HIX GETTYS

TRANSCRIPT %u2013 HIX GETTYS
[Compiled November 22nd, 2010]

Interviewee: HIX GETTYS

Interviewer: Carter Sickels

Interview Date: August 5th, 2010

Location: Boiling Springs, North Carolina

Length: Approximately 48 minutes

CARTER SICKELS: This is Carter Sickels. This is August 5th, 2010. I%u2019m at Hix Gettys%u2019 house in Boiling Springs, and we%u2019re doing the interview at his house. So if you could just say your name.
HIX GETTYS: Hix O. Gettys.
CS: And where you were born and your date of birth.
HG: I was born February 2nd, 1919, in Rutherford County.
CS: Okay, all right. So you were born in Rutherford County?
HG: Yes.
CS: Where is that from here?
HG: You get in Rutherford County in about two miles up the road here, straight up 74. It goes all the way past Chimney Rock that way, and then it goes up to the mountains, going north of here.
CS: Were your parents from North Carolina also?
HG: Yes.
CS: Same county?
HG: Same. They always lived in Rutherford County.
CS: Okay. Did your father work in the mills?
HG: No, sir. He was a farmer.
CS: He was a farmer?
HG: Yes.
CS: So you had animals and livestock?
HG: Kept animals and raised cotton and corn, and all the different crops that the people normally raised in that area.
CS: Did you have brothers and sisters?
HG: I had four brothers and one sister.
CS: So when did you start working at the mill, and which mill did you work at?
HG: I went to work at Stonecutter Mill in Spindale. I began working up there in 1941, and in %u201943 I moved to the Cleveland Cloth Mill in Shelby, which eventually became part of J.P. Stevens. The O. Max Gardner owned the mill when I first went to work there. I was there when Decker Gardner committed suicide. I was there the night he did it.
CS: Oh, my gosh.
HG: Then, about 1943, %u201944, I%u2019m not sure the exact date, J.P. Stevens bought it from Max Gardner%u2019s family. Max Gardner, Jr. came to work, and he was my co-worker. They put him in the mill to work with me. He was to learn all of the jobs in the mill, and eventually he would be the manager of the mill. He was to learn all the jobs, had to know how to run all the jobs in the mill before his daddy would make him manager of the mill. He put him in the mill, working with me. I worked in the weave room. It was the only place I ever worked in the mill, all the%u2026
CS: %u2026You did that the whole--all the years--in the weave room?
HG: Yes, sir. I did all the jobs in the weave room and eventually became a supervisor, and eventually became superintendent of weaving.
CS: Okay. Can you describe some of the things that you did, what some of the jobs were in the weave room?
HG: Well, most everybody, our new employees coming in to work the first time, they had to go to work on some jobs like doffing cloth or cleaning the looms. That%u2019s cleaning looms, cleaning the machines up when a warp run out. They%u2019d clean it up and make it clean again to put a new warp and start over in. Then you promoted from one of these jobs. They decided if you were capable or not, why, they%u2019d make a weaver out of you. The weaver paid more money than just lower-paid jobs. Every time you stepped up, you got a raise in pay because you got a promotion. Usually, you went from loom cleaning to cloth doffer, and those two jobs paid the same amount, but then they%u2019d train you or teach you to weave after that, after you had learned and done a satisfactory job of the job that they put you on, an hour job. They paid you by the hour. Incidentally, I went to work in the mill--I was working at a lumber plant for twenty-five cent an hour, and they offered me a job at Stonecutter Mill for thirty cent an hour, and I took it for the nickel. That was two dollars a week more pay.
CS: Yeah.
HG: That%u2019s why I got in the mill and eventually I came to Shelby and went to work at the cloth mill. By this time, I had already learned to weave. They taught me to weave, and then I became--when I came to work at the cloth mill, it was called Cleveland Cloth Mill, the proper name for it--I had become a warp man. A warp man was the one that put the big beams of 8,500 yards of beam on this big beam this big.
CS: Wow.
HG: And that was behind--they put that behind the loom to make cloth out of it.
