Second Interview with Mary Belle (Powers) Plaisted

Second Interview with Mary Belle (Powers) Plaisted

Avis M. Carlson

Noel Kalenian

25-Aug-80

Mary Plaisted talks about growing up in the Milldale area around the sugar beet factory in Grand Junction, Colorado, and about the brothels and red-light district nearby. She describes having to beg and take odd cleaning and sewing jobs to support she and her children, and the kind strangers that helped her. She mentions the many places she lived in Grand Junction, the floods common in the Riverside neighborhood, and living in a close-knit Italian community there. She talks about being pregnant during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. She speaks of living in Delta County as a girl, about sugar beet and potato cultivation, and life on a farm. The interview was conducted by the Mesa County Oral History Project, a collaboration of Mesa County Libraries and the Museums of Western Colorado.

Begging

Poverty

Basic needs

Homemakers

Gardens

Italian americans

Influenza epidemic 1918-1919

Mesa county--history

Grand junction--history

Irrigation--colorado

Delta county--history

Ute indians--history

Ute indians--social life and customs

Garfield county--history

Agriculture

Farm life

Family life

Mesa County Oral History Project

Madam Fran

Maria Louisa (Hoover) Powers

Joseph Alexander Knox Crawford

Theophilus "Cap" Head

Charles "Charlie" Arthur Kessinger

Mary Belle (Powers) Plaisted

World War I

Plains to Peaks Collective

sound

https://mesa.marmot.org/Archive/mesa%3A1329/Audio