Mill Village Story

Andrews Gerald Bruce

Description

A Mill Village Story is the record of one mans upbringing in a place and time that is quickly vanishing. A quintessentially American small town, West Point, Georgia is a place defined by its local industrya world-class textile mill run by the West Point Pepperell corporationand adherence to traditional Southern values of congeniality, manners, and friendliness. Everyone author Gerald Andrews knew or even just rubbed shoulders with worked at the mill, and it was Andrewss experiences there that would take him from relative poverty to the corporate boardroom. A Mill Village Story is an account of Andrewss early years, his rapid rise to leadership in various textile firms, and the special character of the village that shaped him.How does a young man go from night watchman to corporate sales in a matter of years? A Mill Village Story offers some explanation. Creativity and kindness set him on the right path, those characteristics nurtured in him by family members and the mill community. Gerald Andrews also quickly gained a reputation as a problem-solvereven at the lowest position at the milland for recognizing the importance of every employee, no matter their rank. This compassion for his employees contributed to his success. In A Mill Village Story, a lifetime of wisdom comes to file, with Andrews peppering his tale with the homegrown philosophies he developed from the unique social relationships he enjoyed growing up. Add to the mix personal encounters with Southern characters like country psychic Mayhayley Lancaster and A Mill Village Story becomes a memorable time capsule that serves as a portrait of a uniquely American place.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: University of Georgia Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781588383884
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2019 by Gerald B. Andrews
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, Montgomery, Alabama.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Andrews, Gerald B., author.
Title: A mill village story : a southern boyhood joyfully remembered / Gerald B. Andrews.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018014 (print) | LCCN 2019980291 (ebook) | ISBN 9781588383877 (cloth) | ISBN 9781588383884 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Andrews, Gerald B.-Childhood and youth. | Villages-Chattahoochee River Valley. | Mills and mill-work-Chattahoochee River Valley. | Company towns-Chattahoochee River Valley. | Textile industry-Chattahoochee River Valley-History-20th century. | Chattahoochee River Valley-Biography. | Chattahoochee River Valley-History, Local.
Classification: LCC F292.C4 A53 2019 (print) | LCC F292.C4 (ebook) | DDC 976.1/56063092 [B]-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018014
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980291
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America by The Maple Press

The Black Belt, defined by its dark, rich soil, stretches across central Alabama. It was the heart of the cotton belt. It was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy. Here we take our stand, listening to the past, looking to the future.
To my family,
which is not just a chapter,
but the whole book.
Contents
1 Introduction
2 A Southern Perspective
3 A WP Railroad
4 The Civil War
5 In the Beginning
6 Alabama
7 Junior
8 Coca-Cola
9 Early On
10 Mayhayley
11 Along the Chattahoochee
12 Papa and Mama
13 Joseph Louis Barrow
14 High School
15 Night Watchman
16 The Plant Janitor
17 My Town
18 English Class
19 Creative Change
20 A Cool Girl
21 A Boy and A Bike
22 Sarah Jim
23 Boy Scouts
24 Healthcare
25 Three Dr. Peppers
26 The Beauty Contest
27 Old People
28 Auburn
29 6th Avenue and 48th Street
30 The Mama Bird
31 The Hostile Takeover
32 Mill Village Reality
33 Summing-Up
The Last Mill Village
Acknowledgments
About the Author

