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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview K-0511, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
Although ostensibly about the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd, this interview presents a history lesson on the gradual extinction of independent farming in eastern North Carolina. Larry Kelley shares the details of a lifetime of farming and other rural work. He sees himself as among the last members of a generation of old-school farmers who were pushed out of agriculture by factory farms and new techniques. But although farmers are being forced to abandon their farms, especially as Floyd exacerbated their financial difficulty, Larry maintains his faith in the strength of his rural community. This is a lengthy interview, and it is sometimes difficult to glean useful information from it because of interruptions and sound interference. The interview's highlights are focused on the Kelleys' experiences. Researchers interested in Larry's father's experiences as a farmer can look to the first fifteen pages of the transcript. Both Larry and Betty Kelley participated in the interview, but Larry did virtually all of the talking.
Larry Kelley shares the details of a lifetime of farming and other rural work while discussing the hardships he and others faced in the aftermath of Hurricane Floyd.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
I know this mill was obsolete but it's been a, you know, a part of the community's history for three generations.
Well, let me just say to start the tape that I'm Charlie Thompson and I'm here in the trailer that was bought for the flood by Larry Kelley and his wife, Betty Kelley. And it's December 9th 1999, almost three months following the Floyd flood. We're talking about the history of the community some, some about the mill, some maybe about the clean up and the businesses that Larry's involved in. So you were saying about the mill and so forth, that it was obsolete. But how was it fitting into community history?
Granddaddy came—his name was J. R. Kelley—he came out of World War I.
Now the year I don't know exactly. But the day he came home from World
War I they were having a land sale right where the mill and my house and
the stuff is now. And he had saved his money—he was in service in the
Navy for four years—and he lacked $600 having enough to pay for [Unclear.]
I thought I'd take my camera with me.
Oh my goodness.
He had to borrow $600 to pay for the land.
Tell me his name again.
J. R.
J. R.
James Richard.
Okay.
And that was after World War I was over when he got out of service. So it had to be somewhere around 1918 or 1920, somewhere along there. But after—
Do you know why he decided to open a feed mill? Why he decided to not be a farmer?
He started out with a sawmill [Unclear.]
This was on his own parents' land.
That was his land that he bought when he come home from service.
Okay.
His daddy—his name was Morris Kelley—lived a few miles on the Island Creek, and his daddy—
Island?
I-S-L-A-N-D, Island Creek.
Okay.
His daddy came from Ireland and settled in Moore's Creek out of 421. And then [in] a few years they moved up to Teachey, North Carolina.
Okay.
And from Teachey they moved up to Island Creek. You're familiar with Hanchey's Store up here?
Yes.
Down that road. That's where he was raised at. And when he went in the service and come back after four years in the Navy—the day of the sale is when he come home. He bought this land with his daddy's help, $600 from his daddy, and promised that everything that his daddy had—his daddy give him the $600—that he wouldn't inherit anything from his daddy's estate. That was the deal.
Six hundred dollars was probably a sizeable part of the estate at that point.
Can you imagine saving what money that you made for four years. I
believe he was making $18 a month, $20 a month, and he saved up all but
just a few cents once in a while. But he never [Unclear.]
He hadn't been wounded or anything?
No.
But he was in direct combat, do you think?
He was on the carriers.
Okay.
And he was a steam—he worked with the steam engines. He was a fireman, I think, what they called it back then.
Right. Keeping the boilers going.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. His hair turned white at a real early age, and he's
always said it was because of the heat from the boilers. [Laughter]
So he did it on share or [Unclear.]
Yeah, uh-huh, for half. And when the Depression came—I've heard him tell
this story many, many, many times. He had to shut his sawmill down. He
was only charging something like $2 a thousand [Unclear.]
You mean with a hand shovel.
With a hand shovel, yeah. And so he worked like that to get enough nickels and dimes to get something to eat. They grew everything they had except they had to buy sugar and stuff like that.
Meanwhile all this wood is still setting there?
Sat there and rotted. And at that time it was the prime timber of our country. The top grade materials that he couldn't sell.
