A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

7: Into the Rooming-House Business

7 ❙ INTO THE ROOMING-HOUSE BUSINESS ❙ 53 ❙ Back in Albuquerque I decided to get in the rooming-house business . I rented a big old empty house, but I didn’t have any money to buy furniture. So I went to a secondhand man, an old boy by the name of Logan. I never will forget him. I told him what I wanted to do, and he said,“Anybody as ambitious as you are, I’m going to help you out. Take me down to this house and show me what you need. I’ve probably got enough stuff around here to furnish it up and get you started, and you can pay me off as you rent out your rooms.” So that’s what I did. I took him down and showed him the house I’d rented and, sure enough, he dragged in all the furniture—beds and mattresses and tables and chairs—that I needed to start the rooming house. Once I got it set up, I rented rooms to railroad men. They were just in there for maybe one or two nights a week—you know, the way railroad men come and go. Like, say, they were running from some place in Colorado to Gallup,whatever their run might be,and staying overnight in Albuquerque.They were no trouble.I didn’t see very much of them. So that turned out all right. And in whatever ❙ A WOMAN OF THE CENTURY ❙ spare time I had I roasted peanuts on the back porch of the boarding house and put them up in little packages attached to cards. I got businesses to carry them for sale on their counters. So I had the rooming house going and the peanuts going while I was working at the grocery store.And I also worked one afternoon a week at an auction house.There I hit on an idea for another little business . I bought some of the things that went pretty cheap at the auction sales, then had an auction of my own. I rented a house and furnished it up with the stuff I bought out of the auction sales,because I thought people would pay more for the furniture from a house looked like somebody’d just moved out of and the furniture was being sold, than they would out of an auction house. As it turned out that was true. After I paid off the auctioneer I made a little profit off of that business, too. And that worked out all right. The next thing I did, I got into entertainment. As I was growing up, my mother never allowed me to go to dances. I could only go to church and sing hymns. I guess she was trying to keep me from running the streets and being a whore, which I never had any inclination for anyway.She used to take me to all these concerts with old lady Schumann-Heink and that guy—what was his name? Caruso—and there I would have to set and listen to them screaming their heads off, couldn’t understand a word. I was disgusted . Great big old fat thing setting up there yelling. I just got to where if anybody turned on classical music, and it starts going way up high and then all of a sudden dying out to practically nothing, why I feel like picking up that music box and crashing it on the floor. But in spite of that, I’d always been musically inclined. I loved to sing. And since I had a pretty good blues voice, about this time I got a job evenings and weekends singing with Monty Blue and his orchestra . I dressed up in an evening dress and walked around among all these bald-headed men, singing the blues. These old guys would try to grab at me when I walked past them,and I’d pat them on the head. 54 ❙ INTO THE ROOMING-HOUSE BUSINESS ❙ Some nights I made as much as fifteen dollars.That was good money in those days. Once I was making money singing I bought a saxophone and started taking saxophone lessons from this lady, Rose Jenkins, who taught piano and violin and other instruments. Rose Jenkins’s husband was an arthritic person. All his joints had frozen. He couldn’t move a joint in his body. If you pushed his head back...