Foxfire 9

by Foxfire Fund, Inc.

  PLATE 80 A view of the land Roy used to own. The sign in the right corner reads: “These fields, locally known as Mill Ridge, were once used to grow tobacco and hay. They were purchased by the U.S. Forest Service in 1970, and now are important brood areas for turkey and grouse. Fruiting shrubs planted along the road provide food and protection for many wildlife species. Wildlife habitat management of these fields and surrounding forests is a cooperative effort between the U.S. Forest Service and the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.”

  The way we did our teeth, there was a fella that had a pair of forceps—or tooth pullers, they called it. If you had a bad tooth, you’d go up to his house and he’d get you down and take your tooth out. (That’s) what we did in the dentist business. The last’n he pulled for me, I went to his house and he was hoeing corn in the field. He sent one of his children to the house to get his pullers. He got me down between the cornrows and took my tooth out.

  [We took care of a lot of our own problems and didn’t even call a doctor.] One time we was peeling tanbark and something stung me on the foot. I thought it was a bumblebee sting. After a while, it wouldn’t quit hurting. I looked down and there was two [punctures]. I told my dad I believed that I was snakebit. He looked at it and said, “I believe you are.” So I went down there [where the snake had bit me] and I looked and there was a copperhead laying there. “Well,” he said, “you go to the house but you take your time and don’t get hot.” The house was down the hill, and in about five minutes, I was [there], I told Momma a snake bit me. She went and got the turpentine and held the bottle to that place. Then she got a gallon of kerosene and set my foot down in it and soaked it for a while. Then she made a poultice out of a soggy paste of hot water, meal, and salt. She mixed it up and got it real hot and put it on there with a cloth around it. She left it on there till the next morning. That was it. My foot swelled up, but I never did get sick.

  During the Depression, many people left the mountains and went North to the big industrial cities like Detroit in search of jobs. Roy was one of these people. This is what he told us about his experience:

  [I went up to Detroit in] 1927. I had a neighbor that [had gone] up there before and I heard from him. I went up there and stayed with him. I went up on a train out of Marshall. I borrowed twenty-five dollars from my grandma to go up there. [My grandma] didn’t say nothing about me going to Detroit. She just let me have the money. I’ve thought about that a lot of times. I think she thought this big store in Barnard was going to come up for sale and she had a little money. She said, “Roy, I’ll let you have the money to buy that store.” But it didn’t come up for sale. [That] was the same store I bought several years later.

  So I went up there [to Detroit] and went to work with a corporation [which] made ice cream cabinets. Later that company combined with another company and they started making refrigerators also. I was a checker in the receiving department checking the inventory of the [railroad] cars.

  After that I worked for a private detective agency for six or seven years. I guarded the vice president of Chevrolet Motors for three years. I was guarding that old boy when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. After that, times got pretty hard and he discontinued our services.

  Then I started guarding the man that financed Fisher Brothers when they went into Detroit and started making bodies for General Motors. I guarded his house for four years. He had a gate there and I would close it at night. Sometimes he would come in scared to death. A lot of times, Edsel Ford’s wife would be down there. I knew Edsel Ford’s wife personally [I also knew a] fella who was with Chrysler. I knew all of them. They visited there, you know.

  [Lots of mountain people had gone to Detroit the same time I did.] Generally they tended to live in the same neighborhoods. They lived in a place called River Rouge. That was a suburb south of Detroit. It was really all the same town. You would never know you was out of Detroit when you got into it. Most of the people in River Rouge were from the South. They even had a chief of police that was a Southern man.

  That was probably the first time some of [the mountain people] had been in a town any length of time. Of course, I had never been in town either. I was out of the country straight into the city. To me it was quite a change. The numbers of people and the way they lived, of course [were different]. I guess some of them hadn’t been to a theater before. I don’t guess I had. [Indoor plumbing was new to me.] I just couldn’t get used to that. There was no indoor plumbing in our community. Most of us didn’t even have a outhouse. We had lots of woods. That’s it. Young boys would sit on a stump. Be sure to get on one as high as you could get!

  [And where I came from] we didn’t have electricity. We didn’t have a telephone. I guess at that time we didn’t have a radio. I remember the first automobile and the first radio I ever saw. I remember the first airplane that come over. I just had to guess that it was an airplane. I was hoeing corn for ten cents an hour, and that airplane came over and somebody said, “What’s that?”

  Somebody else said, “I believe it’s an airplane.” We didn’t know. We just said it was an airplane.

  During the Depression, I worked every day. Couldn’t hardly get off a day. Everybody was kind of afraid of people robbing. Robbing was starting to get pretty rank back in the Depression days. They was pretty desperate. I seen people going down the alleys eating out of garbage pails. Eating out of the garbage pails! I saw that. People were losing their homes. Maybe they had been paying on them for years. People were desperate.

  While I was in Detroit, I was making more than the average person, but finally this little store come up for sale back at home and I decided I could make a go of it. So I come home [and the owner] told me what he wanted for it. I said, “All right.” I decided to buy it. I hadn’t ever sold anything. I didn’t know anything about selling anything. I had a little money—not too much. I believe I had about eight hundred dollars.