Virgin timber.
Virgin timber. A lot of it cypress, red cypress, which is—doesn't rot very easy. It'll last a long, long time on a building, and termites won't eat it.
Still, it stayed long enough to rot.
And my daddy just grew into the business. He was the only child. They started making corn boxes, strawberry boxes after the Depression, and all that was handmade. I've still got the machine that made those strawberry or strawberry slats and the corn boxes that were nailed together with corn box nails. I've still got the machine that does that.
We've heard about the strawberry crop being one of the biggest income producers in the county for a while.
That's right.
And he was making the boxes.
He was making the boxes.
For the quart size or did it hold—
Quart. Then he made the carriers.
Okay. And they took those carriers into the field—
Right.
Filled with quart boxes and then they'd ship the whole thing off.
Right.
So you didn't get that back.
No, unh-uh.
So you had a constant job to do.
Right until the new system came in where they used wire boxes. And the
cost was something like—it was going to cost between fifty and a hundred
thousand dollars to get set up in that, and he couldn't see that it
would be worth it. So he had a steam room to steam the blocks, and he
used sweet gum, which was a real easy to find material. And they used a
steam room to steam it to make it soft so that they could veneer it.
I've still got the veneer machine that they put those blocks in. It
peeled it a sixteenth of an inch thick or something, real thin stuff.
And it had to be where you could bend it to make those corn—those
strawberry coats. People around in the neighborhood worked there during
the season, and at night. At that time people just didn't have a lot of
money and children, after school, would come and work [Unclear.]
Now, how about your parents?
My dad was—run the sawmill.
When was he born?
Twenty-seven.
Granddaddy was twenty-seven years old when he got married. And he was born a few years after that. And he was born in 1896, so 1896 and twenty-seven—
It would be just 1924.
Okay.
Or '23.
So daddy would have been about seventy-five now. He's dead.
Okay.
He'd been about seventy-five.
Seventy-five, okay, plus twenty-four is ninety-nine.
So he was born somewhere along there.
Okay.
But he worked—and granddaddy and he worked together [Unclear.]
Did he go off—did he go to school over here at the Northeast School your dad?
He went to Wallace, didn't he?
He went to Wallace School, but I can't—. I know my granddaddy went to
the [Unclear.]
Harry and them, they went to Wallace. I think your daddy went to Davis.
It was one of the Wallace schools. And then he graduated from Wallace
School and never went to college. Back in the forties they mostly run
the sawmill. And as far as the gristmill, at that time it was paying
out. But even while he run the sawmill
Now, where are all these things stored that you still have?
Down at the mill.
Some of them's inside—
Inside the mill.
Inside the old mill. I've got two mills down there; sawmill, too, and the veneer mill, which they used to make the corn boxes and strawberry sacks and stuff. It's not under a shelter. But it ought to have been. The storms have come and blowed them down, and I just didn't have anywhere to put it. I had a fire a few years back, so I had to move the shingle. It liked to burn it up. But I got it out, and I never put it under the shelter. Just got busy and never did. But I'm fifty-four years old and I know how to operate all of that. The only thing I've never operated was the veneer machine. I've never veneered anything. I've always wanted to. And I've had people from way off coming in wants to buy this stuff for a few dollars, you know. But I wouldn't sell it.
When did they start the sand business, Larry?
Started the sand business in the early fifties—late forties, after the war.
You were born what year?
I was born in '45.
Forty-five. About the time you were born they were starting this.
My granddaddy or my grandmother on my daddy's side had some brothers
that during the Depression had moved to St. Petersburg, Florida. They
couldn't find anything to do around here, and so they had moved to St.
Petersburg. And they went to
And this is your brother?
This was my dad.
Your dad.
My dad and granddad.
Okay. And what's your dad's name?
His name was J. W. Kelley.
J. W., James—
James Wilton.
Okay. Okay.
And this was late forties, early fifties about. So they started in the sand business together. They always worked together, dad and granddad.
Now we saw a sand business. You go on down 41 and take a right like you're going to Maple Hill.
They started when I quit.
