around, ran out and up the street just as hard as he could go.
“When my grandfather went to retrieve the cleaver, there were black curly hairs stuck to it,” she said with a laugh. “He had shaved the guy’s head.”
White’s grandfather also owned the whole street of Everdeen Avenue. He bought the whole block where he built houses. It had been surveyed but nothing was sold. Her mother said she lived on every house on that street. They would build one house, live in it for a while as another was in progress, put the one they were in at the time on the market, and move to the next. The cycle repeated until the stock market dropped in 1929, and her grandfather lost everything.
White and her family also lived through the Great Depression. She recalls what it felt like having to pinch pennies to make a living, stating that there were times they could not even make a dollar between the whole family.
However, White states that she and her family ate well. They had gardens and animals. With her grandfather being a butcher who knew what to do, they would can the meat, because they did not have electricity for refrigeration. When they finally got electricity in their house, there was one light in each room.
White learned how to milk cows and do all types of fieldwork before she had even started school, her grandfather had a boy who died when White was 18 months old, so she stepped up.
“He picked me up, took me to the barn, and called me bud until the day he died,” White said.
White’s grandparents subscribed to the Athens Messenger. White’s grandma taught her to read the summer she turned 3, so she would also read the paper.
White said that a few words were a little difficult but she learned them real quick. Back then, the Messenger contained condensed books and a lot of local news. Every town has a correspondent that would tell who was visiting who, who was down with a cold, and as White put it “plain gossip.” White says that she became a loyal reader of the Athens Messenger paper because it told about people she knew, alot of the articles in the Messenger were about the people and places she was familiar with.
White says, “Somewhere in the late ‘40s or early ‘50s, they would run a condensed book in the Messenger, there was a section of it in once a week or every issue, I would look forward to getting the paper, so I could read the next installment.”
Although White is a loyal reader of the Messenger, she would like to see it published more than three times a week, even though she does not see where that is possible. White would also like to see a comeback of more local news.
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