DON FRANCIS

TRANSCRIPT %u2013 DON FRANCIS
[Compiled November 18th, 2010]

Interviewee: DON FRANCIS

Interviewer: Carter Sickels

Interview Date: August 7th, 2010

Location: Boiling Springs, North Carolina

Length: Approximately 19 minutes

CARTER SICKELS: This is Carter Sickels. This is August 7th, 2010. I%u2019m interviewing Don Francis at his auto shop. So could you just say your name?
DON FRANCIS: I%u2019m Don Francis.
CS: When you were born and where?
DF: I was born in 1939 in Caroleen.
CS: Where were your parents born?
DF: My mother was born in Forest City. My dad was born in Caroleen.
CS: And you said both your parents worked in the mill?
DF: They did. My dad, approximately forty years and my mother, probably thirty-five.
CS: What did your dad do?
DF: He was a loom fixer.
CS: Okay. What kind of shift did he work?
DF: He worked first shift.
CS: The early--. What were the hours?
DF: Six-thirty to two-thirty.
CS: And what did your mother do?
DF: She was a battering filler.
CS: What did that mean?
DF: That means that she put the spools of thread into a big cylinder for the loom to use up.
CS: How long did you say she worked there?
DF: Approximately thirty-five years.
CS: Okay, wow. Did you have any brothers and sisters?
DF: I%u2019ve got two brothers and one sister.
CS: So you grew up in the village, in the mill village?
DF: We did.
CS: Can you describe what that was like, or what some of your favorite things were, or your memories of it, or places that stand out to you?
DF: Well, we lived on a street with a whole lot of kids, a whole lot of kids to play with. We more or less built and made our own toys back then.
CS: Like what kind of stuff?
DF: Well, our dads would bring some things from the mill and we%u2019d make us different toys, or he%u2019d bring us wheels and we%u2019d make what was known as a cog wheel wagon to ride down the hills and race with and that type thing. We just made our own bows and arrows. An old man that lived on the street taught us how to bottom chairs, so we did that. We just had a good time, playing, shooting marbles, playing with the little toy cars, and fighting ever now and then.
CS: How many houses would you say were there in the village?
DF: It was a pretty big village and it was kind of broken up into five or six different sections, but on my street there was probably about twenty-five houses on that street. And then, all together, there was probably three hundred in the mill village.
CS: And did they have a company store?
DF: They did have a company store. They could charge their purchases there and it would come out of their paycheck.
CS: Were they still doing the scrip at that point?
DF: I don%u2019t remember that.
CS: No, that was probably earlier.
DF: Yeah.
CS: What other things did they have in the village besides a store? Did they have any other businesses or anything?
DF: At that particular point in time, there just wasn%u2019t a lot of organized sports or anything. My younger brother, who%u2019s four years younger, was in the first organized little league baseball that I can remember.
CS: Yeah, I heard that the mills had their own baseball teams.
DF: That was for the adults, but for children there wasn%u2019t anything organized until, like I say, when my brother four years younger than me come along. Then he participated in some of the first little league. Then of course we had Boy Scouts and the mill village built us a scout cabin with a big lake, and the lake still stands, but the scout cabin has been demolished. That stood for many, many years. That was a big part of our coming up was being a scout.
CS: You and all your brothers?
DF: All my brothers. Me and all my brothers were scouts. They all achieved higher than I did. One of my brothers was an Eagle Scout.
CS: Oh, really? Were most of the boys? Were a lot of the boys in the village involved in the Boy Scouts?
DF: No, not that terrible many. When I was there, we probably had twenty.
CS: Did you go to the movies or was there a movie theater or anything?
DF: The closest movie theater was in Forest City.
CS: How far was that?
DF: It was about seven miles.
CS: Okay.
DF: When we got old enough, we would hitch-hike up there.
CS: Oh, yeah.
DF: Or find a friendly taxicab driver that would take us up there for nothing. That%u2019s how we got around.
CS: How much were the movies then?
DF: It was a dime.
CS: A dime?
DF: We%u2019d take a quarter and get some popcorn and a drink and see the movie.
CS: Did they have any places to eat in the village? Any restaurants or anything?
DF: They had a drugstore at the company store there, and served sandwiches. There was a couple of places around. There was a drive-in that was there a little bit later on. When I had become a teenager there was a drive-in.
CS: Oh, wow. Okay.
DF: But not many places to eat back then. Most of it was %u201CMammy%u2019s kitchen.%u201D [Laughter] CS: Yeah. Did your family buy the house from the company or did they--?