CS: What was that called? What was that job called?
HG: That%u2019s what?
CS: What was that called? A what man?
HG: A beam. It was a beam of yarn.
CS: Okay.
HG: I was a warp man. They called him a warp man.
CS: A warp man. Okay, that%u2019s what I wanted to know.
HG: That%u2019s the warp; that%u2019s the warp that went in the looms that made the cloth. It held the cloth together, and then eventually, after that, why, they offered to send me to loom-fixer%u2019s school. A loom fixer is actually the loom mechanic. Just like a car has to have a mechanic to keep it going, so I became a loom fixer, and I worked that for several years. Eventually, I became an instructor. I was teaching other people to fix looms. That was my job for a while. From then, you went from, well, it wasn%u2019t necessarily made that way, but when I went on a training job to teach other loom fixers, I became a supervisor, a shift supervisor.
CS: Okay.
HG: Then I worked as a shift supervisor for several years and eventually, I worked--you started on the--when you went to work on most any job, you were promoted from third shift. A shift worked from six %u2018til two, the first shift in the morning, and then from two %u2018til ten at night was the second shift, and you had a third shift that was from ten at night %u2018til six in the morning. You had to work until your time came. By seniority, you had to be on it longer than anybody else to promote from the third to the second to the first shift. It took me a good while to work from a third shift up to the first shift, and I was a supervisor for, like, I don%u2019t know how many years. I never stopped to think about it, but it was several years. Eventually, they offered me the job as superintendent of weaving and I was on that for the last eighteen years I worked.
CS: Superintendent of the weaving?
HG: Sir?
CS: Supervisor and then superintendent?
HG: Superintendent of weaving.
CS: Okay. What were some of your responsibilities when you were a supervisor?
HG: When I was a shift supervisor?
CS: Um-hmm.
HG: Well, I was in charge of--in our particular plant, and different plants may have it arranged different ways, but I had twenty-one employees, and I was responsible for that twenty-one. Twenty-one was what you was supposed to have. You didn%u2019t always have twenty one; it might be twenty-three or twenty-one or twenty, but you had twenty-one employees; that was what you was supposed to have. You was responsible for running two-hundred-and-forty-four looms with that twenty-one employees. And you was responsible for the quality and efficiency, both, off of those looms. Your efficiency, they expected you to run in the upper nineties. Now, that was--I don%u2019t know how to tell you so you%u2019d understand it, but you had to keep two-hundred-and-forty-four looms running efficiently. I%u2019m talking about all the time, all the time.
CS: Okay, that%u2019s a lot.
HG: They expected ninety-five or better percent efficiency out of two-hundred-and forty-four looms.
CS: That%u2019s a lot.

HG: And you had twenty-one employees to do that with, and you had so many weavers and so many cloth-doffers and so many of these different people in the mill: magazine fillers and unifill tenders and all these different positions that you had to have to run these looms. You had four loom-fixers that you were responsible for. You were responsible for all twenty-one, supervising those twenty-one people, and there again, maintaining your efficiency and quality. Quality was a big deal in the textile mill.
CS: Yes, sir.
HG: There wasn%u2019t much demand for second-quality stuff, and they wanted it to be first-quality. Two and three percent seconds was all they wanted you to have. Two and three percent out of it. That was a whole lot. They didn%u2019t want you to have that, but they%u2019d let you get by with two and three percent.
CS: Okay, I believe it. At any point, did you live in the mill village?
HG: I did until I went in the service. I never lived in the company houses, but I lived in Shelby, like, I lived right behind the mill when I went into the service. I was drafted in the service and I lived right in the mill during the time.
CS: Do you remember, was there a company store at the mill or at the village?
HG: We did not have a company store.
CS: No?
HG: But we had a--we called it a dope stand.
CS: Yeah, what was that? I%u2019ve heard about that. What is that?
HG: Well, it was just something they%u2019d, they%u2019d push a wagon through the mill with all the different kinds of sandwiches and candies and drinks and everything on it. A man had this big box affair that he--on wheels--that he pushed through the mill, and he stopped every so often, always stopped about twice. Now, there was three supervisors per shift. I told you I had two-hundred-and-forty-four looms.
