The principle, the philosophy of life was to love everybody, to be kind
to everybody and treat everybody right. Of course there were mean people
back then—not too much, weren't too much. They didn't have the
communication then, the way of traveling and going about from place to
place. See, I was born before the automobile was, and I was born before
the airplane was. The airplane down at Kitty Hawk weren't 'til 1903. I
remember the first automobile. Mr. Bruce Strowd's father, who used to
live just above us, adjoining plantation, and then his father moved to
Chapel Hill (well, his grandfather lived there too)…. Bruce Strowd at
Chapel Hill Strowd Motor Company, Bruce was just a young boy, and they
took an old gasoline engine and took some old wheels. We lived right on
the side of a little sandy dirt road, public road. Bruce took this
gasoline engine, and it was an old type of engine with alternate
Page 39 stroke. It would hit "pow, pow, pow, choo, choo,
choo; pow, pow, pow, choo, choo, choo." It'd skip; you've heard them,
and you know what I'm trying to say. Well, we was plowing out there a
little, (I just could reach the plow handle; I believe it was in 1907 or
'08) and we heard this fuss coming down the road. It just scared the
mule to death. And I run around there and got him by the bridle, trying
to hold to him 'til that thing passed. And Bruce Strowd come in sitting
on a goods box, come right by the house in a little four wheel
contraption, him and Mr. Seaton Smith of Chapel Hill (that's my wife
Lessie's uncle.)
[Laughter] That's the
first automobile that was ever in Chatham County. It had a gasoline
motor, but it was a woodsaw motor. And he had it geared so it would
propel, you know, and it would go along about five miles an hour. And it
went "chooka, chooka, chooka, pow, pow, pow, pow." And then there was a
streak of smoke; he had a smokestack, and it'd fly in there. And that
just scared the old mule to death.
[Laughter]
The greatest thing we'd ever seen in all our lives. I believe it
was about 1908; I was about six or seven or eight years old.