“Before there were cars, my family had a ‘surrey with fringe on top’ that we would go to church in. My sisters would take the train to New Orleans and shop for shoes, hats, coats and materials to make dresses.” Amacker says she cannot remember when she first actually saw a car since, “I’d seen them in magazines and was not particularly impressed.”
       Her family’s first car was a Model T Ford her father purchased in 1918. “He taught my brothers to drive, and they usually did all the driving. Especially
after my father almost drove the car into a ditch while he was admiring a
neighbor’s cornfield.” There were no paved roads, remembers Amacker, just
trails wide enough for a single car and since cars then were not enclosed; they
would keep curtains under the seat to put up when it rained.
       Amacker has also lived through a myriad of social changes such as the
beginning and end of Prohibition and women’s right to vote. She was one of
those rare women, who in the 1920s went to college for a degree in the sciences. “My father believed in education, and my Grandfather Stewart was a teacher.”
       To help with college expenses, Amacker earned “pin money” cutting the hair of fellow female students, because they did not want to visit the men’s barber shop which was their only other option. “I also earned credit toward
tuition by working in the laundry Arcadia woman witness to 100 years of change
for the dorm students.”
       Classes were held Tuesday through Saturday. There were 68 students in her
freshman year and only 33 by the time she was a senior. “We were not allowed
to date off campus. Any boyfriend who came to visit stayed on the porch or in
the parlor in the afternoons.”
       The dress code for going to town or church was black dresses during the winter and white dresses during the warmer months. Amacker worked hard to get her degree in chemistry after only three years, graduating in 1929. After college, Amacker taught high school math until 1931 when she married oral surgeon Charles Amacker and they had two children. Son Charles Amacker Jr. died in 1988; daughter Mary Anne now lives in Arcadia.
       After Amacker was widowed in 1960, she went back to teaching. Amacker took full advantage of the opportunities the changing times of her life offered, from going to college and attending a World’s Fair and traveling around the world in 1970. She still stays busy, weaving on a table loom and helping her daughter with several genealogy books tracing their family history back to the Revolutionary War.
       

E-mail Tracy at: tracywerth@cox.net

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