CS: Yes.
HG: We had five-hundred-and-seventy-two looms in that weave room. He%u2019d come by and he%u2019d stop periodically, oh, as he went through the mill. Everybody had the privilege of leaving their job and going and getting them something to eat. Wasn%u2019t no hour off or nothing to eat. You had about ten or fifteen minutes to eat a sandwich and drink a Coke. And he had coffee and different drinks on there. But you could get enough to eat off of that to do you for the eight hours. You had to be careful; some of them would spend more time eating than was working if you%u2019d let them. But anyway, that%u2019s the only thing they sold. Then they had a canteen. We were not allowed to go to the canteen during work hours, but they had a canteen that they opened up at the shift change time, like the ones coming in, coming to work; they could go by and get--. At one time, they sold some cloth, but they didn%u2019t sell much cloth. It was usually refreshments. Sometimes a worker going off a shift would go by and get something too, but they had a place for that also. It was open only between--at shift change time.
CS: Between the changes? How much would you say that a sandwich would have cost back in the forties, fifties?
HG: I can remember all the drinks cost a nickel.
CS: A nickel?
HG: Five cent.
CS: Five cents. [Laughter] HG: A sandwich was probably--their best sandwich was, I would say, was not over fifteen or twenty-five cent at the most. Blanche, what would you say sandwiches cost back then off the dope wagon?
BLANCHE GETTYS: In the forties, I wouldn%u2019t think they would have been over ten or fifteen cents.
CS: Wow, yeah.
HG: Fifteen or twenty cents?
BG: Yeah, because you could go to town%u2026
HG: %u2026I think it was fifteen cents%u2026
BG: %u2026and come in the drugstore when they had%u2026
HG: %u2026You could go to the restaurant then and get a pretty good meal for thirty-five cents, really.
CS: Thirty-five cents, wow! I wish that was the case now.
BG: Yeah, don%u2019t we all? But it went up as the years passed.
HG: Coffee was a nickel, but before the mill closed in 1981, it had only gone up to about a dime then. Drinks had gone to about--when did drinks go up? I don%u2019t know hoe long.
BG: When I went to work--well, I didn%u2019t go to work until 1950, and they were higher then than they were in the forties, and then they gradually went up, oh, I%u2019d say%u2026
HG: %u2026I don%u2019t think drinks was, maybe a quarter when the mill closed.
BG: Oh, I believe they%u2019d have been more than that.
HG: They might have been. I don%u2019t remember, really. I didn%u2019t drink many of them, really. I%u2019ve never drunk a lot of drinks. I never cared for them.
BG: I never did drink a lot either.
HG: But we ran--that window there has got the kind of cloth we made. I made that cloth myself right there.
CS: Oh, did you?
HG: You could buy that back when I made it, they sold some cloth and I bought that there, and you could buy it for probably forty cent a yard.
CS: Okay. When did you retire?
HG: The mill closed in 1981.
CS: Oh, it did.
HG: I was forced to retire.
CS: How old are you now?
HG: Ninety-one-and-a-half.
CS: Ninety one, wow. You look great.
HG: Thank you.
CS: So that mill closed a little bit earlier than some of the other ones?
HG: Some of them closed. We closed a little bit before the Dovers did. Well, wait a minute.
BG: The Dover mills ran several years after that.
CS: That%u2019s what I thought.
HG: Some of the Dovers had started closing before we did, and some of them lasted until just maybe a year after we closed.
BG: Oh, longer than that after you closed, because (17:12) worked over there.
HG: Stevens was a chain outfit. At one time, they had eighty-one mills.
CS: Okay.
HG: And 43,000 employees. Now, this is the word I got. We were headquartered in Greensboro. That%u2019s where we looked, but the main headquarters was in New York.
CS: Okay. Over that many years, what were some of the changes that you saw in the workplace or at the mill?
