Marjorie Rogers Oral History Interview

My name is Marjorie Alice, maiden name is Maull, Rogers. I married a Rogers. He was a Yankee from Chicago. I was born and raised in Pine Castle and I’m still a Pine Castle girl. I know I live right, a half block in from Pine Castle to Belle Isle and when the candidates come to my house for a Belle Isle election they always tell me: “You know you don’t live in Pine Castle. You’re in Belle Isle.” And I say, I know it, but my heart’s in Pine Castle. So they always get a kick out of that because I have all the pioneer bricks and memorabilia out around my front doorstep.

Marjorie Alyce Maull, born October 22, 1927

I was born here in Pine Castle to Charles Edgar Maul, Sr. and my mother was Hallie Hansel Maul and they were married in 1918. I do have photographs of that, too.

Charles Edward Maull, Sr. and Hallie Hansel Maull, on their honeymoon in Miami, 1918.

I also have a brother who’s three years older then I am and I have a sister that’s seven years older than me and her name is Evelyn.

Marjorie, age 4, Evelyn, age 11, and Edward, age 7.

So we have a very good life in Pine Castle. I can’t think of any other place that I would want to raise my family. There was just mother and daddy and three children and we all got along real good. I’m not a game person. I’ve been to people’s homes they want to play games. I just stayed at Conway Lake every time I could. I’d go down to the lake and swim that was my main activity actually growing up.

LISTEN Part I (15:24)

Pine Castle was very interesting. It has grown, changed a lot. Doesn’t really make me too happy, but that’s just a sign of the times that’s they way it is… What used to be Conway Road is now Hoffner Avenue. And what used to be Orange Avenue coming from Orlando down through Pine Castle heading towards Taft used to be the Old Dixie Highway. And now it is Orange Avenue and the roads have been all paved. They used to be dirt, but it’s still home and we love it.

My first school was Pine Castle. I went to first grade. Maud Hoffner was my first grade school teacher. And believe me you could read when you graduated from first grade because she stayed after school to help us with our lessons if we needed help. And, of course, your mother knew all the teachers there. I think lunches were ten cents. And mother wanted to make sure I ate my lunch. So I sat next to Mrs. Hoffner in the lunchroom. And I remember hating stewed tomatoes. I had to eat those things and I couldn’t get out of it because I knew she’d tell my mother if I didn’t eat. But that was really something our first grade… she taught in Pine Castle 50 years. She taught the first grade. My sister was seven years older than me and she and my brother were first grade students there. But then I went on up through the 8^th grade in Pine Castle, had good teachers…. Then I went to Orlando High School.

Marjorie Maull, Graduation Day, 1945

I’ve been very active all these years with the reunion always serving on the committee. And we had some pretty big ones here in Orlando and Pine Castle. We had 325 students in our graduating class in 1945. And believe it or not there were still a lot of people that we attended school with that remained here in Orlando….

I went to California as soon as I graduated… I was there a little over a year, I think, and then I flew back home with my sister and moved back to Pine Castle… And I had been going with someone that was in the service in the Navy. And I really wasn’t in love with him but through letters and everything we got pretty close and actually his shipped docked in San Francisco when I was there so I got to see him again. Prior to that most of our time getting together was just letters. And mother and daddy liked him because they used to invite the service personnel on Sunday to have dinner in our home.

Marjorie at home after church, Sunday, 1946

They did that when World War II was going on… So anyway he got out of the Navy and he went back to Chicago, but then he came down and then we decided we’d get married. And we married in the First Baptist Church in Pine Castle.

Marjorie and Floyd Rogers were married November 30, 1946.

Had a very good life. We raised five children.

Floyd and Marjorie Rogers with their five children, 1960.

