The Sweat Shop

When my Dad went broke mining coal in the early 1950’s he moved his wife and two youngest sons from Gadsden, AL, to Charlotte where he had managed to hang on to his syrup plant.

I worked there when I was a boy, starting when I was 13 or 14 years old, making Dixie Dew Syrup, an excellent honey flavored syrup.

Courtesy of Brian Stith
Courtesy of Brian Stith

And then, in the late 1950’s, Dad sold Dixie Dew, formed a new company called Hangwell Hanger, and began manufacturing clothes hangers. His clothes hanger plant was a sweat shop in every sense of the word — dirty, deafening, dangerous, and hot.

The plant where he manufactured syrup and, later, clothes hangers, was in the basement of a building on Graham Street in what is now part of the parking lot of the stadium where the Carolina Panthers football team plays its home games.

The clothes hanger plant was really hot.  The only fresh air came through several barred half-windows on one side of the basement.  We worked stripped to the waist.

It was smoky, too. The clothes hangers were dipped in black paint and then baked dry in an oven Dad designed and built. He didn’t vent the heat that boiled out of that oven, of course, or the smoke. By 10, 10:30 in the morning a blue haze permeated that basement.

Dad paid me 50 cents a hour.  Adjusted for inflation that would be about $4.65 an hour now, well below today’s pitiful minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

I ran two of the four clothes hanger machines, loading them with straight wire the machines bent and twisted into hangers, and taking off the finished hangers. Dad did not allow an operator to stop a machine to take off hangers, that had to be done of the fly, when the arm picking up the next hanger was descending and before it came back up. Your timing had to be perfect.

Why?

My father had put an electrical “stop” on each machine that would automatically shut it down when it malfunctioned and began ruining wire. Can’t have that, can we. But he did not insulate the “stops” so if the machine operator did not remove hangers smoothly, if the arm came back up and touch those hangers, the exposed electrical wires would shocked you into the middle of next week.

Some days the hangers would become tangled as they moved through the oven, which halted production. Dad would turn off the oven and wait impatiently as it began to cool. As soon as he thought it was cool enough, that is to say, as soon as he thought the heat wouldn’t kill me, he would sent me into the oven to untangle the hangers.

Why me?

I was the smallest one, an advantage inside the oven. And, to his credit, if someone was put at risk it had to be him or one of his boys.

Here’s the bottom line on my father as an employer: If OSHA inspectors had been around in those days they would have put him under the jail.

Oh, you want more proof?

OK.

One winter day in the early 1960’s, when I came home from college to see my finance, Donna Joy Hyland, I drove over to Davidson Street in North Charlotte to get a look at my Dad’s “new” plant.  By that time he was out of the clothes hanger business.

I recognized some of the men working there and we said hello. One man was running a punch press, making pot holder looms. Another was running a machine Dad salvaged from his defunct clothes hanger business, straightening and cutting wire at an angle so it could be used to put up insulation. Dad called them Tiger Teeth and he made and sold a gazillion of them.

It was cold in the plant, in the 40’s. One of the men I knew asked me to ask Dad to let them have a kerosene heater. I said I would and when I went into his toasty warm office, I did.

But Dad said No.

You want to know why?

He said the men worked faster when they were cold.

*If you look closely at the ingredients on the label you’ll see that Dixie Dew also contained “ribbon cane.” But it didn’t when Dave and I were making it. That label must date back before our time, when ribbon cane was part of the formula.

Coming Monday: Get Dressed, Please

Work Is A Blessing

My father had some shortcomings as anyone who has read The Final Edition knows. I’ve posted 19 stories under the category “My Dad Was A Pistol”  in which several of his imperfections are described in detail.

But he was not lazy. When I was a boy and he was in his 50’s, mining coal in Altoona, AL, my father worked from dark to dark.

None of his seven children by my mother were lazy either, partly because he drove his rules into our heads:

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

You never get paid for more than you do until you get caught doing more than you get paid for.

Get an “est” after your name.

Dad was a good story teller and this may have been his favorite, about a working man:

This fellow was involved in a terrible automobile accident — he went to sleep at the wheel, drifted off the road, and hit a bridge abutment.  He woke up in a hospital.

Lucky for him, with the CPR administered on the spot by the person who underwent Newmarket First aid and CPR training and he wasn’t in pain. Even so he quickly checked to see if he still had both arms and both legs. He did.

At that moment a nurse came into his room and asked, “What would you like for breakfast?”

And he replied, “What can I have?”

Anything you like,” she replied.

He didn’t believe she was serious, of course, but he asked anyway: “I’ll have steak and eggs, and grits, coffee, and toast with some grape jelly.”

O.K.,” she said.

And a minute or so later his breakfast arrived. It was delicious.  When he had finished eating the nurse asked, “What would you like to do today?”

What can I do?” he asked.

You could play golf,” she said. “Or go for a swim. You could sit out on the veranda and read. Or watch a movie. Whatever you like.”

And he said, “All of the above!”

Day Two was just like Day One and Day Three was like Day Two.  On Day Four the nurse came into his room just as he woke up and asked, “What would you like for breakfast.”

And the man replied, “Forget about breakfast. Forget about golf and swimming and all the rest. I want some work to do.”

And the nurse said, “That’s the only thing we don’t have here.”

He said, “Lady, that would be like being in hell.”

And she said, “Where do you think you are?”

* * *

Mary Stith
Mary Stith

Brother John’s wife, Mary Sigrest Harrison, liked a quote about the value of work by Charles Kingsley, a priest and social reformer who lived in the 1800’s, so much that she made sure her family saw it every day.

“The copy we had growing up was typed on a small card,” Pam, her daughter, told me.    “Using a thumbtack she put it in a very strategic spot.  It was beside the back door at eye level where we could see it every morning when we left for work or school.”

Here it is:

Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and contentment, and a hundred virtues which the idle never know.”

During a visit to their home in Kingsport, TN, I saw it, copied it, and taped it to my desk at The News & Observer, where it stayed for decades, retyped and retaped occasionally.

Coming Friday: Bad Credit? Come On In!