HG: Well, when I first went to work, we had an old box loom. Now, this was a box loom. You can%u2019t tell it from looking at that piece of cloth, but that%u2019s got two different kinds of filling in it. They run two shuttles, and we put in a bunch of looms that had four shuttles running. Well, have you ever seen a loom running?
CS: I%u2019ve seen, yeah, in a museum and in pictures, but not at the workplace.
BG: Oh, and by the way, this material%u2019s not been hanging up here that many years.
CS: Okay.
BG: He had a roll in the closet in there and I found it.
CS: Oh, wow.
BG: We needed some new ones in here and I said, %u201CWhy couldn%u2019t we have some made out of this right here?%u201D and we took it and had these ladies to make them.
CS: That%u2019s real nice.
HG: I ran samples for the general manager of the mill. We%u2019d think up different kinds of filling. We had as many as fifty or a hundred different kinds of colors of yarn. We%u2019d think up different things and I ran, while I was on the loom-fixer instruction, why, I ran a lot of samples for the general manager. We%u2019d make up a bunch of cloth sometimes that wouldn%u2019t sell. The salesmen would say, %u201CWe%u2019re just not interested in that. We don%u2019t think that would sell,%u201D so they wouldn%u2019t ever ship it. So they%u2019d sell that cloth to anybody who%u2019d want to buy it for twenty cent a yard, and that%u2019s a piece of that cloth right there. I give twenty cent a yard for it.
CS: That%u2019s nice.
HG: You know, the local management, the general manager and so forth--incidentally, we had one of the general managers at our plants who stayed at our plant, and he lived in Shelby, he had a plant in Birmingham, Alabama and he had three or four in Greenville, three or four mills in Greenville, and ours, and one in Galax, Virginia. He was manager over here; he looked after those plants. He was a real nice fellow, a good friend of mine, and we had a little more leeway than a lot of people did because he was with us all the time. We%u2019d go to him, and he%u2019d give permission to do a lot that somebody that didn%u2019t have a plant manager around them, they couldn%u2019t do it because they didn%u2019t have access to him, I guess you%u2019d have to say. But that%u2019s about--like I say, I had on my job when I was a shift supervisor, I had two alleys on four box looms, and that gets to be real complicated. Now there%u2019s a heap of difference--. I had one alley of Draper looms, and they%u2019d just run one shuttle back and forth. There%u2019s not much complexity to do that. Anybody can run one of those, almost, but the box looms, you%u2019ve got to send one shuttle and it%u2019s got to have a pattern to show you when to throw each of the four shuttles. It gets to be real complicated sometimes, but I enjoyed fooling with them. We used to play with them a lot. Made a lot of cloth off of them. Don%u2019t put this in writing, but we shipped 750,000 yards of cloth a week.
CS: Wow.
HG: That%u2019s the whole mill. Now, there were two weave rooms. My weave room downstairs was the box looms, and there was a weave room upstairs with four hundred Drapers in it, and we made a lot of cloth.
CS: About how many employees would you say were there?
HG: The whole mill at one time had over six hundred, but I think it got down in the low five hundreds on a general run. I%u2019d say five hundred would be a good average.
CS: Okay.
HG: Not often did I ever know how many was total there. I could have gone out and asked, but somebody, they%u2019d have told me in the personnel office if I%u2019d ever asked, but I didn%u2019t ever have occasion to need to know, and I didn%u2019t ever ask. But I know at one time we got something over six hundred, but five hundred was about what we normally average. It was a good place to work. They were good to the employees, and we paid a little bit more than the Dovers did, just a dime or something an hour more than the Dovers, and we were the only mill during the seventies that did not stand any looms for lack of help. Would you believe that at all the unemployment now?
CS: Right.
HG: Most all weaving mills that I know of have stood looms, had to stop them off because they didn%u2019t have nobody to run them. You couldn%u2019t get help, but I%u2019ll say this: we hired everything that come in the door for a long time. We took good, bad, and indifferent; we took them all, and tried to make something out of them. We had people that had never worked nowhere in their life except right there. They went to work there when they got out of school, or even a lot of them never did finish school. They went to work there when they were children and worked until they was old age and died there. We had a lot of good people that worked there, a lot of them.
