MURFREESBORO, TN - Phyllis Pugh is the oldest of six children, born and raised in Mississippi. Because her father was not in the picture, she was raised by a single mother, and the family of seven lived back and forth between their own home in Montrose, MS, and their grandmother’s home in Louin, MS, just a few miles up the road.
"We came up poor,” Pugh says. She was married, for the first time, at 18, and had two daughters, Erica and Elaina. “Those girls were ...