Sad to say, but I don't really know a lot about mom's background. Unlike dad she had a reasonably stable childhood, as far as I know. She was raised by her mother, Priscilla Walker, and her father, William H. Singletary. Her dad worked at the Mississippi Power plant and I guess her mom was a housewife. Mom had three brothers, Bill, Doug, and Harold, and they lived in Gulfport all their lives.As a young girl she worked in Mrs. Hattie Hobbs' beauty salon where she claimed to have worked on Lizzie Borden's hair. Mom actually managed to graduate from high school.
Other than the Lizzie Borden story, mom never told me much about her youth. So I'll have to get someone else to fill me in there. How she ended up meeting dad, I don't know, but they must have had some chemistry together because Gaynelle was born just over nine months after they married.
I do know that we had a great mom. She wasn't June Cleaver, far from it, but she was a typical housewife of the time. She did all the laundry, cooking, cleaning, ironing and she used to make clothes for us as well.
To earn spare money, she used to do ladies' hair in her bedroom. . Her big customers were Lou Rose Thompson and Ann Koval. I remember many days I'd be playing in the floor while she worked on someone's hair. She'd let me play with the hairpins, curlers, and clips. I also remember her having a freestanding Sunbeam electric hairdryer. It looked like half of a huge football on a pole.
When I was in high school, she'd make me these really nice shirts. I'd go with her to the fabric store and pick out the material and she'd whip out a shirt in a couple of days. Some of my favorites were the one made out of green material that looked like the tips of a peacock's feather, a denim one that she embroidered flowers on the yoke, and this material that looked like mountains and clouds. My absolute favorite things she made were a Levi's jacket with an embroidered eagle's head on the back (it was stolen in 1980) and a satin dashiki that has a sequined phoenix on the back.