CS: Yeah. Do you feel like you had a good relationship with the employees that you supervised?
HG: That was one of our things. You better have a good relationship with your employees if your going to supervise running a job. If you%u2019ve not got a good relationship, you ain%u2019t going to run much of a job. You%u2019ve got to make them want to run their job. Of course, most everybody except the hour help that I talked about first, the first ones that come in, most everybody gets paid for what they do. Every loom had a pick clock that showed how much it had run, and the weaver got paid by the number of picks on his clock. A pick is one shuttle through, and they go through there a hundred-and-seventy-two times a minute. You can figure up the picks after while, but anyway, we were paid by the number of picks, and I mentioned efficiency and quality, and that was a strong thing for us to begin with. They paid a bonus every week for your efficiency and quality. That made everybody want to get in there and run the job better because they got a few dollars extra if they run a good job. If they didn%u2019t run a good job, after it went on a while, if the supervisor couldn%u2019t figure out why, well, they had to hunt them a job someplace else because they demanded a good job. They wanted their equipment run efficiently and they wanted good quality made.
CS: Okay.
HG: And you mentioned earlier about if I was ever raised on a mill hill, mill village--no. I went to work down there in %u201943, and they%u2019d already sold their houses in %u201943 to the employees. They sold them, and I%u2019m not--I don%u2019t know about all of them because there%u2019s, I guess, several hundred of them, houses scattered up the side of the hillside up there. A lot of the employees bought their own houses and they sold them to where people could buy them.
CS: Help them out, yeah.
HG: I don%u2019t know anything about price, because it was all over before I got there. I don%u2019t know when the mill was established, but Max Gardner, Sr. built the mill and started it, and you know, right now I know--I%u2019m not one of them, but I know a lot of millionaires now. Max Gardner, he was governor of North Carolina at one time. You know that, I%u2019m sure.
CS: Um-hmm.
HG: He sold the mill and he come back and told everybody in Shelby he knows what a millionaire feels like. He sold the mill for a little over a million dollars. Now, can you imagine that?
CS: No.
HG: No telling how many million a mill with that many looms in it would be running would be worth now, but maybe a hundred or two million, but he come back telling everybody he knowed what it felt like to be a millionaire. And he didn%u2019t tell how much he got for it. I don%u2019t know, but that%u2019s the story I%u2019ve heard many times.
CS: Was there some kind of sports or entertainment for people who worked there? I%u2019ve heard about some baseball teams, baseball leagues.
HG: There was a baseball team, and my supervisor, the first one that I went to work for was a man who had been brought there for a pitcher for the ball team.
CS: Oh, okay.
HG: But the team was gone when I got there in %u201943. I understand back in the twenties and thirties, nearly all mills had a team. But on occasion, on occasion--they emphasized safety a lot too. When they got a million man-hours, the company paid all employees, took them out to a fish-fry or some fete of some sort and fed them all at one time. You mentioned entertainment%u2026
CS: %u2026yeah%u2026
HG: %u2026and we used to--do you know where Cedar Park is up above Polkville?
CS: No, sir.
HG: Anyway, it%u2019s a--well, they%u2019ve got a big building and it%u2019s sitting beside of a river. It%u2019s an entertainment center, really, but they have a restaurant and all in there. We used to go to Cedar Park pretty often for these fish-frys, but these fish-frys would be catered up there at Cedar Park. We worked all during the war years, during World War II, we worked six days a week, and a lot of times worked Sundays too. I didn%u2019t work Sundays, but a lot of the different departments that pushed to get enough cloth out, some departments did work on Sunday. I was never asked--I did--I worked two Sundays total. I almost refused to work Sundays because that%u2019s my day off. We did work six days without any let-up. We worked six days a week all during the war years. That lasted for several years. We started six days a week way back in the--well, I went to work, first went to work in 1940 up at Stonecutter Mill in Spindale, but, not kicking Stonecutter, but I liked the job at Shelby a whole lot better, and it paid me a lot more money than that one at Stonecutter. Stonecutter was the biggest mill--it was the biggest mill in this area.
