That's right interesting. I did have, kind of, personally, a question. My
second year up at the Business School was right when the Crash had come.
The Crash came in the fall of 1929, and
Page 9 I graduated
up there in June of '30. The Business School was about the first
graduate school of business in the country, you know, and most of the
rest of them came along after that. You put in for appointments to meet
with recruiters who were coming up there. I wrote down here, and my
brothers said, "No, you don't want any appointments. We're expecting you
to go to work in the company." And I wrote back and said I would much
rather kind of go it on my own. Most of the recruiters up there were
coming from commercial banks or investment banks, mostly banking. Very
few manufacturers were recruiting. Some of the retail chains were
beginning to, Sears, Roebuck, Montgomery Ward. But I figured I'd go to
work and have a few appointments and take a job. Oh, they were insistent
that I not do that, that I go to work for the company, so I didn't have
any interviews. And the company said to me they wanted me to go to New
York, which was the main merchandising office, which I did, not too
happy living in a big city after having been able to play golf after
work and that kind of stuff. I moved into New York with a couple of boys
from the South that were bachelors, as was I. People didn't get married
then until you got a job that you knew you could support a wife. Today
they get married even before they get out of high school, almost. The
first job was to be a credit runner in the credit department, which
meant going to the various banks and factoring companies to check up on
customers for the credit files. After several months there, they gave me
some training in the various fabrics. I had worked in the mills,
incidentally, in my summer vacation between college terms, so I knew a
little bit about—not the details of textile school stuff—but weaving and
spinning, ectcetera.
Page 10 I was a cub salesman there in
the New York market for about a year, calling on people that we didn't
do business with, trying to bring in new customers. Well, with a New
York sales force of about ten people, why, it was pretty tough for me to
find new customers that had credit [unknown]. But anyway,
I was finally given the New York State and Pennsylvania territory. I
made my headquarters in the New York office but travelled New York State
and Pennsylvania. I didn't have any customers in the City, of course, or
in Philadelphia—we had an office—but out to Pittsburgh and up to
Buffalo, etcetera. I was there until 1933, at which time our salesman
that travelled Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan left us and went with another
company. I was single and easily mobile, so, with one pitch around my
territory with a new cub salesman, I went out to Chicago. I made my
headquarters in the Chicago office. We had four men there: one for the
city of Chicago; one travelled south through Illinois and Iowa; one
travelled north, Wisconsin and Minneapolis; and the other one was my
territory, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, kind of east of Chicago. I was
there until the man who did the city-of-Chicago job had a liquor
problem, and he got fired. They asked me to take over Chicago, which
meant Sears, Roebuck, which was a big account by that time, and several
big garment manufacturers were headquartered in Chicago. A pretty good
market. I was in Chicago, looking after that market, until I got sick.
In 1936 I got tuberculosis. That was before they had streptomycin and
these drugs, and they put you flat on your back and hoped you could
resist it. Maybe you could, and maybe you couldn't. Well, I fought that
thing in Chicago there in the hospital from the middle of '36 until
Page 11 about the end of '36. I went out to Arizona for a
year and finally got back on my feet and came back to Greensboro then
and decided the hell with it, I wasn't going to travel anymore. That was
a little bit too rough. I might get another breakdown. I had had pretty
much training up there at the Business School on finances, and we didn't
have anybody that was too hep on that, so they made a job for me—I say
"made"—here in Greensboro. I moved back with my mother and later got
married to a Greensboro girl in late '38. In the meantime, I guess you'd
say that I kind of was Daddy Rabbit on putting all these different
companies together, consolidating these various individual corporations
and the selling corporation with the manufacturing company. That was in
'45. I was in Washington during the War with the Quartermaster General,
but after the War we got this consolidation together. In 1951 we sold
400,000 shares of our stock, not the company, but individuals. My two
brothers and I each sold 100,000, and the Moses Cone Hospital sold
100,000. Moses Cone Hospital owned about a third of the company at that
time, because my father's oldest brother, Moses, and my father started
this thing. Moses had no children, and he died without a will in 1908.
So under the laws of intestacy, his wife inherited half of his personal
property, which was stocks in these various mill companies. So she set
up this hospital, retaining her interest in her husband's estate for
life; then would be the hospital. She didn't die until 1947, so the
hospital didn't have any funds to build and to get in business. But the
hospital owned about a third of the company, and when she died it sold
some of its stock to provide some money to build the first plant. That
was the necessary stock that the stock exchange required to have in
Page 12 the hands of the so-called "public" so it would be
a tradeable item. As long as it was held by just a few people, it
wouldn't qualify. So with those 400,000 shares of stock in the hands of
the so-called "public," we acquired about two or three thousand
stockholders in connection with that distribution, that sale. We already
had some 2,000 stockholders, so it gave us about 4,000 stockholders with
some 400,000 or 500,000 shares in the hands of the so-called "public."
That was in 1951.