Okay. That's not yours? Okay.
They started by building a binge that was high enough to back trucks
underneath. Made it out of wood; they built it out of oak and cypress
with hartford
It comes right out of the river, or does it come out of the ground?
No. We just—we started and dug a hole. Down on a hill back in the woods there's a swamp all the way around it. [There is] a river and the river swamp, and there's another swamp that comes in around it. And there's a big hill back there and he had cleaned—
And that's in the Northeast community?
That's right behind the mill.
Okay.
They started digging sand out of there, and it was white sand. And it devised the screens. They had turning screens with gasoline engines to turn the screen to pump the sand into. That would separate the coarse [sand] from the fine, and the rocks or the trash or any roots that were pumped in would be strained out of it. When it come out it was just like beach sand but it wasn't dead sand. It was good builders' sand, the best in this part of the country.
What is dead sand? You mean you can't use beach sand?
You go down to the beach and you walking on it and you hear it making a noise—
Squeak.
Squeak, squeak. That's dead sand. If you mix dead sand and cement there'll always—you can go over there and sweep it and you'll always have a dust. That's just because of the cement on the mortar mix. It's because of the sand. The sand's dead. See, people don't go down to the beach to use beach sand to mix concrete with.
Partly has to do with the salt in it, I guess?
Well, I can't answer that.
Okay.
I don't know, but I know it's so fine that it won't hold. But this was some of the best sand in this part of the country. And finally regulations and things put us out of business back in 1980.
But you had taken it over. It was your business.
Yeah. I'd taken it over. And back in the early seventies it would have been after we got married.
Y'all got married in the early seventies. BK/
Sixty-five.
Sixty-five, okay.
And so we worked together. Granddaddy was [in] retirement and was not
able to work. But he was around every day. He was—he was mighty special
to me. And dad started—he moved down to Florida and kind of retired down
there. He stayed here
This was before the chicken integrators moved in.
Yeah. This was in the later part of the sixties. We fed chickens, picked up eggs seven days a week and sold them for eight cents a dozen.
Where'd you sell them?
We had two markets: one in Beulahville and one in Burgaw.
You weren't a contract grower.
No. We were private.
You were private, but you had a contract with them to buy—
Nineteen fifty-eight daddy put up the first feed mill, and he moved the sawmill back, which was close to the road, Highway 41. It was even closer to the highway then. Sometime in the forties they changed the road that went by my house. And you know where Betsy lives?
Um-hmm.
Well, that house that sits back off the road, the main road went back to her house, and curved back out towards the fire department and went by my granddaddy's house. Then when the road changed in the forties and they paved the road—
This road, Highway 41, wasn't paved until the forties?
I can't tell you just when it was paved. But it was after the Depression, I think; it could've been the late forties.
Okay. But ever since you can remember it's been paved.
Ever since I can remember it's been paved. So it was paved before I was
born. But we sold eggs for eight cents a dozen—two dollars and forty
cents for a thirty dozen crate delivered to Berg Owen. Had to buy our
crates and flats back. I lost—after the first flock I lost a hundred and
some dollars and all my labor. And we had our own mill, so I could buy
everything as cheap as I could buy it. Along then all the corn that was
coming in was coming in being pulled by hand. [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.]
You built another mill?
My dad.
Your dad did.
My dad built another mill. But I was there and [Unclear.]
And what was the mill called?
Kelley's Mill.
Okay.
J. W. Kelley Milling Company.
Okay. And you continued on with the sand business. Did you keep running the grain business, too?
My brother took the grain business after he had retired. He quit in, what year Betty?
Who, Dick?
Yeah.
[Unclear.]
About eighteen, eighteen, twenty years ago. So it's '99.
[Unclear.]
He quit about seventy, late seventies when things began to change when
this corporate farming came in. The chickens were already [Unclear.]
Nash Johnson and—
The earliest one was Ramsey [Unclear.]
Ramsey.
And after—
They started milling their own feed, and so that took a lot of your business, I guess.
