The World Through the Dime Store Door
A coming-of-age memoir evoking farm, mining, and small-town life in Alabama’s Tuscaloosa County as the world transitions from the Great Depression to World War II.
In the 1930s, the rural South was in the throes of the Great Depression. Farm life was monotonous and hard, but a timid yet curious teenager thought it worth recording. Aileen Kilgore Henderson kept a chronicle of her family’s daily struggles in Tuscaloosa County alongside events in the wider world she gleaned from shortwave radio and the occasional newspaper. She wrote about Howard Hughes’s round-the-world flight and her horror at the rise to power in Germany of a bizarre politician named Adolf Hitler. Henderson longed to join the vast world beyond the farm, but feared leaving the refuge of her family and beloved animals.
Yet, with her father’s encouragement, she did leave, becoming a clerk in the Kress dime store in downtown Tuscaloosa. Despite long workdays and a lengthy bus commute, she continued to record her observations and experiences in her diary, for every day at the dime store was interesting and exciting for an observant young woman who found herself considering new ideas and different points of view.
Drawing on her diary entries from the 1930s and early 1940s, Henderson recollects a time of sweeping change for Tuscaloosa and the South. The World Through the Dime Store Door is a personal and engaging account of a Southern town and its environs in transition told through the eyes of a poor young woman with only a high school education but gifted with a lively mind and an openness to life. Read more about it or purchase here.
When the Wolf Camped at Our Door: My Childhood in the Great Depression
This memoir recounts the hardships and joys the Kilgore family and their neighbors experienced in a close-knit southern rural community during the Great Depression.
As the Depression tightened its grip on the world, six members of the Kilgore family were living in a cramped farmhouse in Brookwood, Alabama. Crops didn’t grow well, food was scarce, shoes were in short supply, and the few clothes they had were all hand-me-downs. The Kilgores struggled to make ends meet, cobbling together odd jobs and working the land by hand.
Despite all of this, young Aileen thought life was full of hope. She longed to hold on to it, and scribbled down daily events on whatever odds and ends of paper she could find. In this memoir, Aileen Kilgore Henderson creates a vivid portrait of what life was like for so many living in the rural South during the Depression. The book begins when Aileen is ten years old and follows her into her teenage years over the course of twenty-seven episodic chapters. Drawing on her girlhood diaries and told through the charismatic voice of her younger self, Henderson’s nuance storytelling sheds light on the common struggle for survival during a time when people were at their most vulnerable.
Against the backdrop of a world where hard work and harsh conditions like hunger, privation, sickness, and early death were everyday realities, Henderson’s stories are nevertheless tinged with young Aileen’s lively sense of humor and optimistic faith in people and in the promise of life despite trying circumstances. We follow her rambles in the woods, her visits with friends, a trip to a fortune teller, and a search for the Howton Horror, a mysterious monster rumored to live deep in the Alabama backwoods. Read more about this book or purchase it here.
Tenderfoot Teacher
In 1952 Aileen Kilgore was teaching fourth grade at a school near where she grew up in Alabama. Her life was busy but she wished to see more of the world. Remembering exciting tales she'd heard of the Big Bend region in Texas, she wrote to the school board at Alpine, near the park, to apply for a position there. To her surprise an offer came back to teach at a new school within Big Bend National Park itself. She accepted. The young schoolteacher was at first overwhelmed by Big Bend: the wildness, the limitless space, the isolation, and the exuberant Texas children. But she soon came to love the area and the people. During her first year at Panther Junction, she met one special ranger named Art Henderson. When he was transferred to the Blue Ridge Parkway that summer, there was a hole in her life. During her two years at Panther Junction, Aileen wrote long and frequent letters to her family and, the second year, to the ranger she'd met. Those edited letters make up this book. Read more about it or purchase here.
Eugene Allen Smith’s Alabama: How a Geologist Shaped a State
In 1871 when the University of Alabama reopened after it was burned during the Civil War, Eugene Allen Smith returned to his alma mater as professor of geology and mineralogy. After persuading the legislature to appoint him state geologist in 1873, he spent his summers enduring chills, fevers, and verbal abuse as he searched for industrial raw materials that could bring about better lives for destitute Alabamians. What he accomplished became the catalyst that transformed Alabama from an aimless and poverty-stricken agricultural state to an industrial giant to be reckoned with. The story of “Little Doc,” as told in Eugene Allen Smith’s Alabama, is drawn from many sources: Smith’s transcribed field notes, countless numbers of letters he received and the carbon copies of his replies, his published reports over a period of fifty years, wills, genealogical records, histories of the state and of the University of Alabama, and contemporary newspapers. The many photographs—ferry crossings, wagon travel, even a 1988 tennis game—bring alive the Alabama of that era. Read more about it or purchase here.
Stateside Soldier: Life in the Women’s Army Corps, 1944-1945
"I don't know anybody who has ever done such a daring thing as I have done," twenty-two-year-old Aileen Kilgore of Brookwood, Alabama, wrote in her diary in January 1944, after enlisting in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) during World War II. From basic training in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to her discharge in late 1945, Kilgore served as one of more than 150,000 American women who joined the Women's Army Corps―the first group of women other than nurses to serve in the ranks of the United States Army. Aileen Kilgore Henderson has collected and edited diary entries and personal letters that recount in an engaging narrative style her twenty-three months of experiences in the Army. Henderson addresses a little explored facet of World War II―the military service of women stationed stateside.
Recording the excitement and anxiety of enlisting, along with the camaraderie, challenges, and monotony of military life and labor, Henderson had a keen eye for the newness of her undertakings. She worked as one of only six female airplane mechanics at Ellington Air Force Base and as a photo lab technician, and she provides animated descriptions of her duties and diversions on the base. A detailed document of daily life in the service, her writings also chronicle the cultural shock of a young woman from the hills of Alabama introduced to Army discipline; sharing close quarters with women of different religious, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds; and interacting with female officers, male soldiers, and civilians. Additionally, Henderson reveals the public scrutiny and criticism WAC members faced as they assumed nontraditional roles. A fascinating record of history in the making, Henderson's diary and letters offer a window into the lives of groundbreaking women and their lasting impact on the United States Armed Forces. Read more about it or purchase here.