After I was eighty-three. And then the next spring, this past spring a
year ago, I worked nearly three months. I worked over a month, and then
Bill wanted me to come back down there this spring and help him again. I
was down there the other day and done a little work. This fellow who
works in there, he says, "How about you doing this and let me go over
and do something else?" And I all right. I went down there one day, and
one of the fellows said he needed an extra hand that day. He wanted to
know if I would work for him. I told him, "No, I've got other things
planned. I can work three hours for you this morning if you want me to,
if that'll help you any." He said he was loading a truck, and he just
didn't have time to do it. I says, "Well, you go on and load your truck,
and I'll do this then." Till a certain time; I told him when to come
back. And he come back, and he said, "Have you got a card out there?" I
said, "No, I ain't got no card this spring." He said, "Well, get you a
card." I said, "No, you just forget about what I worked for you this
morning. Let it be." And he said, "No, I'd rather you'd have a card out
there." But I told him no. Then Bill called me up one day and… See, I
fired the boilers when I first went down there. My job was to keep steam
for them and mow the grass—there wasn't much to be mowed around
there—and clean up the office and toilets. And of course I had time to
do that. Sometimes I'd get a little tight on it. But they put in a gas
boiler over the years there, about ten or twelve years ago, maybe, and
it didn't take half as much time in the boiler room after they put in
gas. It almost run itself. You'd
Page 49 have to go down
there and watch your boiler and keep it blowed down and put your
treatments in it and see that everything was running. They was
a-bottling this here what they call Reddi-Whip, and I helped them on
that most of the time. Then sometimes when I'd have to go to the boiler
room, one of them would fill in where I was at till I could go down
there and do what I had to do. They had sort of an extra man that could
do that. And so he called me one day along back in the spring, like, and
he wanted to know what kind of wax I'd used on the floor. He says, "The
floors has got so in the office they don't shine. They don't look like
they did when you was here." And I told him I just used regular wax. I
got it over at Pine Chemical. And I was down there one day and I was
looking at the floors. I said, "I'll tell you what's the matter with
your floors. You have to strip this wax off every once in a while and
put new wax on it to make it shine. You need a new brush on your buffing
machine. The scrub brush is wore out; it was wore out when I left here."
And they hadn't took the wax off in nearly three years. And I took it
off once or twice a year while I was down there. I was down there
twenty-three years, and I worked every Easter Monday and every Fourth of
July and every Thanksgiving Day when there wasn't no body else working.
I'd clean up the office from start to finish.