Everybody for as long as I can remember up until this period of time, late seventies, everybody had hogs, cows, a few horses, but mainly hogs and cows and chickens and turkeys. And then the chicken people put in and so we lost the chicken feed business, but we still had the dairies in this area. We served several dairies: Penderlee and that area and then back out the other side of Wallace. Then finally the dairies went out. When they had a buy out the dairies closed down, and I don't know—
Was this in the eighties?
Late seventies.
Late seventies.
And so after the dairies closed up, the chicken business stopped. I sold
hogs when I was—we were in the feed mill business and we were married
and I sold hogs for nine cents a pound. And I decided at that time—that
was early seventies, late sixties, early seventies—that if I was going
to have to give away what I was working for I was going to give it to
somebody I knew. So I killed hogs two or three times that winter. I
killed most of the hogs that I had that were ready to go to market, and
sold the meat at [Unclear.]
You only did that one time?
No, we did that—well, I done it right on for years. I killed hogs every year. In fact, we killed hogs up until two years ago. So I've got everything it takes to kill hogs. And I've got a cousin that worked for the Department of Agriculture under Jim Graham. He was over the stations. His name was Pat Kelley. Do you know Pat?
No, I don't.
He's retired now isn't he, Larry?
Pat? Yeah. He's retired now. I saw Pat at a funeral. An aunt died, and I
preached her funeral. After the funeral I was talking to him and he said
he did want to be in another hog killing like we used to do. And I said,
"You would come down here and send somebody and shut us down." And he
said, "No. I want to see it done and be in it
That's the way y'all did it for all those head of hogs? You were doing it out back, and outside and all that?
We started—I'd start every morning about four o'clock, put water in it a few days before. And it was built out of tin and cypress, had wood sides to it and the bottom was tin. Built and dug a pit and set it down over—the sides were tapered, and we had strips across the bottom to support the weight of the hog. We put a smokestack in the back of it and we fed it from the front. And it would draw like a chimney. Along then when we were killing hogs it was cold. It'd be down in the teens and everything froze up. And we'd start hog killings in the morning about four o'clock. And then everything thawed out. We killed just what we could working at the time.
How many?
No more than two or three. We [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.]
Now as you say, the Department of Agriculture would say you have to
Well, you can still do it. I don't think there's any law against killing hogs at home.
For your own consumption.
Because back in the sixties I'd kill hogs at home and save the meat, which probably then was illegal. But when you're perished to death, you've got no money. You have to do whatever you have to do. Well, a top hog weighs two hundred pounds and it'll cost you eighteen dollars. And a ham—if a ham weighs twenty-five pounds, at a dollar and a quarter one ham would be—.
Uh-huh. That's the way to go.
We've seen some tough times. I remember my granddaddy talking about his times, but we've seen some tough times on the farm. And farmers can't keep on moving. They can't keep going after the dollar.
But now so many of them are producing hogs. They're contracted.
Yeah.
How much a pound are they getting?
Most of the time they're getting feed conversions plus so much a head. So the feed conversion is real good—they'll get more plus they'll make so much a head. It can vary. I don't know what they make. But just imagine this now. The hogs belong to the feed company. The medication belongs to the feed company. The—everything that goes with the hog belongs to the feed company except the labor and the house and the land, but when that hog dies that hog belongs to the farmer.
How so? Doesn't get paid for it, in other words.
He doesn't get paid for it and he has to dispose of it. And now they have to incinerate them. I think that's the most unfair thing that ever happened. I mean, responsibility stops whenever the hog—or the animal dies, then it belongs to the man who had to work through the hot and cold and everything to dispose of it. And there's no protection for him.
Right. Well, it's important to talk about that. I don't know how much you feel comfortable talking about it, if it's a problem. But so many people think hog industry is one entity that is polluting the rivers. And that's all they know about it. But as you're describing it, there are these farmers who are struggling out there who have hard times and who really can't survive without a contract. But then that's unfair, too. They're caught in the middle. Is that what you're saying?
Our son-in-law does this. Bobby does it for a living.
Our son-in-law [Unclear.]
But you used to raise hogs. I mean, how is it different. I mean, it was a pleasurable thing? You wanted to do it?
