Interview with Karen Abbott, September 15, 2021

Could you tell me your name?

My name is Karen Abbott.

And who are you with?

And I'm here with my friend, Angie Whitehurst.

Today, we're here to talk about celebrations in Petworth and your experience with celebrations. You've brought out some photographs. Could you tell us about some of those?

Certainly. I—My mother and father, my stepfather loved to pet parties. And we, we did, she would have this basement. As a matter of fact, my father built the bar down here and we'd have card parties and parties for anything, just—just parties. And of course we weren't allowed to attend. But we could—we knew—we could hear the fun and we would sneak down and peek.

But this, Angie, is a picture of my Aunt Betty at one of the parties. She's dancing. And that's my step, the back of my stepfather's head. But he did all the work down here so they could party. This basement was just a, it was a cellar, and he he fixed it up and put paneling on the walls and, they entertained—they entertained all their guests down here or in the kitchen. This picture happens to be in the kitchen and my mother used to have old kitchen tools, you know, the grind, the meat grinders, the shears the ice—what do you call them, the ice tongs, the huge ones, and she hung them on our wall. And I guess this is a picture of her husband, my stepfather, with the ladder hanging, some of those items on the. I still happen to have the same ladder upstairs.

This is a picture of my mother and her girlfriends. And they are having their little drinks in the den upstairs. This is a picture of my mom. I think they might be in, I can't tell. I think they might be either down here or in the backyard. I can't tell. But again, their party here in Petworth, all the time parties.

This is an old picture of what the backyard used to look like. The yard extends all the way out to where the little—the station wagon is and we had a fence and got a big walnut tree in the back, and had a fence in front of the walnut tree and her her tables, which had the umbrella during the summer, and they'd sit back there and party.

And my mother loved to have dinner parties. And she was a fabulous cook, and this is one with her friends and I don't know if we were cleaning up or whatever.

But looks like a lot of fun.

Yeah, we had a lot of fun. And this is a picture of the backyard. This table, as a matter of fact, it was where she used to do a lot of—she had a garden, a vegetable garden, and she would do all of her potting on that table. Oh, and this one you can hardly see but it's a picture of, in our backyard, and evidently the children. We would have been running around and being bad. But we were, we had to all lay down with our heads on the table and be quiet.

What do you think you did?

I have no idea. We were always doing something.

That's terrific. Sounds like you had quite a few parties in this house.

Oh, lots of parties in this house.

How has the idea of celebration or your celebrations changed since since these pictures were taken? How would you describe—?

I actually do have that tendency of my mother's. I got that from her. I love to party. I love to have house parties. I have not done it in many years. But yes, I love the house party.

And she likes to get dressed up.

And I love to get dressed up. So yeah.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.