I was digressing a little bit from the real story, but this is an
anecdote that comes into it . . . I was down at that convention in
Charleston and I was walking across from the old Citadel Square Baptist
Church to the Francis Marion Hotel one day at lunch and I saw a young
crowd standing in front of the door of the hotel and one fellow was in
the middle of them and he was just hammering away and talking about the
evils of dancing. I stopped and I listened a minute and he caught his
breath and I said, "Pardon me just a minute, but tell me what is wrong
with dancing." "Why," he says, "they dance in houses of ill fame." I
said, "I'll take your word for that, I've never been in one."
[laughter] You ought to have seen those
other ministers leave, it was just like a covey of birds.
[laughter] Well, let's go back to what I was
talking about with Father. I went to work when the war came along in
1914 and of course, everything went down to the bottom again here and my
father just said for me to come in here to the office and I went in
there and worked with him and I hadn't been in there but about three
weeks when he told me to look after a building on Main Street that he
had been looking after since 1904.
Page 22 I went up there
to look after it and there was some old janitor that wasn't doing a
thing in the world about cleaning it up right and I told him to clean it
up and the next day I went back up there and they hadn't done a thing
and he said that Mr. Cutinoe, who was my father's bookkeeper had said to
do something else and I like a young fellow . . . I was only nineteen
years old . . . he said, "Well, Mr. Cutinoe told me to do something
else"and I said, "Well, Mr. Cutinoe is not running this building now,
I'm running it." I was out soliciting a little insurance and some other
things and I got back to the office and Father handed me the keys to the
safe and he said, "Mr. Cutinoe quit, you're the bookkeeper." Well, I had
taken a little simple bookkeeping course in the summer which my father
had insisted on me doing while I was in college. It was just a simple
course, but I knew enough about bookkeeping and I took it over right
then. I used to have a lot of fun, I would work during the day
soliciting business and I would go and see my girl . . . we've now been
married fifty-nine years and I would go to see her at night and I would
have to leave at ten-thirty because her father and mother insisted that
ten-thirty was late enough and I would go back down to the office and
work until about one o'clock keeping books and be back down there the
next morning at eight to get started, but that was the only way I could
. . . I had to moonlight, that's what I called it. That's what they are
doing today and it's no different from a lot of people today. You just
have to do that kind of thing. I left out one thing that I ought to have
told you, though. In 1907 when that panic came, there was a gentleman
from Spartanburg, I won't call his name, he's long dead, but he used to
buy bonds also and he would come over here sometimes to Father and say,
"Furman
Page 23 we'd better get our people together and
buy this bunch of bonds here," and they would maybe make a joint bid on
them together. He worked pretty well in the South, he was over in
Atlanta, this fellow was, from Spartanburg. He had a trigger mind, a
mind that was just like a computer. If you know anything about buying
bonds, you know that it's the net yield on those bonds that you have to
figure on and you can figure them with a premium and an interest rate
and between the two of them, you can show that the net yield is so much
and the lowest one is the one that usually gets the bond. He could
figure them quicker than anybody you ever saw. He had no computer, just
a pencil. He got over there and he got on some bonds and he said, "I'm
the low bidder," and the governor of Georgia disputed him, and he got up
and slapped the governor's face and he and the governor had quite a
ruckus about it. Well, he came over here some weeks after that and there
was no place in Greenville where you could take any person for lunch, or
dinner, as we called it in the middle of the day at that time, and
Father would bring them down home, we always had a place where another
one could sit at the table. While he was down there, he told about this
incident in Atlanta and he said to my father, he said, "Furman, you know
I'm honest." After he left, my father said, "Son, I want to tell you
something, any time a man ever tells you he's honest, you'd better watch
him."
[laughter] You know, I never forgot
that.