He went back in the military. He had been in the Navy and he joined the Air Force. And that’s where he retired from 26 years…

LISTEN Part II (11:38)

Pine Castle

As far as Pine Castle I could go on and on about Pine Castle. It was a small little town. Everybody knew everybody else. You didn’t dare get in trouble even if you thought about it because they knew it. Everybody knew everybody else and gosh it was just so different then. We had chores and we did our chores. We had to do our chores before we could go outside. But I had more boys in my neighborhood than girls. So Shirley Brewer was a very, very close friend of mine and she lived right down the street from me. And my cousin, Dorothy May Jackson, lived behind me kind of. She was my second cousin and we were close. So we all went to school together, rode the school bus. Everybody rode the school bus. We couldn’t drive. I finally got to drive my senior year a little bit… But Pine Castle, the center of Pine Castle everything was right there. We had Doc McCall’s Pharmacy there on the corner.

VIEW

Marjorie’s mother, Mrs. Hallie Hansel Maull, and Doc McCall at Pine Castle Pioneer Days, 1979.

We had Martin’s Grocery Store, Post Office, and, we had a lot of churches and they always had some activity going on. I never heard of trick or treat when I was growing up. The kids didn’t do that at Halloween. We had big festivals and games. They had a gazebo there at Pine Castle. They had costume contests and candy and balloons and dunking somebody in the water. You know it was just a lot of fun. Good, clean fun….

Marjorie Maull on Conway Road, 1945

There were very few paved streets. What used to be Old Dixie Highway that ran from the outskirts of Orlando down to Taft… ran all through the state, really all the way down south. And the street that was Conway Road which is now Hoffner Avenue… we played dodge ball in the middle of the road, Hoffner Avenue. Well, it was Conway then. Somebody would see a car, somebody would holler out – CAR – Get out of the road, let ‘em pass- And we’d go back to playing dodge ball. But as I said most of our activities were at the lake. Crittenden’s dock down there. Now our church sits on Conway Lake right there at Crittenden’s dock. And prior to all the groves that we had, they used to baptize all the people there in Conway Lake right there at Crittenden’s Dock….

LISTEN Part III (14:34)

Pine Castle Women’s Club

I joined first in the 1940’s. I think it was around 47 or 48 when they started it up and I was a member and we used to have our events at the Brown Cow down off of Hoffner still functioning today for all the events around the lake. It belongs to the Robinson’s he had the law firm here in Orlando…. But I go. And I go to the Corner Rose Tea Room over there. That’s nice, too. They’ve really done a marvelous job of fixing the club up…

Pine Castle Baptist Church

VIEW

The church that I grew up in was right there on the corner of Old Dixie Highway and Conway Road. But they demolished that I guess when they started building a new church. Well we had one church built and they started building another church just in the last three or four years. It’s really nice. It’s right there on Lake Conway at Hoffner and Randolph. I go usually twice on Sunday and Wednesday night. I enjoy the church. We have a good church and a wonderful minister. The minister and his wife are very nice. Bill Burkhalter and his wife, Joyce, very wonderful people. In fact, I was just there for Sunday night and I heard Ralph Meloon speak. Yes, and that was wonderful, too. He’s a very good speaker. He’ll be 97 here in a couple of weeks. Very strong voice….The Meloons… I knew the mother and father because they went to church with my mother and father.

Charles Edward Maull, Sr. and Hallie Eugenia Hansel of Pine Castle, 1919, ages 29 and 22.

So, yes, I remember them, very nice people, very blessed to have them also. We have a lot of nice people in that church. They call us a “hugging bunch” and we are big huggers. You know that’s what you like in a church, very caring. But it’s a beautiful church and I live just around the corner from it. I’m actually within walking distance of it…

Maull Machinery

So you mentioned your father’s shop, what did your father do? He was mostly in citrus. .. They owned a citrus plant. And my grandfather and my father invented several machines that they used in the citrus business. It actually was in Crescent City. My father was from Crescent City, Florida. Maull Machinery. I’ve got his business card. Nicholas Maull was my grandfather and my father was Charles Edgar Maull. Daddy and Grandpa Maull were originally from Crescent City, Florida. But then he met my mother and he left Crescent City for Pine Castle. And my grandfather lived here and he was in the citrus grove business, real estate. He owned a lot of property in Pine Castle. He just gave it away for people to settle here though, you know. All of the children were given property to settle and build a home on; and my mother and father included when they got married. And daddy and his father built our home that we lived in. He was in the citrus industry and that was a bid deal back in those days. He came down here in 1865 after the Civil War. So I’m a fourth or fifth generation pioneer. And his mother was Granny Harris. So I go to Pioneer Days dressed as Granny Harris….

