My decision to re-enter college with the fall session....deciding to quit smoking (I had begun this due to boredom of sitting in the tank with nothing to do, and free cigarettes furnished)....beginning again after several weeks at school....mornings at lectures....afternoons at chemistry,physics and biology labs....finishing graduation requirements in two fall and one summer session (anxious to get on with life after two lost years)....
Applying for admission to three or four medical schools....turned down....one claimed 50 applicants for every place in class....later learned one of my classmates waited three years before he was accepted....he was married and already settled down....I had been living at home and felt I needed to get out on my own....turning down a potential job at Stanford University teaching undergraduate French (asked by my former French professor)....
Having read salesmen highest earners accepting a job in Charlotte with a high school and neighborhood friend selling race records (phonograph) for a distributor....traveling North and South Carolina and occasionally eastern Tennessee and Northern Georgia, calling on music stores, returning to Charlotte on week-ends quite frequently with sales insufficient to cover my advance....after three months, realizing I had no talent for this....
Taking a job with Johns-Manville acoustical tile division as a construction clerk....phoning Dad to wire me $15 to tide me over until my first pay check on new job....pay on sales job was $50 per week guaranteed as an advance and a percentage of sales beyond a minimum sales figure....the Johns-Manville job was $35 a week and over the two years I worked there received raises finally amounting to $42 per week....with my friend renting a single room at $7 per week....having to eat out at diners every meal.... tired out after a days work and having to return to a single room with two beds and a chest of drawers at night, hardly enough room to turn around in and no place to relax as there were no chairs and the landlady insisted we not sit on the beds....living from "hand to mouth" for two years....further wearing out the $1350 6-year old Pontiac driving to work and on company business, as well as visits back home to Hickory....
Being hospitalized one week-end with a gall bladder attack while in Hickory and failing to call my boss in Charlotte.... finding out from my sister Audrey that the company she was working for was looking for someone as a potential replacement for their in-house insurance agent....interviewing for the job one Sunday afternoon and being offered the job....giving a week's notice in Charlotte and when the week was over loading my car with what few possessions I had and moving back to my parent's home.
Beginning to date Louise on a regular basis, after having dated her a number of week-ends driving up from Charlotte...not having enough money to have any extravagant dates...mostly a movie, a stop at a popular fast food stand for a hamburger..... parking somewhere and talking...visiting at her mother's or my parents....helping Louise with our wedding arrangements...the seemingly endless running about to get everything worked out... ...renting a three-room upstairs apartment in a private home just off Springs Road....having only $250 saved and using some of it to make a down payment on a refrigerator and electric range... Dad promising $500 and us using part of it to buy a bed, mattress and chest of drawers, as well as a kitchen dinette set.... wedding day at Sweetwater Presbyterian....double wedding with Louise's sister Betty and Gene Mitchell...relief it was all over and we were all on the way together in my old 1942 Pontiac to Fontana Dam in western NC for our honeymoon...being so tired we stopped in Morganton to eat supper...driving only to Marion then before stopping for the night...continuing to Fontana the next morning...during the trip not knowing whether the old car would hold up for the entire trip or not...returning Sunday evening and being concerned whether the brakes would hold up coming down the mountains....all of us returning to work Monday (wedding was preceding Thursday)....
The financial squeeze of making payments on the stove and refrigerator as well as a silverware set Louise had financed (no money for anything else for more than a year)...Three months or so after marriage moving to Dad's old hosiery mill building on Springs Road....$12.50 per month for three rooms in tandem, ten feet wide and total length 40 feet (the entire building was 20 by 40 feet and had been divided lengthwise into two three-room apartments) .... living there most of six years, during which time we installed a washing machine, bought our first TV, our first sofa and chair, a collapsible bath tub, installed a water heater, traded the Pontiac for a 1953 two-door Chevrolet, received a deed from Louise's mother for one-sixth of the land she owned, had a well dug, contracted and had built the home in which we have lived for 35 years so far....
Alan born May 12, 1951 just after I had left to go eat(Louise's sister Evelyn had come in to sit with her after I had spent the night)....Susan born October 31, 1953 while I waited in Louise's room observing the relatively large number of people on the streets that evening due to Halloween....
Two years working for Mortgage Service Corporation typing house insurance policies...Louise working at Merchant's Produce and Grocery, a wholesale food distributor until Alan born....Two further years at Mortgage Service as Manager of Tax and Insurance Department, seeing that tax and insurance bills of mortgagees were paid from escrow accounts, that escrow accounts were kept up to date by payment increases if necessary, picking up mail at post office and buying postage in Pitney-Bowes postage meter at lunch time whenever necessary....brown bagging sandwich lunches...being disturbed at lunch time by calls from customers...dictating letters into a dictaphone with wax cylinders, to be transcribed by my secretary....always six or more stacks of files ready with letters to be transcribed....