The Cotton State-by 1839 Mobile, Alabama, annually shipped 440,000 bales, half of all cotton exports for the entire country.
1
Introduction
S ometimes in my dreams I think the past is coming back to get me, but it never does. It s ironic that, in spite of our concerns about the dangers of the world, we spend most of our lives protecting us from ourselves. However, history isn t a matter of speculation or possibility; it s a product of evidence, proof that it happened. No one wants to be astonished by tomorrow; we all want to be prepared when it arrives but rarely are. The border between the past and present can be very permeable, but what history has taken for its own, it will never give back. Yet we shouldn t get too far ahead of ourselves, because reality is relative to what we remember and always grades on a curve. In today s world, honesty is a welcome postcard from yesterday. Fortunately for us, life hides a lot more than it reveals. Yet I have seen too much of the world to give it my full trust. Even so, in invocation, we should praise the non-famous men and women who brought us to this place, many of whom came from small mill villages.
Now, as an introduction, my name is Gerald and I like creativity, exclamation points, children, hugs, dogs, Auburn, and honest people who make me smile. Being raised in the long shadows of a small mill village-a textile company town-in the South, back when cotton was king, was the icing on the cake for one poor little boy-me. Just being born in America was the cake, because it was a child-friendly world. It was a place where I discovered the greatest lesson a wise man will ever learn: The mouth never speaks what the mind and heart doesn t first dictate. At the same time, a mill village in its own way conjures up a rural universe in which to live, as people become immersed in their own unique worlds. We didn t need a burst of asterisks or quotation marks to define who we were-we knew. With the many uncertainties we face today, we re all looking for a safe, magical journey back to the familiar. But it s hard to airbrush the real world. I have spent my life in awe of the privilege of growing up as an ordinary little kid in a hamlet in the hardscrabble back country of the Deep South, where imagination is rarely in a state of purity. A mill village was less a place in time and more a state of mind. Reality is not necessarily what happened but the memory that remains after everything else is forgotten.
So the real world is relative; sometimes it seems to reach beyond human bandwidth. Opportunity was always the Trojan horse we tried to slip through the mill village gates, and by its very nature this wasn t easy. This is the story of that little boy, some of his challenges, and a few of his experiences. A childhood forged in a little Southern backwater put me on the path to become what could perhaps best be described as a Problem Doctor. Hard circumstances presented a sense of early independence and self-reliance, which was a heavy weight to carry, but it served me well. At the same time, it s difficult to write a rough draft of one s life because there are so many nuances.
Along the way, I learned that knowledge is the true currency of life. I was lucky and had a front-row seat on the pictorial history of the iconic West Point companies-West Point Manufacturing Company, West Point Pepperell Inc., and West Point Stevens Inc.-in the extraordinary golden mill village era. One learns that the senses are not always a reliable portal to the real world, but if you lived it, you didn t require an introduction-you were already there. Risk is never a safe route; it s simply a headlong plunge into reality. We were just simple kids, wannabes, lying in wait. I have tried to tell this story in an expressive understatement, its own world in action, as a stretched mill village boy who took a long dive into deep water.
I was born in Fairfax, a small hamlet of 3,500 people, one of several unincorporated little textile towns-Riverview, Fairfax, Langdale, Shawmut, Huguley, Lanett, and West Point-strung together on Highway 29 like beads on a necklace along the winding Chattahoochee River, the border between Alabama and Georgia. Deeply embedded in the mill village fabric was an addiction, gently, comfortably closing around a longing heart like a warm, soft hand but never giving it a painful squeeze. There was a unique safe innocence about it. These tiny enclaves were a special place where we knew that every adult would recognize us, know where we lived and to whom we belonged. There was an abundance of warm hearts and wonderfully lived-in faces. I felt as if our little towns belonged to me and I belonged to them. My alter ego could not have enjoyed it more than I did. With boyish enthusiasm, I sometimes seemed to have slipped by a normal childhood altogether because our special place was a little world within itself. As a kid I woke up every morning with gusto, kissing the floor with my feet and facing the bathroom mirror with a smile.

Fairfax Mill 1962-Home of Martex Towels.
It s hard to size up a typical mill village in a casual glance or just a few words. They were all different. Each one was as broad as the individuals that lived there, as well managed as the company that ran the mill, as deep as the distinctive tales of the people, and as varied as the many dreams of those searching for them. No one wanted to be culled from the herd; we all wanted to be part of the whole. There were no landed gentry-everyone lived in Company-owned homes, even the plant manager. Neither was it a big book town; in fact, we didn t even have a bookstore or a public library, but the wisdom and quality of the people that lived there made up for it. Truth was never a depletable resource.
A mill village employee s life resided somewhere between an unwritten contractual clause and a guaranteed rite of passage-with each privilege closely followed by a responsibility to the Company-which in turn looked after your interests. It was a conditional two-way street of mutual respect built upon a foundation over many years of mostly unspoken social agreements. The most uncanny thing about small-town living is how simple it was, although it brims well over the edges of the expected. There was an unfathomable respect between management and employees, as well as for one s neighbors, that was hard to comprehend. In the 21st century, the real world has proven that hope is filled with retrospective expeditions, and no matter what you think you are looking at, it can change before your very eyes. Eventually, the mill villages did. One can t escape reality; it is the most consequential of all of life s lotteries, and our task is to live in it and through it-but few escape the large white spaces and scars it leaves.
No one wanted to be considered ill-mannered or contemptuous. Everyone wanted to narrate their own story of the self and their family, the individual existence in the collective whole. Parents and grandparents patiently waited for the day their children and grandchildren could have a declaration of independence and pursue a better education and life. Everyone had their place and purpose in the whole, like a well-oiled machine, and there were not many assaults on convention. One lived through one s own atmosphere of biography-held up by honesty, integrity, trust, and reputation-buffered by common sentiments of the community. There was a strong church upbringing in a mill village, causing us, for the most part, to look at the world through a moral Protestant lens. We were primarily known for our pared-down normalcy. I m still set alight by the patiently waiting memories of those experiences.
Each day alw