CS: Was it?
HG: They employed well over a thousand people all the time. But their baseball teams was gone, but a bunch of these people who they brought in to work to play ball, they give them a job in the mill. Now, they paid them something for playing ball, but they give a good job in the mill to entice them to come there.
CS: Huh, that%u2019s interesting.
HG: This is in the Depression years, and I lived through the first depression in the thirties, and it didn%u2019t take much money to look good back then.
CS: Yes, sir.
HG: I went to work in the mill for twelve-dollars-and-a-half a week.
CS: What was it?
HG: Twelve-dollars-and-fifty-cent a week, and I worked six days a week for twelve-dollars-and-a-half a week.
CS: So you think it changed from the six days a week, probably in the fifties?
HG: We never did get plumb away from the six days. Now, we worked--it depended on the sales. If they could sell the cloth, they%u2019d run six days. They%u2019d pay more money. Now, they paid time-and-a-half for everything over forty hours, and people were glad to get that. We all took the six days when we could get it because we got time-and-a-half for the six days.
CS: Okay.
HG: We worked some six-day weeks plumb on up until the mill closed.
BG: I started to say, the Dovers run six days, I know, way on up in the seventies, probably eighties.
CS: Okay, yeah.
HG: But just about a year-and-a-half before the mill closed, we took out those box looms that I was telling you about running the four--. They took those looms out and junked them, sent them to the scrap yard and spent--this is what they told me--spent eighteen million dollars putting in new machinery in the cloth mill, downstairs in my weave room.
CS: Wow.
HG: Never run successfully after that.
CS: Really?
HG: Those looms today, and I know a fellow who still works for, not a J.P. Stevens Company, but he stayed on with the company that bought them out. Those looms, today, are sitting down yonder in the warehouse in South Carolina right now.
CS: Really?
HG: They took them out and sent them down there, trying to sell them, and they%u2019re still sitting down there right now.
CS: Wow. Did you have both men and women working at the mill?
HG: Yes, sir.
CS: And they had different kinds of jobs?
HG: Women would make weavers--they could promote to weaving, but we didn%u2019t have no women loom fixers or mechanics. It%u2019s a dirty, pretty nasty job, and it requires some lifting sometimes, and it%u2019s just not a woman%u2019s job, a loom fixer is not. We worked both blacks and white.
CS: Did you?
HG: In the later years, we had to hire a lot of blacks, and some of those turned out to be excellent employees.
CS: So you had hired some black people even before you were required to?
HG: The black people when I first went down only did janitorial jobs and they did warehousing, but not doing any of the skilled labor jobs.
BG: You had a black lady the weaved before the plant closed, you said.
HG: What?
BG: You said you had a black lady that weaved before you closed the mill.
HG: Oh, I had lots of black weavers. Oh, yeah, I had some real good black people weaving, women, yeah.
CS: Okay.
HG: We just hadn%u2019t given them an opportunity before, that%u2019s all, really.
CS: Yeah.
HG: In the early seventies they started to bringing black people in and teaching them better jobs. I had good black friends. I had some come see me after I retired.
CS: Did you?
HG: They%u2019re good people. I like them.
CS: Yeah, good. I guess I just have a couple more questions. You said that your father was a farmer. Have you ever wanted to follow in his footsteps and be a farmer?
HG: I wish you shouldn%u2019t have asked that. Yeah, I liked farming. After I retired, why, I had cows all during the years. While I was working, I still kept cows, but since I retired, that%u2019s all I%u2019ve done. Since 1981, that%u2019s all I%u2019ve done. I%u2019ve kept a bunch of cows.
BG: You raised hay. That%u2019s farming. He raised hay, baled hay.
CS: Yeah, okay.
BG: That%u2019s farming.
HG: I bought $400,000 worth of farm equipment.
CS: So you%u2019ve gotten to do both then.
HG: Huh?
CS: So you got to farm and you worked in the mill.
HG: Well, I did that. The farming was a sideline.
CS: It%u2019s hard to make a living that way, right?