Coming home in summertime and finding Louise worn out from the heat of our tin-roofed apartment and canning and taking care of the children....Saturday afternoons sleeping to be refreshed in order to play sax at the Saturday night American Legion dance in our five-piece band....returning after 1 AM and sitting in front of the apartment in the car with Frank Miller, our guitar player, listening to early morning radio broadcast of big band music, which we emulated as much as possible in our band, before going in to bed....
Being approached by M. B., a former fellow employee of Alvin Bolch Jr., my cousin, at Elliot Hosiery Mill, about working for him as office manager at B. Hosiery Company an organization founded by some stockholders of a large hosiery company, in Chicago Illinois. He offered a raise of $4 per week from my current salary and I took the job.
M. had an older woman working in his office who was doing all the work and complaining about needing help. He seemed to think one person could do all that was required, and after some time of training for me fired her. It had become evident to me that due to all the reports required by our Chicago office that the woman's complaints were justified, and after several months he hired someone to help me. I worked a comsiderable amount of overtime even after getting some help, and soon someone from the Chicago office came down and I was put on a fixed salary with "Chinese" overtime. This was a situation where the overtime pay was determined by the total hours worked, and could result in the hourly rate being less than the current minimum wage, which mine was on a number of occasions.
B. Hosiery was a greige goods producer of men's, misses and childrens hosiery and at its peak shipped 13,000 dozen pairs to plants in Illinois and Kentucky. At the time, the Illinois company was the largest producer of men's work socks for a large retailer, and B. Hosiery shipped 8,000 dozen pairs per week, made on Scott & Williams B-5 and HH model knitting machines, 176 needle, 36 gauge.
Daily routine required picking up mail at post office in the morning and delivering outgoing mail in the late afternoon on the way home ... answering telephone ... totaling knitting, looping and inspecting production tickets and posting to time cards ... posting knitting production to inventory stock ... totaling knitting and looping flaws and posting to time cards and bulletin board ... taking employment applications, if any ... typing correspondence, if any.
Weekly routine required doling out knitting needles to fixers ... preparing shipping bills of laden ... invoicing shipments ... delivering paperwork to trucker terminal ... taking yarn and needle inventory and preparing reports re usage of these to our Chicago office ... receiving via Teletype quantities of work socks, by size and style, to be shipped the following week ... calculating the number of machines the fixers should set up to achieve the required styles and sizes ...
Preparing Quarterly reports and deposits of withheld taxes to the IRS, and, of course, yearly IRS reports and preparing employee withholding tax W-2s to be filed with their tax returns.
While working with the problem of setting up machines to produce the styles and sizes required I discovered I could quickly do it by the use of my slide rule ... I could set the total order against the weekly order and read the quantities by size directly off the rule ... this saved me from having to use an electric calculator ... thinking further about this, it occurred to me the number of sizes from size 10 to 13 if plotted on graph paper with sufficient space between each, and connected with a line at the topmost points, looked like a skewed probability curve ... could it be that someone wanting to run goods for stock could use the probability curve and be fairly correct with respect to required sizes? ... this set me to thinking about the tank gunnery method (and probably artillery method as well) of correcting fire to hit a target ... bracketing the target and using a series of shots, cutting the distance between the shots by one-half and you'd hit the target eventually without fail provided each succeeding shot continued to bracket the target ... this is a practical use of the mathematical convergent series ... thinking how many other mathematical concepts could I find in practical use?..
Over the 12 years I worked for B. Hosiery, the type of plain work sock we made was gradually replaced by a more sporty looking long-rubber -top sock of which B. Hosiery and the Illinois Company had no machines to produce so far as I knew. So, after about 8 to 9 years, our work sock machines were shut down and sent to Kentucky for storage, and we only had about 33 Scott & Williams Komet machines left. During the first nine years I worked for three managers who were replaced by death and other reasons. The final three years I was named manager, but since we only had 33 machines I still had to do the office management, including clerical work with only one person to help.
At last the order was given to shut the mill down and I had the thankless task of laying off about 40 persons, and with the help of a few key employees, shipping the remaining machinery and equipment to Kentucky. I was told I would be paid for the next three months to close everything out. Unfortunately, since employment was coming to an end, those who were still working had little interest in doing a good job. Consequently the machinery was not adequately fastened on the truck and a large part was wrecked before reaching its destination. In all fairness, however, these particular machines had come to us individually crated and when I asked if they should be shipped that way I was advised since we no longer had the crates we should ship them well braced. Never having shipped this type of machine before evidently resulted in insufficient bracing.
After applying for work with several companies, I was offered work at Superior Cable Corporation in Hickory, about two miles from our home. I was hired to work with the records of the MESD division but almost before an office and desk had been provided personnel offered a test for computer programing. I took it, passed with a B rating and was sent to IBM Autocoder (Programing language for 1400 series computer) school in Boston, Mass. I then worked until 1977 as a programmer and programmer/analyst, never less than 45 to 50 hours per week. These were the early years of mainframe computers, and changes in software and hardware was fast and furious, always resulting in need for schooling and learning new languages, operating systems, etc. as well as trying to provide new systems and programs for the company.