My hogs were raised—we grew them out on dirt.
Did that pollute anything?
Sure it did. You could smell it, but you didn't have the smell that you have now. And we used sand hills and places that were back off the road and away from people's houses.
In the woods.
Yeah. But you didn't have the smell that you've got now. You didn't have the concentration or the numbers. See, Duplin County is growing more pork than any other county around—Duplin and Sampson County, this area. Along with that production comes pollution. And the by-products—
And they have hogs at a more confined area, more per square foot, right? How many hogs approximately does one grow or have now?
Oh they can have anywhere from a thousand to several thousand. And then at least two to three bunches a year. Then you've got your pig factories. The pigs are raised in one place and then they're shipped to another place that grows them up to bigger pig size, and then they're sent to the grow out houses. So it's three different stages of the operations now. Everything's under—in a house—under controlled climate. See that—we had that situation to decide whether—just like in the old days when granddaddy and daddy quit making corn boxes. I'll tell you just exactly what happened. They farmed, too. And they made the corn boxes and strawberry cups and sold them to the farmers. In turn when they carried their crops to market, the buyer told them, says, "If you use my baskets and my boxes and my cups, I'll buy your strawberries and your corn. But if you don't, I'm not going to buy your crop." So the man that bought the produce on the produce markets in Wallace and Fason started buying boxes from them, too. You know, you're factoring bringing into here making a profit on them selling them to the farmer. And then buying their produce back. And the hogs—either he had to change over to the new style box or quit. So—I've still got some corn boxes.
They didn't get floated away, sugar?
Well, we hung them in top of the pack house that were made back fifty, fifty, sixty years ago. I saved them. When the building blew down in Fran I took those boxes and moved them to another place. To just show grandchildren a little bit of the history of how we worked.
And how is that like—you said that was an example like the hog business.
Well, the hog business—we had to make a decision whether to go into the contract growers or continue on working with individuals that had their own few animals on the farm. And so I knew that we either had to get bigger or close down. And my brother was running the feed mill and he couldn't make a go of it. So at that time my daddy still had ownership of it, and he leased it to someone else that was close kin to the Murphys. He made cow feed for Murphys and stuff like that. But their production was in hog feed. And you use a much rougher roughage in the feed for cows than you do for hogs. And so he stayed on for about eighteen years and closed up last year.
And why did he decide to close up last year?
There was no—there was no business.
No cattle feed to speak of.
No cattle feed.
Because there were no cattle.
Well, Murphy, see, has got cattle on all their hog farms to eat the grass where they spray this stuff out of the lagoon, the manure. They spray it on pastures and put cows on it to eat the grass.
So most all Murphy contract growers have cattle, or the cattle belongs to Murphy, too?
Most of the time the cattle belongs to Murphy, too.
Oh, okay. And Murphy is from right here. He's from this county. Did he start growing hogs like you did?
Yeah. In fact we made feed for him.
A few at a time.
We made feed for Wendell and his daddy, Holmes Murphy, when they first started—before they ever put up their mill. They put up their mill over here at Register's. And I heard Wendell tell this story many times. He started with $10,000. His daddy had to sign for him to borrow $10,000, and he put up a feed mill. And they started feeding cattle, and they went broke. And he went back, and rearranged and started back again. And I'm sure he'd tell you they've been broke at least two or three times and have managed to come back.
What changed? What made him so successful? He went broke three times.
Well they went into corporate—this big, big contract growers. And one of the big feed companies, I'm sure were backing—
He started using the poultry model. Is that where he got it, you think, from the turkey growing system?
I don't know, but I think Wendell was the main one who came to poultry—I
mean the hog houses and stuff. And the designs have changed over the
last twenty years. He took hogs and they were growing hogs on ground.
And they went to the confinement to keep the hogs from running away on
the ground and fighting the
So these houses they have now are air-conditioned, heated?
Well, they're vented either by fans and your pig—their houses are
climate controlled [Unclear.]