HG: After I retired, I%u2019d have hated to depend on that for a living because I wouldn%u2019t have made much of a living. See, I was old enough to draw my Social Security when I retired. I didn%u2019t have no choice because the mill closed. I was the last one. I locked the door when we left over there. I was the last one leaving over there.
CS: Really? How did that feel?
HG: It didn%u2019t feel good.
CS: No.
HG: I missed the people. I missed going to work every morning. I enjoyed my work. I loved to do what I did. I thoroughly enjoyed it, really did. A lot of people would talk about dreading going to work; I looked forward to going to work. I enjoyed my work, I really did. The company was good to us. It was a good company to work for, but there%u2019s no such thing as a J.P. Stevens no more.
CS: That%u2019s right.
BG: It%u2019s sad too.
CS: It is a sad story.
BG: All these textile plants being closed is sad.
CS: It is sad, all the mills that have closed.
HG: They said they had 43,000 employees at one time, and I venture that--I used to have to go to Greenville just every little bit--we had four mills down there that I visited, and people were happy was all that I ever knew anything about. It was a good company. And, like I say, we paid just a little bit more than the some of the other textile mills in the general area. That%u2019s one reason we didn%u2019t have problems keeping help, paid a little more money, and we tried to treat people right too. Apparently we did, because everybody seemed to be happy.
CS: Yes, sir.
HG: We didn%u2019t have all that many complaints.
CS: Did anyone ever get really badly hurt?
HG: Well, I%u2019ve seen people get hands mashed and stuff like that. The worst I ever had, a man was under a loom and he forgot to flag it to where anybody knowed he was in front of it, and I saw something under the loom, something from the mechanism caught the skin right here and peeled the skin off the back of his hand. It was the worst accident I ever saw there. I took him to the hospital, but never no bad accident. Never had nobody in the forty years I worked there, as far as I know, nobody never died on the job. For whatever reason, I never knowed nobody that died on the job.
CS: No, okay.
HG: And that%u2019s a little unusual because a lot of people die of a heart attack for no seemingly trouble behind them before they have the heart attack. We%u2019re having that to happen here in this community. We%u2019ve had a lot of that to happen here. Just, well, the best friend--I had a neighbor down here--four years ago, he was sitting, eating a sandwich--sitting at the table, eating a sandwich, and fell out of his chair, dead. The man that lived next door took a bath and started to bed, and he didn%u2019t make it to the bed. He fell in the floor after he%u2019d had his bath. How long has Wallace been dear, four years?
BG: About four or five years.
CS: Oh, yeah.
HG: And I%u2019m seeing a lot of that now, but it makes people wonder now why we worked so long, and we had a lot of people work over there past retirement age too.
CS: Okay, yeah.
HG: Those old people were the ones you depended on.
CS: The ones that had been there?
HG: They knew what work was about.
CS: Yeah. Can I just go back to one thing? You had said at the very start of the interview was when you had started working and the man who committed suicide?
BG: The Gardner.
CS: The Gardner.
HG: Oh. He was a son of the one that owned the mill.
CS: He was a son of the man who owned the mill.
HG: The man that owned the mill.
CS: Okay.
HG: He did it out in the office. He wasn%u2019t%u2026
CS: %u2026He wasn%u2019t there%u2026
HG: %u2026wasn%u2019t in the mill, wasn%u2019t in the plant.
CS: But you had been working there when that happened?
HG: Yeah, I was there the night it happened.
CS: Wow.
HG: Well, the mill was full of people working the same night. I just happened to be in the building. I was one of many in the mill when it happened. O. Max Gardner, Jr., when I told you who I was training, he finished college that year. He finished down at State, and he was one of the nicest young men you%u2019d ever want to meet. A good, hard worker, and he didn%u2019t care how dirty he got. He was in there with me. We worked. I%u2019ll say this much: you mentioned farming several times. We loved to hire boys off the farm, men and women both, off the farm because they consistently knew how to work when we got them.
CS: Hard workers?
HG: Yeah. We didn%u2019t shy away from them. If they said they come off a farm, why, we wanted them.
