Dave Sherman
Greenville
Dave Sherman was born in Greenville, Mississippi, on November 21, 1925. Both his father, Deeb Yousef Behada Charmoun, and his mother, Affifi Khalil Abdallah, were born in the Mount Lebanon region of Ottoman Syria. Mr. Sherman remembers his father’s stories of immigrating to the United States in 1903 from Beirut, at the age of 18, by way of Mexico. He had left the Mountain as a result of the oppressive nature of Turkish occupation there. Arriving in America, immigration officials changed his name from Charmoun to Sherman, as was common practice. Mr. Sherman’s mother arrived in the U.S. in 1904 by way of Ellis Island, and the two were married in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in 1908.
In 1909 Mr. Sherman’s parents moved to Lake Village, Arkansas. His father peddled, travelling to small towns across the Arkansas Delta selling his wares, such as bedspreads, bed sheets, undergarments, women’s hose, shoestrings, and other household goods. By 1913 Mr. Sherman’s parents had moved to Greenville, Mississippi, and opened a grocery store at 415 Cleveland St., which the Greet 1927 Mississippi River Flood destroyed. They opened a new store on Washington Ave. that sold general merchandise, such as shoes, boots, and dresses, in addition to groceries. The growing family lived in the house next door to the store.
As a youth, Mr. Sherman attended E. E. Bass School and Greenville High School, later working at Virden Lumber Company, then as a partner in his father’s grocery store, eventually opening Greenville Lumber Company in the mid-1950s, which he ran until 2004. Dave Sherman and his wife Sara Sarullo Sherman moved to Oxford in 2005 or 2006, and he still lives there today, attending St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, which counts a number of Lebanese Oxonians among its congregants and even hosts a regular Lebanese dinner of grape leaves, kibbee, and other Lebanese foods. He is pictured above grinding the meat to make kibbee in 2017.
This interview with Dave Sherman took place in his home in Oxford, Mississippi, on December 12, 2017. He passed away on January 27, 2022.
AUDIO (Click to listen):
“Papa was a salesman with pillows, sheets, and white goods, and he walked from one town to another. From Mexico on to Hattiesburg. When he got married, then he moved to Lake Village, Arkansas, and Papa didn’t want to move around anymore. In other words, he didn’t want to leave the family and go walk down there. So he opened up a little wholesale place to sell to salesmen, like he was. And the Great Flood of 1927 came and wiped him out. You know, nobody had insurance—nobody knew about insurance then. So he found out that there was a grocery store for sale in Greenville, so he took Mama, and we moved over— He moved the two children and Mama to Greenville, opened up his store.”
“Mama cooked everything. But I’ll tell you what else Mama had to do. There was no meat grinder to make kibbee with, so Mama would cut the meat up small, and she had this pot, this thing made out of marble, and it had a great big hole in the thing, and then there was a mallet, and Mama would put that meat, small pieces of meat there, and she would beat that meat until she pulverized it to make kibbee.”
—Dave Sherman