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
You began talking about the feed mill. You said something about it being from a past era. But you kept running it anyway. That it was obsolete, I think you used that word. At some point you began to realize that agriculture was marching on to a different tune. And you were still in the old feed mill and old business, or at least your brother was.
Well, he—they decided that they didn't want to have to put up the money to go into this new style hog producing. We've done—I've done some of it before he quit. I had some—I had two people that were contract growing pigs for me. I furnished the sows and all the stuff.
For your slaughter business, your meat selling business.
I quit the meat.
Okay. This is after that.
I killed just for myself. Later on—I don't remember what year it was—hogs fell down in about '70. Anyhow, I lost sixty, seventy thousand dollars in just one year's time. In the fall I had gone to PCA in Kenansville, Production Credit, and borrowed enough money to buy grain to feed my hogs for another year. And hog prices were down so until I didn't have enough to sell on the futures' market.
And I was—the cash that was coming in was not enough. The profit was gone and I was losing $40, $50, $60 a head on every hog I sold, so I decided—after I had already got the financing—to quit. And I started selling it, and in 1979, '80 I quit the sand business. I went in and rebuilt everything—
You quit the hog business what year?
Along the same time.
Okay. Sand and hogs—
It was during—it was during what they called the recession. When Reagan
come in—when Reagan come in I was ready to see Reagan. But I didn't know
that Reagan was going to cost me everything that I had worked for. The
farm prices and everything fell, and he was cutting the fat. He cut our
livelihood completely out. And I'm not saying that Reagan was not a good
president. I still agreed with him on a lot of things, but as I look
back, he cost me everything that I had worked for as far as economical
things that helped us in this part of the country. And when you lose
that kind of money and keep right on pumping money into it—I have
learned since that if you've got enough money and can survive, and the
people that are backing you will back you long enough, you can come out
and make money. My philosophy was, when I was in the boat and I was in
the ocean, and I couldn't see land and the water was coming in the
bottom of it and I couldn't bail it out fast enough, the ultimate thing
that was going to happen to me was I was going to perish. I was going to
die. And so I quit my business. And the sand business, we had three
different government regulators that came in and told us what to do and
how to do it, and didn't supply any money. They spent my profit for me.
And at that time house building had stopped completely; there was no new
So the river had supplied plenty of sand. It wasn't a problem of finding the sand. It was still there in that swamp?
Well, on our land we had sand left but it was getting on down. But we couldn't pump out of the river; you couldn't go to the river.
That was one of the regulations.
You had to stay away from the river.
So that old barge that was made at one point—
That old barge was replaced in the seventies, I believe, with a steel
barge that was three foot deep, quarter inch or three eighths metal. The
steel came out of a jail they tore down in Greenville. It was solid
sheets of steel, great big sheets that they cut out of a prison, a
county jail. Anyhow, we got it, got it built. A man down at Snead's
Ferry built it, and we hauled it back here and put it in the water. We
put a [Unclear.] [Unclear.]
And that was one of the citations?
I told them I said, "Do whatever you have to do." So I shut it down.
Eighty thousand dollars in citations. We furnished a reconstruction
program every year. [Sliding door opens and closes.]
Yeah, so, in my mind that's a clean industry to have. You're just harvesting sand that's washed down by the river.
We had a lake. I was not [Unclear.]
It wasn't at the river even, but it was—
It was just on a pond, and we were just making a plumb digger by pumping the sand out and hauling.
It was just down in the ground, and as you dug it out the water was filling back.
Yeah.
Well that's so—
Sad.
It is. It is sad, because here was a business that was running. And now we have, in comparison, these hog businesses that are polluting the river, doing lots of damage. We've been hearing story after story of hog manure going into houses and getting all over their clothing and every book they have, and so forth. And that isn't regulated out of business at all. I mean, it's something that continues.
And liability is going back on the producer and not on the—on the grower, not the company. The farmer, the farm person who has inherited or worked a public job and bought him a piece of land big enough to start a hog operation that's struggled, that's paid taxes. And when he put in that hog operation his taxes just went to thousands of dollars a year in property tax.
