Full Text of the Excerpt

MIMI CONWAY:

When did you leave school to begin your working career? How old were you when you left school to begin working?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

When I went to the printing office?

MIMI CONWAY:

Right.

ERNEST SEEMAN:

About ten or twelve, I guess.

MIMI CONWAY:

Yes. I think you told me you were twelve.

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Well, my father thought we all were going to have to work, and he was aiming to make a printing factory with three heads to it. That was a bad move: we didn't get along together.

MIMI CONWAY:

You and your two brothers?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

I had two brothers: Wallace and Henry. Wallace was more practical than I was, and he took to the business better. My father sent him to Raleigh to Kings College to learn shorthand and bookkeeping, and he just let me roam in the woods. I wasn't harnessed very well.

MIMI CONWAY:

But one day when you were a boy, didn't he come to you and tell you it was time to work?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

At the breakfast table: that's where he always broke unpleasant news.

MIMI CONWAY:

What did he say?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

Well, I thought it would be all right. That was his orders; I had nothing to do with it.

MIMI CONWAY:

What did he say to you that morning at the breakfast table?

ERNEST SEEMAN:

"Well, it's time you boys were getting to work now. You're going to have to run this printing office." And they had a big dynamo he had bought. He had bought a big paper cutter. He went into debt for all these things. He was personable and people liked him, and he was honest, and he knew his stuff.