Author: pat Stith

The Intruder

I was alone at Snowbird, in the mountains of North Carolina, and it was as dark as a closet in the three-sided shed where I was sleeping.  We had never had any trouble up there but since I was alone I put a flashlight and a loaded .410 shotgun within easy reach of my rack before I went to sleep.

I was asleep on the middle rack on he right.
I was asleep on the middle rack on the right.

The noise that awakened me  frightened me.  I wanted it to be a mouse scrounging around for something to eat. But I knew it wasn’t, it was something a lot bigger than a mouse.

I don’t have a brave bone in my body, but I can’t stand the tension. In a situation like that I have to have resolution. Someone or some thing is going to get hurt, me maybe, but we are going to have resolution.

I dropped my hand down beside the rack, felt for the shotgun, and quietly pick it up. I cocked it and, at the same time, turned on my flashlight.

The intruder was a skunk.

I turned the light off immediately and lay there, quietly. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. I don’t know how long I waited — it seemed like a long time — before I switched the light back on.

The skunk had been walking away from me, back to the woods. He stopped when my light came on and turned as if to say, “You’re shining a light in my face?  Well, we’ll see about that.”  And he began walking back toward me.

I pulled the trigger, I shot him before he could shoot me.

Coming Friday: My Teacher

 

Motivating With Money

A year or so after I graduated  from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and went to work for The Charlotte News Dad asked me to go to his warehouse in North Charlotte one Saturday afternoon and assemble some corrugated box partitions, see how many I could make in an hour.

He and Brother Dave had decided to get into the partition assembling business and he wanted to know how much they were going to have pay for labor.

So I put some together. The table I worked on –a sheet of plywood on top of a drum– was wobbly and the corrugated partition board I was assembling was crooked, but I was able to assemble 23, 24 partitions an hour.

I told Dad that, with practice, on a better table, with straight board, I could probably make 30 a hour.

At that time the minimum wage was $1.40 so I told him that he and Dave were going to have pay a nickel a piece. People would not do that kind of work for minimum wage, they were going to have to give them a chance to make a little more.

So that’s what they paid, five cents per partition.

A few weeks later Dad told me that they had a man making 40 partitions an hour. I was surprised. A little later he said the guy was making 60 an hour. I was a really surprised. Then he said the guy was making 80 an hour. I was amazed.

That’s when I asked for a job, working three nights a week and all day Saturday, assembling partitions. I got to where I could do 120 an hour in short spurts and average 100 an hour all day long.  The  News had paid me $120 a week to start — $3 an hour.   I was making $5 a hour working nights and Saturdays assembling partitions, fabulous pay for unskilled labor, the equivalent of $38.18 an hour in 2018 dollars.

Postscript: There’s a lesson here somewhere, about how productivity goes up when productivity and pay are linked.

Coming Monday:  The Intruder

NOTE: The Final Edition was one year old last week.  I’ve posted two stories a week and I thought you might be interested in seeing a list of the 10 best read posts.  Three of the top four are newspaper stories. Two are river stories and two are hiker stories.

Obviously, the earlier a story was posted the better chance it had to made the Top Ten but, anyway, here they are:

  1. “PIZ ZA! PIZ ZA! PIZ ZA!” Padding the Roanoke – 6/23/17
  2. Those Mean Old Newspapermen – 3/20/17
  3. This Was Not A Real Job – 9/4/17
  4. “Oh, Copyboy?” – 1/30/17
  5. Lost on Blood Mountain, Part 1 – 2/16/17
  6. Mind Game [Video] – 11/25/16
  7. Bear Bryant Called – 3/13/17
  8. “F” – 5/8/17
  9. Are You Boys Armed- 5/5/17
  10. He Might Be A Redneck – 12/26/16