Marjorie Maull Rogers, dressed as Granny Harris, and her brother, Edward Maull at Pioneer Days, 2005.

LISTEN Part IV (14:17)

The Lord’s Been Good

Unfortunately, my grandfather his bit of money – when the had the crash in 1929 – he didn’t get his money out of the bank in time before it collapsed. His son did and his oldest son was on his way to take his dad to the bank and it crashed before they got there. But anyway we survived. The Lord’s been good. Really good. We might not have had much, but you know when you don’t have all these overwhelming things to take your – I didn’t know we didn’t have much… Something I really remember, the way they ate and the food they ate. Today we can’t eat like that. They worked hard. I guess they went out in the field and plowed the groves or whatever they had to do. Push it along. I saw my granddaddy do that a lot. And they went to bed early and got up early. But I’ve seen my grandfather at breakfast in the morning and Nanny would be over there and fix his breakfast. He’d have a big cup of hot coffee with a lot of sugar and cream in it and he’d have toast on his plate and pour bacon grease on it. Bacon grease all over it and then pour coffee on it. And that was – it looked good – I don’t know. I’ve never eaten like that. But you know they did. They didn’t have cholesterol problems. Maybe they didn’t know anything about cholesterol. They lived to be close to 87, 88, 89 my grandmother was. But then their lifestyle was a lot different then, too. Because they went to bed early and I remember granddad sitting around the kitchen, the wood stove. They always had a wood stove soaking his feet…I think about my childhood and the good times that we had, family times.

Marjorie’s maternal grandparents, William Mathew Hansel and Sarah Margaret Locke Hansel, 1945.

We had a lot of restrictions but we didn’t mind. We knew the rules. I can’t tell you just some of the things going downtown on Friday night, parking your car.. well they parked there in Orange Avenue and Beacham Theater. You know where that its? That used to be our biggest theater, the one to go to. The one I went to see was Shirley Temple at the Beacham Theater…. But anyway, we’d go downtown to park and it would be right there what you call Wall Street and Orange Avenue. And they’d park the car… and we’d figure the drugstore was right there on the corner and we could get a five cent cup of ice cream and a five cent bag of peanuts. And we loved it! We dumped the peanuts in the ice cream and it was really good. That was really a treat for what ten or twenty cents or something. We could walk down the street together, but we couldn’t go no further than Church Street. Right there at Kress’s dime store. They had Kress and Woolworth’s across the street and then we’d have to turn around and come back on the same side of the street….

Marjorie relatives, pictured from left to right, her mother, Mrs. Hallie Eugenia Hansel Maull, Aunt Ollie Hansel Prescott, Aunt Effie Hansel Fulford and Grandmother Sarah Margaret Hansel, 1945.

Christmas

All our big holidays were family. And we always had plenty of food. And the menu was all laid out and different ones would know what they would were to bring. I always had a good Christmas. I remember I still have the book that mother and daddy gave me when I was 11 years old: “Helen’s Babies” was the name of it…. But we got small gifts. We didn’t get a lot. Daddy made me a rocker one time for Christmas. He was very handy and he made me a rocker. And then I got a doll and you know like a book or something. They just didn’t give any big presents, you know. Whatever we would talk about. They’d pick it up in the Sears catalog. We would show it to them. But we didn’t ask for too much – never thought about it. I think all of our holidays were special. I really do….

Marjorie Maull’s grandmother, Sally Hansel, known by all as “Aunt Sally” and her son Burt Hansel of Pine Castle.

Future Generations

When you think of future generations like your grandchildren, do you see them staying in Pine Castle? Yes, especially my daughter, Susan. She definitely does. In fact, she’s active in the community now with the Safe Neighborhood and she’s president of it. In fact they’re meeting tonight at the Women’s Club. They meet once a month…. But I love Pine Castle so anytime you want to talk about it you give me a call and we’ll talk about it.