RB: It was nice in an old-fashioned way. It had expensive, but plain and antique looking furniture.

CH: Why were businesses stopped in Gideon?

RB: The man that owned the Gideon-Anderson business sold to a man named Harris from Cape with the intent that it would carry on like it had in the past, but he wrote it off with taxes. I think that if the guy had cared about Gideon and the business, then it would still be here.

CH: What was the first business in Gideon?

RB: I think the lumber company was the first company in Gideon.

SH: Do you remember anything unique about Gideon in the past?

RB: Gideon was one of the first places to have a one-stop shopping center.

SH: I heard that children in school had to go to school in shifts because of the amount of children enrolled in school. Is this true?

RB: Yes, the children that lived out in the country had shifts from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and the city children had shifts from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Of course, we went to school in July and got out from September to October for cotton picking.

SH: What did people in Gideon do for intertainment?

RB: We had the theater which shut down and tried to open back up in the late sixties but there wasn't enough business to kep it going. School activities such as cheerleading and basketball, or work kept most of the kids busy. Most of the high school students did not have cars to run around in, you were lucky if you got to stay out both Friday and Saturday night. The city did not have a cerfew then, it was up to the parents.
SH: What was the cause of the population decrease?

RB: People picked cotton by hand and when the cotton pickers came along the people lost their jobs. Share croppers would get share of profit for payment and for rent; people had a lot more houses. One farmer would own a farm and would have many houses on it for his share croppers. At that time bigger farmers started to take over and people started to disappear. Also fewer children were born because you did not need them for field work. And when the box plan opened people went there because of better jobs and better money.