DF: No, we rented it.
CS: Just rented it?
DF: We rented it. When I can first remember, we just had four rooms and a path. Each room had one little light in it and there was no receptacles, so if you had a radio you had to run something in that light up there to play a radio. Of course, TVs weren%u2019t around yet, and then as things progressed, they come in and they underpinned all the houses. They sheetrocked all the houses; they put bathrooms in all the houses and wired them for better electricity for 220 for stoves and refrigerators and that type thing. When I was twelve years we moved out of that house, and they had worked on it ever since I could remember. As they would do a project, they would do it all over the whole village, so it would take a while to get around to doing different projects on all the houses. It would take several years. In the years that I do remember, they did all of this.
CS: Do you remember about what time that would have been when they started putting in the plumbing and the--?
DF: Probably around 1952, %u201951. Oh, excuse me, in the late forties because in 1951 we moved out of that house into a house that my dad had built.
CS: In the same area?
DF: In the same area, about a half-mile from the mill village he built our house, new house.
CS: Then what did you do after high school?
DF: I joined the Navy. I spent four years in the Navy and came back.
CS: So that would have been what year?
DF: I got out of the Navy in 1960. I went to work at Pittsburgh Plate Glass, which had opened in 1959. I didn%u2019t particularly like that. I left there and went to Fiber Industries.
CS: Why didn%u2019t you like it?
DF: I got too much glass in my hands.
CS: Yeah, slivers of glass.
DF: Hot glass got in my hands. It was a hard job. Had a lot of turnover. Everybody in Cleveland and Rutherford County has worked up there at one time or another.
CS: And left?
DF: For short periods of time.
CS: Did you try to get a job at the mill where your father worked?
DF: No, I had been in there. I would go in there and get me a nickel for candy or something, and back then, us kids could walk in the mill, and I had seen enough of it that I didn%u2019t want no part of it.
CS: What was it about it that--?
DF: It was hot; it was sweaty; it was loud, and I knew I didn%u2019t want to do that.
CS: Did your parents ever talk about their work, that they liked it or didn%u2019t?
DF: My dad talked about it a lot; my mother didn%u2019t. She didn%u2019t particularly like it; it was boring.
CS: It was boring.
DF: They worked her hard. She wasn%u2019t real fast and she didn%u2019t ever take a lunch break.
CS: Yeah, I heard back in the forties they didn%u2019t really get lunch breaks. They would just push that cart around, the wagon.
DF: Pushed the cart around and more or less just eat on the go. That%u2019s what she did.
CS: What year did your father retire?
DF: [Pause] I don%u2019t really remember, but I%u2019m going to say sometime in the seventies. I%u2019m not sure exactly. I remember when he was sixty-five he retired.
CS: So, before all the mills started closing down. So you were at Fiber Industries. What kind of work did you do there?
DF: I started off in what was called the spinning department that spun the synthetic yarn, and I stayed there for three months and I went to work in the storeroom.
CS: When you were in the spinning department, was it a lot different or was it that much different than the mill, the atmosphere?
DF: Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
CS: How was it different?
DF: It wasn%u2019t loud. It wasn%u2019t all that hard. This was just in the beginning of their operation down there. Some nights we didn%u2019t have that much to do in the early days, but it paid good for the area at that time and I enjoyed the work. It was a swing shift, and I was young at the time, so when a job came open, a day job, I took it. I stayed on it for eight years and then I worked for two-and-a-half years in the traffic department.
CS: Oh, okay.
DF: Directing freight, what-have-you.
CS: Which position did you like the best?
DF: The last one.
CS: Why was that?
DF: Just a better job, a better-paying job.
CS: Better pay?
DF: Yeah.
CS: When did you get married?
DF: I got married in 1962.
CS: Did your wife work at Fiber?
DF: No, she worked at Sears--Sears, Roebuck.
CS: So, when did you leave Fiber Industries?
DF: I left in 1972.
CS: Is that when you got into the car business?
DF: I actually started working part-time in 1969 with my brother, and we bought this property in probably 1971, and by 1972 we built a building, so I pretty well had to quit my job. I had something going on.
CS: So you kind of did it part-time to see how it would go, and then you could quit your job.
DF: And my brother did the same thing.
CS: Was he working also at the Fiber Industries?
DF: No, he was an engineer with Duke Power.
