My brothers all made loom fixers, and Clyde, the last one that died, run
a second hand's job. His name was Clyde Oliver, COD, Clyde Oliver
Dodson. And working over there at Poinsett, he helped the second hands
over there. And if they had to
Page 21 have a roll of cloth
marked off and cut it off before it got a full roll, a full cut, why,
he'd go mark it. A woman come to him one day and said, "I want to get
you to mark a roll of cloth over there for me. I can't find the second
hand." And he just went over there and wrote "C.O.D." on it. And when
the second hand seen it, he said, "Don't you know that's an insult to
that woman for you to put that on that roll of cloth, ‘C.O.D.’?"
[Laughter] He said, "Insult, hell. That's my
initials."
[Laughter] But my oldest
brother, Estes, had several overseer jobs. He was at Judson and all
around. He got to be an overseer. One day there was a fellow over there
got mad at him and quit, and he told my brother, "If you'll just come on
outside the mill, I'll give you a whipping." And so my brother said,
"Okay, come on." He just went leading the way. When they got nearly to
the door, he tapped my brother on the back and said, "We'd better not do
that. I might want to work for you again sometime."
[Laughter] My oldest brother went up in Greensboro and
took a little old weave room up there. And them people up there didn't
have no use for people from South Carolina. And he went up there to a
little old woollen mill that was fenced in, and they had sheep in the
mill yard. And he went up there and took that little old weave room. He
said it was so nasty and filthy and the lint hanging down from the
ceiling. And when he went up there, them people sicked bulldogs on him
and everything, tried to run him off, and he wasn't the running kind
neither. And so he went in there and went to work and got the mill
cleaned up and got the looms to running better. They had [unknown] sicked them bulldogs on him when he went to work,
and when he left up there he'd got them looms a-running so good and all,
and they had got to making more money. When he left, why, they bought
him a nice suit of clothes and an overcoat.
[Laughter]