  My daddy said, “I’ll sign a note with you for the balance of the money.” That was in 1935. We inventoried the stock in the store and the stock was worth $1,356. I had a 1927 four-door Chevrolet sedan that was in good shape, and I decided I would sell that. I sold that car for one hundred dollars. I had a little farm over there that I believe I had paid five hundred dollars for, and I sold it for about eight hundred. And with that money, I bought the business—the stock—and I rented the building. The rent on this store building was five dollars a month. The rent on my house, which was a two-story frame house immediately behind the store, was seven dollars a month. That was twelve dollars a month I was paying for rent. And the store was a good brick building.

  There were actually two stores in town. After a year, my business got going good and I tried to buy the store I was renting, but the man wouldn’t sell. The other merchant had a nice brick building, and he was willing to sell, so I bought his building and stock and moved out of the first store. The post office was in there, and when I bought that second store, I moved the post office. We put the mail on and off the railroad mail cars, and we served two post offices, so everybody in the area came for their mail there. Some of them walked from a mile or two miles back on the other side of that mountain. The woman that was postmistress, she didn’t pay anything in rent for that space. I figured it was good advertising if people had to come to my place to get their mail. If I made the store attractive enough, I would get their business, so I tried to make it attractive with the goods and with the prices.

  One of the passenger trains was called the 101. It came about seven in the morning and it had mail on it. The other two trains that had mail on them were the number 11 and the number 12. The number 12 ran about one o’clock and the number 11 ran about three o’clock. We had to meet every train. I still dream about missing one of those trains with the mail on it—get there and the train would be pulling off about the time you got there! We had a room in the back of that store and I stayed in the back at night to keep somebody from stealing. One night there was a terrible storm, and I thought it
was the mail train coming. We had stock in the back there, and I jumped up and hit my head on a big old tub. When I hit my head, I laid back down. I knew where I was then. It was a storm coming and I had thought it was the mail train.

  That postmistress was a neat-looking woman, but she was pretty sensitive. She was a widow. I used to kid with her all the time. There was an old man come in, and he was looking for a woman. He told me, he said, “I like the looks of that postmistress up there.” He said, “Could you speak to her for me?”

  I said, “Yes, sir!” It just tickled me to have some fun with her. I told him, I said, “I’ll talk to her for you.”

  In the meantime, there was a man that lived back on that gap yonder. He said, “Roy, I have a sow over there. I’d like for somebody to take this sow and raise the pigs.” He said, “I’d give ’em half the pigs if they’d just take her and raise them.”

  PLATE 81 The railroad tracks and the siding that served Roy’s stores.

  PLATE 82 The store Roy started out in. Roy said, “See, there’s a railroad siding down here. Everything was handled by rail. All of my shipments—hardware and dry goods, even tobacco and hogs—come by rails.”

  I said, “I don’t know. I might locate somebody.”

  The old man spoke up and said, “Roy, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you get me and that woman fixed up, we’ll raise those pigs for you.”

  I thought, “Now I’ve really got it fixed up shore ’nough.”

  So I went back up and I told the postmistress, I said, “That old man down there told me to talk to you about him.” I said, “He’s interested in a woman.” Then I told her about the pigs. “He told me if I could get it worked up, you and him could raise those pigs.”

  Oh-h-h, she turned red, but she didn’t say much.

  In about a week or two, I said, “Have you ever decided about that?” I said, “That pig situation can’t wait much longer …”

  She said, “Listen here now, Roy. I’ve heard enough about that old son-of-a-bitch!” (laughter) Oh, she was mad as a wet hen!

  But we had a lot of fun. And the business kept getting better. Finally I was able to buy that first store out. I also built a seven-car railroad siding built up level with a railroad car floor that we could load and unload railroad cars from. Then I built another store. It was a two-story building thirty feet wide and eighty feet long.

  And then I built a tin building for a warehouse, and I kept my tractors and tools in that. So things really got busy around there for a while. There’s a little story about when I was building this tin storage building that I’ll tell you. I was up on top there doing some work on it. I’d had a cyst on my vocal cord and I went suddenly hoarse. I went to the doctor. He said, “When I take this cyst off, you can’t talk for two weeks. Give it a chance to heal. Otherwise it won’t heal.”

  After the operation, my brother wanted to know how the operation went, and I had to write on a piece of paper to tell him what the doctors said. He got a pencil and paper and wrote back to me! [He wasn’t the only one who did that, either.] I came over to the depot one day to bill out a car. I wrote out the number of the car, type of car, where it went to, and so on and so forth. The agent grabbed his pencil and started writing back to me.

