the aisle and make
some kind of remark. He would have a sack on his back. This always
held tiny little sacks of candy. They started with the smallest
children and gave each one of them one orange and one sack of hard
candy. They went on up the line as far as the oranges and the candy
lasted. If you didn't have a crowd even the adults would get a sack
of candy and an orange, but if you had a large crowd, why it
stopped at whatever age it ran out along the line. This was an
affair at which the program would probably take an hour, an hour
and fifteen minutes. But it was cold in there you know ... they'd
have a great big, old pot bellied stove, but it was in one place in
the church. Everybody couldn't sit around that stove, so you sat
there in your overcoats sometimes.[260]

[Illustration: Miss Gladys Thompson and the Floris Community Orchestra,
1929. The members at this time included: Front row: Haley Smith, Louise
Cockerill, Louise McNair; Second row: Richard Peck, unidentified, Miss
Gladys Thompson (director), Jack Patton, Mary Peck, Franklin Ellmore;
Back row: Helen Presgraves, Ethel Andrews, Mary Win Nickell, Elizabeth
Ellmore, Helen Peck. The old car in the background is the one in which
Miss Thompson first traveled. Note the old four-room schoolhouse also in
the background. Photo courtesy of Louise McNair Ryder.]

Other groups offered activities to fill the farm family's leisure hours.
An elementary school teacher who taught music as a sideline, Gladys
Thompson, organized an orchestra about 1928. It consisted of her violin
pupils and other musically inclined citizens and was called the Floris
Community Orchestra. Twelve violins, and mandolins, saxophones, piano,
drums and banjo made up the group which played for school plays and
community events. They also put on an annual recital and one year even
gave a vaudeville show. "I remember she used to fill up her small
one-seated roadster with music students going to practices and
performances," fondly wrote a member of the orchestra, Louise McNair
Ryder. "One of my greatest pleasures was clambering into the rumble seat
with my violin."[261]

Musical groups also sprang up spontaneously. One, which Joseph Beard
referred to as a "little old hillybilly band," included besides himself
on fiddle, Virginia Presgraves (piano) and her uncle Austin Wagstaff on
ukulele. Richard Peck played banjo and saxophone for the