A Century of Living: The Life of Esta Carter

By Elijah Crabtree

As an assignment for one of his history classes for Professor Colin Smith , Manchester High School senior Elijah Crabtree chose to interview and write an essay on the life of Ms. Esta Carter and was kind enough to share the assignment with the Defender for publication.

A Century of Living: The Life of Esta

A lot has happened from 100 years ago to today, with many major events and inventions. The purpose of this assignment is to gather the perspective of an individual that has experienced a century’s worth of events. I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to interview a person whose life witnessed almost every major event and shift in the 20th century and early 21st century. The person I’m going to interview is Ms. Esta Carter of Manchester, Ohio. Esta was born July 8th, 1923, her full name at birth was Esta Albertine Jenkins. This is shortly after World War 1 ended. Esta has witnessed more historical events than almost anyone else on the planet. Sitting down and having a conversation with her drives home the idea of how convenient life has become in the 21st century and how far the human race has advanced in just one lifetime.

She was raised not too far out of Manchester in a town that no longer exists called Clayton. Her home was a tiny home that she shared with her mother and father and seven siblings, some who passed away very young. This home never had electricity, until after she was long grown. Light was provided by lanterns, and cooking was done on a wood stove. They would burn the wood stove all year round, even through the hot summers. Their water was gathered from cisterns and wells, which she said the “well water was colder than the cistern”.

When I asked, “How did the Great Depression affect your family” she replied, “I can remember hearing my mother talk about it. She said she thought the family would starve to death.”

Esta recalled, “It was dry this summer, no rain and the crops and gardens burned up. You couldn’t…you just didn’t have any way, you know. And we had a neighbor, an old man who would walk to the Clayton store, and he talked to himself. And we could hear him talk when he passed our house and he would say, ‘Oh Hoover won’t even let it rain.’” The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in modern history, lasting from 1929 until the beginning of World War II in 1939. The causes of the Great Depression included slowing consumer demand, mounting consumer debt, decreased industrial production and the rapid and reckless expansion of the U.S. stock market.

The earliest times and memories she recalled were from the first grade. They walked to school every day and it was about a three mile walk one way. The schoolhouse she explained to me was a single room and the insulation was not the greatest. She told us games she used to play as a kid were playing with rocks and tin cans. She explained the games with tin cans where they would put the tin cans on a log or on the ground and you had to hit them with the rock so many times. Sometimes Esta and her siblings would play with the animals they had on the farm, mostly the dogs. On the farm they also had chickens and milking cows. Esta recalled a time in childhood when her older sister tried to make her own ink using berries and lye from her mother’s soap ingredients. Her sister was heating the ink on the wood stove, and it exploded in her face making her have to have her eyes covered with 10 or 12-inch thick bandages and had to stay in a dark room. Esta even remembered times when she would sneak into the get-well candy baskets that people would drop off for her sister. Esta would take the candy, and her sister would never know because she could not see.

Esta and her family would use the eggs from the chickens and sell a dozen for around 6 to 9 cents, and this was how they bought their groceries. Along with the eggs, there was milk that had to be done by hand and when they did not drink it, they would put it in a barrel in the ground to keep cool. The barrel would only keep things cool for a few days, but they always took the milk out every day, so it was always fresh. Girls weren’t allowed to wear pants in these days, Esta said, “We wore dresses. And when it was cool, we wore socks that come up to your knees.”

When I asked her what inventions or changes have amazed her the most, she said that her older brother had been really into new inventions and had brought home a radio. They didn’t have electricity, so her brother had wired it to his car’s battery. Esta said, “and I can remember when that voice, when you heard that voice. Yeah. That was really something.”

Ms. Esta lived through many impactful events in history. One of those events was World War II, a conflict that involved virtually every part of the world during the years 1939–45. Over 40 million deaths were incurred in World War II making it the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history.

Esta’s husband, her brother-in-law and her two brothers all served in World War II. Her brother-in-law, Johnny Carter, was killed in action on the beaches of Normandy during D-Day. She said, “He was a sergeant. And he was in a foxhole and was with a boy from here. They were in there together, and this boy said that Johnny said, ‘Well, I’ve got to get out of here and check on my men.’ He stepped out and they shot him.” That was a painful moment in her family’s history, because they wouldn’t let Herman come home for his slain brother. Esta in that period of time wrote letters to the boys deployed overseas daily. Her mother, who could barely write or read, told Esta if she wrote then she would buy the stamps which were three cents each. She remembers her mother crying every day. Both of Esta’s brothers came home from the war safe, as well as her husband Herman.

I asked a question about what her thoughts were on the Civil Rights Movement, and she explained to me that there was not a lot of racism in Manchester.

Years later, she can recall when they were moving into their home in Manchester in 1963 and hearing on the radio that the President of the United States had just been assassinated. She couldn’t recall too much of the moon landing. Said she probably would have been working at the old refrigerator condenser factory in town, where she worked for 75 cents an hour. When she retired after 25 years of working, she was making $8 an hour and thanking the union. Esta also mentioned that there was no difference between men and women working in the factory and that they were paid the same. After retirement she started dispatching for the fire department and the ambulance in Manchester while Esta’s husband was assistant chief and chief at the fire department. Esta did this until 911 was implemented.

She worked here right in Manchester and said it used to be a nice town. Esta said they had just about everything, a movie theater, stores, and doctors. She said on every Saturday night there was a get-together in town where people would just walk around and around the streets and how she even remembered if you wanted to get a parking spot, you would want to take your car down town around two o’clock in the afternoon and park it and walk home. That way you would have a car to sit in and watch the people walk around. She said that the girls usually wore high heels and hats.

I asked what advice would you give young people today. Esta said, “be honest, be good, be good to everybody and not do the bad things.” Then finally I ended the interview with one last question being what the secret to a long and happy life and Esta said like before, “it’s being good to people, pay your debts, taking care of your body, not doing the bad things like smoking and drinking.”

My interview with Esta Carter offered me a valuable view of 20th-century American history. Her memories provided a deep personal lens on major events like the Great Depression, World War II and the way she grew up. Esta shared experiences with me telling me how her family feared starving during the Great Depression and selling eggs for a few cents, and her brothers serving in World War II. Her story is not biased but is naturally shaped by memory which may have blurred out exact facts. But this interview added an important view to me and taught me things I have never known or even heard of. For example, she describes equal pay for men and women at her factory which challenges broader historical assumptions about gender inequality in mid-century workplaces. Her memories of hearing a voice on the radio for the first time, and the loss of a family member during D-Day highlight how these historical events directly affected everyday people. This interview is compared to textbook history by giving a voice of ordinary Americans who quietly lived through and helped shape a century of extraordinary change.