CS: With Duke Power?
DF: Yeah.
CS: So you%u2019ve been here how long, did you say? How long have you had your store? Forty?
DF: Forty-one.
CS: Forty-one years? And it%u2019s done well?
DF: Made a living.
CS: Made a living? Are you happy that you made this choice instead of working at the plant?
DF: Oh, yeah, because the plant%u2019s closed and I%u2019m still here.
CS: Exactly.
DF: The last words that anybody told me at Fiber as I was leaving, the plant manager, who was Eugene LeGrand, I met him in the parking lot as I was going to my car, and he said, %u201CHey, Don, if that thing ever fizzles out, [with breaking voice] you come on back.%u201D It%u2019s emotional.
CS: Yeah.
DF: And I respected that.
CS: Yeah, it looks like it was just a really hard time when things started closing down and a lot of people lost their jobs.
DF: It was a good place to work. But yeah, this has been good to me. My son%u2019s in the business with me now.
CS: Keep it in the family?
DF: I%u2019m trying to get him to work a little bit.
CS: [Laughter] DF: Excuse me, I%u2019m going to look at something here and I%u2019ll show you as we go.
CS: Okay.
DF: I don%u2019t know why I got choked up over that, but--.
CS: That%u2019s all right. I understand. Was it a surprise or what was the feeling when, I guess it was in the eighties or nineties when everything started closing down? I mean, you weren%u2019t working there any more, but you must have known people who--.
DF: Oh, yeah, I knew a lot of people that lost their jobs. They had one situation they referred to as %u201CBlack Friday%u201D down there. A lot of people lost their jobs on that particular Friday. I don%u2019t remember exactly what year that was, but a lot of people that I knew, they put in a lot of years, but they were compensated well for it.
CS: I guess they didn%u2019t want to close; they just didn%u2019t have a lot of--.
DF: Did you ever wear any polyester clothes?
CS: I%u2019m sure I did, yeah.
DF: You don%u2019t now.
CS: Yeah.
DF: So that was the deal. Everybody had polyester clothes back then. I had leisure suits and what-have-you.
CS: In the seventies that was big, right? Do you feel like Cleveland County is starting to come back, or bouncing back from that time, or do you still feel like it%u2019s got a long ways to go?
DF: I think we%u2019ve got a long way to go. I think we%u2019ve got a long way to go. As far as the textile mills, they tore the mill down where my mother and dad worked, and I pass that occasionally, that place, and I thought well, how bad, and then one day I passed there and I said, %u201CNobody will ever have to sweat there again.%u201D
CS: Yeah, that%u2019s true.
DF: That%u2019s the way I look at that cotton mill.
CS: Yeah.
DF: Because I would watch those people come out of the mill, people that I know would have been retired if they were sixty-five, and they were all drooped over, just%u2026
CS: %u2026Hard work%u2026
DF: %u2026hard work, coming out all bent over, you know, and looked so tired, including my mother.
CS: Do you see that there%u2019s a future here in Cleveland County?
DF: I do. I think there%u2019s a good future here. We%u2019re losing a lot of our younger people, you know. They get their education and they don%u2019t hang around, but they%u2019re working hard to get industry into the county. I believe they%u2019re going to succeed.
CS: I%u2019m about finished if you have anything else you want to--. I know you%u2019ve got people.
DF: Yeah, I do think that we%u2019re getting promises of some plants. I think some of them will materialize.
CS: Okay, good.
DF: And thank goodness that we did get PPG and Fiber Industries when we got those. I think at one time Fiber Industries had twenty-six-hundred-and-fifty on the payroll.
CS: Yeah, I talked to someone yesterday who worked there.
DF: I was listening to the radio the other day and a man in Rutherford County was talking about the places of employment up there, and he said they just had a chart that had plants that had over three hundred, and one hundred, two hundred, so on and so forth, he said today, we don%u2019t have any now over three hundred employees now.
CS: If you could give any advice to pass down to the younger generations, earlier generations, what would it be?
DF: Education.
CS: And one last question. What is the thing that you feel most proud of, or your biggest accomplishment?
DF: Family. And business--I%u2019m proud of my business. All the people that I%u2019ve sold cars to, I feel like I%u2019ve helped them some way or another.
CS: Yeah, you feel like you%u2019re part of the community.
DF: Yeah.
CS: Well, do you have anything else that I didn%u2019t ask? Anything else that you would like to add or say?
DF: No, I think that pretty well covers it.
CS: Okay, well, thank you. That was really helpful for me.
DF: Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW
Mike Hamrick, November 18th, 2010