During this time the company leased System 360 and System 370 (several models of each), and the company was purchased by Continental Telephone Corporation, St. Louis, Mo. to be, as I understood, its manufacturing arm, much as Western Electric Corporation was for Southern Bell.
After several years of fluctuating profits and losses Continental decided to unload the company we were told, since, as a public utility previously alone they had been virtually assured continuous profits. As a result of this Continental maintained only a supply warehouse in Hickory and I was transferred to this unit when Superior Cable became a separate entity again.
Soon, Continental decided to move the supply administration to Atlanta, Ga., and since I didn't want to move there I left their employment with generous serverance pay, and no job prospects. I knew that at my age and level of experience I was not likely to find any long-term employment again at a decent salary, so I resigned myself to taking a pay cut while trying to find work within commuting distance of home, to avoid moving and/or having to get back in debt for a house. I was not mistaken about long term employment.
During these years Louise worked a large part of the time at Star Furniture Company, a furniture frame manufacturing company, and helped out considerably with our finances, and both children graduated from high school. Alan went to N.C. State University for a year, couldn't decide definitely what he wanted to do, and then came to work with Superior Continental, which reverted to Superior Cable Corporation and later to Siecor. Susan Graduated from the University of N.C., Chapel Hill, took a job with Liberty Life Insurance Co. to work in Atlanta, Ga. after training at Dallas, Tex. She decided after several weeks she didn't want to live in Atlanta, came back to Hickory and also got a job at Siecor as a staff accountant.
A classified ad in the Hickory Record led me to a programmer/analyst job with Hunt Manufacturing Co., Statesville, N.C. where I worked with Sid Cline, who had worked for a while at Superior Continental. This entailed working on an NCR Criterion Mainframe using their Neat-3 language, which was similar in some respects to Autocoder. Sid showed me enough of the ropes that I got by very well in short order. Later I was sent to Atlanta to Neat-3 school. Part of the reason this job came available was there seemed to be some indecision about where their computer should be located and what it should be doing. They decided to change to a Hewlitt-Packard computer, change to Cobol language, and move the computer to Philadelphia. Sid and I were both sounded out about moving to Philadelphia, but neither of us wanted to go. I again watched the classified ads, and soon found Homelite, a division of Textron, Inc., Gastonia looking for someone with knowledge of IBM's Bill of Materials software package. I had gone to school twice while with Superior on these packages and applied for the job by letter with resume.
After an interview I was hired at Homelite. At that time, due to the OPEC oil squeeze, chain saws were hot sellers and Homelite was making 5,000 per week. These and gasoline powered line trimmers for lawns were their only products. When the oil squeeze slacked, the chain saw market had been saturated, and layoffs began. I was fortunate that due to my experience with Bill of Materials I was not laid off with the first group. When I went there there were 20 programmers and programmer/analysts. When I was laid off with the last group there were only about 5 left. In addition to the market saturation, I heard rumors the product quality had dropped and caused a drop in sales, and that a truck-load of saws had disappeared, thought stolen.
Gastonia was almost 50 miles from Hickory, and since it was too far to commute we rented a mobile home, first in Dallas, N.C. and after about a month or two one located about a block from the plant, from which I could walk if desired. After renting for several months we thought we might have a better one by buying a new one, and perhaps be able to sell later for a price resulting in rent-free living while in Gastonia. This didn't pan out, and we finally wound up with the mobile home costing about what a furnished apartment would have. But we did live near the plant, resulting in reduced auto expenses, and lived in a very nicely furnished home.
From 9/82 to 2/83 I was looking for work. Finally I was hired at a textile manufacturer within commuting distance of home. This company manufactured double-knit fabrics for a period of time, and probably was the only company owning full-fashioned hosiery knitting machines in the U.S. This type of machine had once been the premier ladies hosiery manufacturing machine, but with the advent of nylon and other heat- treatable yarns, which could be shaped by boarding on hot forms the manufacturing shifted to regular circular machines.
After several months with the company it seems the full fashion leotard business waned and it appeared to me there was a drive to regain its profitability through all sorts of cost-cutting measures, not the least of which was a pretty regular replacement of management and administrative personnel. I feel that I made a significant contribution in helping the Data Processing Department get into a more up-to-date position than it was when I started there.
Louise during the year 1985 developed a kidney problem and had to begin dialysis. As a result, I had to take two afternoons a week off from work and take her to Lenoir for treatment. This, together with my inability to work a 45 to 50 hour week got me laid off.
Although I suspected I was no longer employable, I updated my resume and job-hunted for six months, seeking work within commuting distance of home, and drawing unemployment pay. Finally, I accepted the inevitable and filed for social security retirement, at age 62 and a considerably reduced monthly check.