When Brother Dave turned 16 in 1955 and got his driver’s license he and I bought several dozen vending machines and began selling peanuts in Charlotte. It wasn’t a get-rich-quick scheme — we sold a mouthful of peanuts for one penny — but I saw something I’ll never forget and I learned a thing or two.
One of our machines was in a cotton mill and when I went into the mill to service it I saw why mill workers were sometimes referred to, disparagingly, as lintheads. There were blobs of cotton dust floating in the air, everywhere, so thick you could catch them and put them in your pocket. Cotton dust covered our peanut machine in a thick blanket of white fuzz. It clung to the workers, making them look ghostly. I didn’t know it then, I don’t guess the mill workers did either, but that cotton dust was killing them, giving them byssinosis — “brown lung disease.”
And I learned some things.
I learned that some so-called regular guys will attack a vending machine if it cheats them out of one penny.
I learned that a thief will destroy an new vending machine to steal a few pennies — take $25 away from you to get 25 cents for himself.
And I learned that some grown men will steal from a kid.
For weeks Dave and I couldn’t understand why one of our machines, in a long-haul truck repair shop, wasn’t making money. When we came to service it, the peanuts were always gone, or almost gone, but there never seemed to be enough pennies in the money box. It had to be a malfunction of some sort so, more than once, we switched out the machine, but the problem persisted.
Finally, a fellow who worked there blew the whistle on his co-workers. He said the key to the trucks’ glove box fit the lock on the peanut machine’s money compartment. They were unlocking the money compartment and stealing the peanuts by running the same pennies through the machine, over and over.
Coming Monday: The New Sheriff In Town