Interviewer: Victoria Phaneuf

Affiliation: University of Arizona

I arranged to meet Mr. Spencer on the last day of classes for the year at Moss Point High School, where he instructs students in welding. He had played some of the students the CD of his previous interviews that I had given him the week before, and they were interested in meeting the woman who did the interviews. During the first interview he discussed his working life and during this interview he discussed his early life.

Mr. Spencer was born in 1942 and grew up on a farm in Coy, Alabama, before moving with his family to Mobile in 1957 when his father got a job with Alcor Aluminum. He graduated from Central High School in 1960 and took two years of schooling each at Bishop State Branch of Alabama State Teacher’s College and a vocational school, where he got his certificate in welding. He was drafted into the military and was released in 1967. During the last half of the interview he discusses his family’s subsistence off the land during his childhood and his love of hunting and fishing.