  Anyway, I was up on this building after the operation. I could work with them, but I just couldn’t talk. There was a fellow that come down here and wanted to know if he could have a job. I wrote and told him that I needed him, and I told him that when lunchtime come, he could go up to the store and the wife would feed him up there. So when lunchtime come, he went up there and said, “I’m so and so. I’m working here, and that deaf and dumb man down there said to come up here and get something to eat!” (laughter)

  There was lots of funny things like that, but of course there was hard work, too. When I bought things for the store, I had to be pretty sure that there was going to be a call for them. I remember one time—I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Ball Band people or not. They made rubber footwear. They were the first ones to come out with the composition soles. Before that, they had leather. The shoes had a red ball in the bottom there [as their logo]. They’d come in the early part of the season and the money wasn’t due until October. When I had just built that store, I believe I had borrowed $1,500. I lacked a little having enough to pay that Ball Band bill. I had ordered this rubber stuff and I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it. So I decided I’d better write them. I wrote them about two months before the bill come due, and I told them I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not and could my time be extended if I couldn’t pay them on time. What tickled me was their answer. They wrote back and said it had never been their policy to extend credit before it come due! I thought that was a pretty good answer; but I made it all right. I just wanted to know what I had to do. There’s nothing like doing it in time.

  PLATE 83 Both stores and the warehouse Roy built.

  PLATE 84

  The stuff that I got stuck with I just had to sell at a loss and forget it. There was nothing you could return. We had trouble with women’s shoes more than anything. If you didn’t sell out a pair of shoes this year, you’d get stuck with them next year. We tried not to get that fancy stuff. Get staple stuff, you know. We sold more of a heavy work-type shoe for men. We sold good brands of all kinds of tool handles, stovepipe, dampers. All kinds of plow parts, bolts. We had paints. We had a line of used clothing. We made more off that than anything. You could sell a nice-looking dress for a dollar and maybe it cost you fifty cents.

  Then we’d get lined up with some wholesale people and we’d buy our sugar wholesale, and a lot of canned goods wholesale. And I’d buy a couple of railroad carloads of shucks each year from Michigan and out West, and solid truckloads of cottonseed meal—I remember the price of that meal was ninety cents for a hundred-pound bag—and soybean meal. I bought all that for people who didn’t put up enough feed for their stock for the winter. Some of them just never did make enough feed.

  When I bought flour and stuff for the store, I never bought it in less than twenty-five-pound bags. I usually bought solid truckloads of hundred-pound bags of flour. Later they put those hundred pounds of flour in print bags, and people used those for making clothes. [The company did that] to help sell flour, I guess.

  We sold gas for twenty-one cents a gallon. Kerosene was ten cents a gallon. All our drinks were seventy-five cents a case—ten cents for the crate and sixty-five cents for the drinks. Later we started hauling our own drinks [instead of having them delivered] and we got another fifteen cents off of that. When I first went there, we never had a refrigerator. We had an icebox. The man that brought us our drinks also brought us our ice, and we ordered ice by the hundred pound. If the ice was used up before the man got back, we’d just sell hot pop, and we’d sell it like that lots of times. The icebox had a hole down through the bottom and that went to a hole drilled in the floor so the water from that ice would just leak out down through the floor of the store.

  We also started buying pulpwood and selling and shipping it. You were never sure you were going to get rid of it when you bought it. You just bought it on your own. Then when a paper company wanted a load of wood, they would write me a letter and tell me to ship ’em a railroad carload.

  At first we had to load all that by hand into boxcars. I bought it in five-foot lengths with a diameter of a maximum of twenty inches and a minimum of four inches. Most of it was hemlock, poplar, gum, maple and all that, and most of it at that time had the bark on it. So we’d buy it, pile it off, separate it into piles by [variety], and peel the bark off because there wasn’t no wood sold at that time with the bark on. Then we had to load it all by hand to ship to Champion Fiber Company or International Paper at Canton or Columbia or Knoxville or Kingsport. If one wouldn’t buy, the other would, usually, so it kept us busy.

  Finally we got busy enough that I had to build that seven-car siding I told you about, and we got some mechanical means and started loading it mechanica
lly. And we loaded thousands of carloads of wood. Not just one thousand, but thousands.

  And we bought crossties and sold crossties to the railroad. Anything we could buy and make money on legally and aboveboard, that’s what we did.

  [I also built some silos near my store, and] I raised enough corn on the bottoms over there to fill those silos full. I kept thirty to forty cattle over the wintertime and fed ’em myself and sold ’em in the fall. We kept a surplus—mostly brood cows—and we sold the calves as stocker cattle or baby beef cattle. We always sold them for cash through livestock markets.

  And then, back in the forties, I decided that being in a rural county, we would buy a truck. I had some brothers that were unemployed, so we put a trailer behind that truck and we had a rolling store. We traveled all over the county, and we would swap with people. After they got to know us and we got the route established, when we stopped at their house they’d be watching for us. And if we couldn’t get to their houses, [we’d go to a crossroads, or go as far up their road as we could go, and sometimes several families] would be there waiting when we got there. If they wanted something we didn’t carry in the store, then when we went to Asheville we’d pick it up for them and that would save them a trip to town. What we did, since we had the post office in our place, we had a bunch of cards made up. The postcards at that time cost a penny apiece. Well, I had some postcards printed up with our name and address on them. We would take these cards and distribute them to the customers. If they needed a pair of shoes, a pair of overalls, a shirt, plow, plow point or whatnot, they would mail that card and we’d bring [the item] on the next trip. We got a lot of orders by mail that way.

  PLATE 85 Wig, Al Edwards, and Roy around a table under his picnic shelter during one of the interviews.