Cecil A. Partee Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

on. My mother and dad used to give me books at Christmas and birthdays and
that kind of thing. Not always just toys.
Q: So you liked reading very much, then.
A: Very much. And still do.
Q: Let's'see, were you involved in plays, dramatics, in any way?
A: Yes, we had dramatics there in high school and also, when I was in college,
I was a member of the Players Guild and also a member of the debating team
when I was in college. be of the motivations for the college was that--the
school had some formal dances and I didn't have a tuxedo, but if you made the
debating team, the school furnished you a tuxedo.
Q: Oh! Well! (laughter)
A: So that was a part of my motivation to get into it in college. But I
always enjoyed debating. It's always been a very interesting kind of thing
for me.
Q: Do you remember any of the plays in high school that you took part In?
A: Well, we had a play that we did, East Lynn. And what were some of the
others, I don't . . . Death Takes a Holiday, we did that in high school and
in college. I don't remember the names of any of the rest of them.
SESSION 2, TAPE 2, SIDE 1
Q: Sir, what I would like to do, if we could, is spend some more time on
Blytheville and your life in Blytheville.
A: Okay.
Q: What was your first job there, first paying job?
A: I guess my first paying job was selling newspapers.
Q: Yes. You talked about that the other day.
A: No, that's another experience. That was the daily papers. Z first sold
weekly papers, the ones that came out of Chicago, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh.
They were black papers and we sold them on the weekends. They were weekly
editions and I started writing a column in those papers so that I could say to
people, "Your name's in the paper,'' and they would buy one. (laughter) They
had news from all over, all these little towns where they sold their papers
down South. I wrote a column in all of them, just a little penny-ante news
about different things. As a consequence, people would buy them because
people never got their name in the paper in those days, unless they killed