DOUGLAS MUNGIN: What's your earliest memory of Mossville?

JOSEPH PAYNE: First moving to Mossville, that's my first memory of it. [laughs]

MUNGIN: So what did it look like? You know, like . . .

PAYNE: It was wood all over the place. It was the main drag of Prater Road, right across the track, was a little neighborhood with about two or three houses. Behind there, that's where we moved to. Queensboro, another subdivision across the street from, as you cross the railroad track on Prater, they hadn't even sold a lot over there yet. I remember the time when they was having the sale over there. We was on this side of the track, and the sale was going on on the other side of the road. It was nothing but woods there.

. . .

MUNGIN: So where did you go to school?

PAYNE: Oh, Mossville.

MUNGIN: Mossville? Where was that? Right here?

PAYNE: Mossville down the street. About a mile, half a mile from here. Just where the Mossville, the school . . . was first an elementary and before they built the high school. It was right across the street from my house, man, and I was late for school most of time, living right across the street.

MUNGIN: So the elementary school was here?

PAYNE: Yeah.

MUNGIN: So where was the high school?

PAYNE: They didn't have a high school right at the time when the school first opened, the elementary. And what was that, in ‘55? I think it was with Mossville. They got the high school. That's when they had the football team, a good football team, out of all the schools in the area. It was Vinton kids came to high school in Mossville, Sulphur kids went to school at Mossville. Westlake and Mossville. We had a heck of a team out of all of those surrounding areas. [Payne and Mungin laugh]