CS: Yeah.
HG: And I%u2019m not saying that we didn%u2019t get good folks that was raised in town too; we did too, but farmers were nearly always good workers.
CS: Well, this has been really interesting. You%u2019ve helped me out a lot. Is there anything else that I didn%u2019t ask or anything you want to tell me?
HG: I was in the service. I was drafted in the service. I wasn%u2019t in the service but thirty-two months, and I was real fortunate. I went into the service during the Bulge. You%u2019ve heard of the Bulge? You know what I%u2019m talking about.
CS: Um-hmm.
HG: I came out of the service and I built a house on 74, and I lived over there for eighteen years before I moved down here, but I was living over there and my house had to be moved because the four-lane road was coming through.
CS: Oh.
HG: I moved two houses back over there. I owned two over there at that time, moved two back, and then I bought this land over here and built over here in 1965. I told you about all my life story, but anyway, you asked where--you probably don%u2019t want this on your record, but I come from a place called Sunshine.
CS: Sunshine? Okay.
BG: In Rutherford County.
CS: In Rutherford, yeah.
HG: How long have you been in Shelby?
CS: I%u2019m just here visiting. I%u2019m from Chapel Hill.
HG: You%u2019re from Chapel Hill?
CS: Yes, sir, so I don%u2019t know the area yet.
HG: But it%u2019s about eighteen miles from here, fifteen or eighteen miles from here to Sunshine. You don%u2019t even go off of 74 two miles up the road--you go through the country.
CS: Okay.
HG: Then, when I was sixteen years old, I moved over to Hollis, and that%u2019s where I finished high school. That%u2019s Hollis.
CS: Okay.
HG: And if you go to Hollis now, the building%u2019s not even there. It burned and it%u2019s torn down and gone. You wouldn%u2019t even know when you pass through Hollis no more. But Sunshine, they built a new school there and it%u2019s a real, growing community now. I%u2019ve still got relatives that live up there now.
CS: Do you have children?
HG: Do I have children?
CS: Yes, sir.
HG: I have one son, and he died at thirty-eight years old--of multiple sclerosis.
CS: Oh, I%u2019m sorry.
HG: I have two grandchildren: one lives in Winston-Salem and the other one lives in England.
CS: England?
HG: And the one from England is here now, and they%u2019re in the mountains. They%u2019re going to the mountains today. They have a place up there they%u2019re going to today to spend the rest of the week, but the one from England had a nine-year-old girl. She goes to school eleven months a year over there.
CS: Oh, wow.
HG: She just gets a month out of school, so she comes here that month every year and spends a month here with us and her other sister. The two girls are twins, my granddaughters. That%u2019s all the relatives I%u2019ve got left except I%u2019ve got one younger brother who%u2019s not in as good of shape as I%u2019m in.
CS: Did your brothers also work in the mill?
HG: No, he sold insurance.
CS: Oh, okay.
BG: The youngest one sold insurance. The oldest one farmed.
CS: Okay.
HG: Huh?
BG: The oldest brother you had farmed for a living.
HG: Yeah, my older brother.
BG: And then James sold insurance, but what did Kenneth--? Kenneth was a carpenter.
HG: I had another brother.
BG: How about Oscar?
HG: I had two younger brothers younger than me and I had one sister, and they%u2019re all dead except me and the younger brother now.
CS: Does he live nearby?
HG: Sir?
CS: Does he live nearby?
HG: Polkville.
CS: Okay.
BG: About ten miles from here.
HG: Twelve miles straight up the road, straight up 226 out of Shelby.
CS: That%u2019s good.
HG: You say you%u2019re just visiting here? Who are you visiting here?
CS: Well, I%u2019m here for this. There%u2019s a few of us from Chapel Hill and we%u2019re doing the interviews for the Shelby--.
HG: Uh-huh.
CS: So I%u2019m going to school there.
HG: Going to school there?
CS: Yeah. I%u2019m going to turn this off now.

END OF INTERVIEW
Mike Hamrick, November 22nd, 2010