It goes to buildings, or—
The buildings, because of the amount of borrowed money that went into circulation. He's had to pay so much property tax.
So it's really nothing he owns. It's something that's setting there that the bank owns.
That's right. That's exactly right. And then if he doesn't make his payments—. A lot of the folks they say now they would have never done it.
And now how do they get out?
They've got to work it out to pay for their houses. And when they get them paid for they'll be obsolete and they'll have to be disposed of, or let it rot down or whatever, or build new ones—tear them down and build new ones. And they're already cutting out a lot of the growers.
They're—why are they doing that?
Obsolete.
Oh.
We cut a piece of timber over in the Beulahville area, and the houses were some of the first ones that were built for hogs back there. They're paid for. Stood a chance then to make a good living. And a hog house is something you can't grow anything else in but hogs. You can't convert it into anything else. A chicken house or a turkey house you can use to store a tractor, equipment, farm equipment.
But a hog house not. So you got into the timber business, and you mentioned removing debris. You also mentioned that—you said something about being a preacher. These are things that I haven't heard you talk about at all.
In 1980 things got mighty tough. And I always felt like that I had the strength to endure anything. I was not afraid of anybody or anything. And oftentimes in years past my wife would ask me, "How are you going to do what you're starting out to do?" And I said, "Well, I'm going to start." My granddaddy used to tell me in my younger days—he was eighty-four when he died—he told me, says, "I can't tell you what to do, but—he says, I'll help you." And he helped me. I had a place at the beach in 1979, '80, and things got bad. I sold it, paid off what I had that I could pay off.
Did you have to pay those citations or did you just sell the business to pay for them?
I didn't sell the business. I just stopped operations and told them I just wasn't going to pay it.
Okay.
And daddy still had title to the land. The bond was in his name, so they
just backed off. They broke me and then the times broke me, Reagan's
time broke me. And so I quit. I sold out the hogs. In the meantime, we
had trucks that were hauling produce to Florida and freight back south.
[Noise as before—air conditioner—subject extremely difficult to
hear.] [Unclear.]
I'm forty-three now. I remember the gas lines.
Well, I shut the truck—I shut the trucks down. I owed some of them [Unclear.]
What bible school?
Heritage Bible College in Dillon, North Carolina.
And they're what denomination?
PFWB, Penecostal Freewill Baptist.
Okay.
The same as our home church.
Are you the pastor of the church here?
No. I've been out for two or three years. I haven't gone to the church. This is our daughter-in-law, Carol.
Hi Carol. I'm Charlie Thompson.
This is Charlie, and this is our youngest grandson. He was born right after the flood.
The night you made it out.
That's one of the reasons we had to get somewhere to live.
Right.
And FEMA was promising us but they never would do anything.
Now, tell me a little bit about the timber business and the debris removal, and then I want to hear about the flood.
Well, after all these years I had the sawmill. Daddy was building some
houses down in Florida in his retirement. He was gone a lot. In fact, I
cut the lumber and hauled the lumber, sheet rock and materials down to
Florida when he built his first houses in a way out about place; he
bought land cheap. But he furnished the timber, dressed it. Got a
planer, got all, everything it takes to fix the wood. And all the years
in the meantime I was still running the sawmill. So I learned from my
granddaddy how to run the sawmill and all these other things, and we
just kept running the mill. And after I went to college I pastored a
real small church. The [Unclear.]
Where was that?
Down in Willard. [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Baby crying] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.] [Unclear.]
That's an accomplishment. So you're now—are you still in the sawmill business?
I've still got the sawmill. It hasn't been run since [Unclear.]
Since [Unclear.]
[Unclear.] [Baby crying.] [Unclear.] [Baby crying. Subject cannot be heard. Noise of air conditioning
continues to obscure subject as well.]
And you've been working on the debris removal? Is that what you're doing
with most of [Unclear.] [Baby crying.]
I left mental health in the eighties. I went to Clinton and worked for
Turlington Lumber Company. I never saw a band saw in my life. [Telephone rings.] [Unclear.]
Turlington?
Turlington [Unclear.] [Unclear.]