First jobs in a textile mill
Earlier in the interview, Dodson had described how he assisted his father in the mill before becoming an official employee. In this segment, he describes his first job in the sweeping room and then outlines his ascent through the mill's job structure.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Geddes Elam Dodson, May 26, 1980. Interview H-0240. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
And then I remember
when I went to work in the mill at Woodside. I was a little boy,
although I went in there and went to work a-sweeping and hauling filling
from the spinning room down to the weave room so they could put it on
the looms. That's all I done, just rode the elevator up and down, bring
that filling down when the doffers would fill up them big boxes, and
then I . . .
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
That was the first job you had?
- GEDDES ELAM DODSON:
-
That was the first job I had in the mill at Woodside. And then I got
sweeping and one thing and another, and I run a band machine down under
the mill. They had an automatic band machine. I kept the yarn on that
automatic machine, and it twisted like a rope only it's little. We were
using them for belts on the spinning frames. And I run that hand machine
and watched that other one, kept it a-going. And then I went up in the
weave room and started sweeping up there. And my daddy made me a reed
hook out of a spoon you stir coffee with. I got one in there laying on
the chest of drawers now I made myself. I don't know what went with the
one he made me. But them little old two-harness weave, you just need a
little old short reed hook, and the spoon was the handle. You put your
thumb in the spoon and draw in them ends.
- ALLEN TULLOS:
-
How old were you then?
- GEDDES ELAM DODSON:
-
I wasn't quite fourteen. I've been in the mill over sixty years. And then
I learned to weave. I learned to tie a weaver's knot. And nobody didn't
teach me how to weave. I just watched the weavers after I learned how to
tie that knot. Back then you had to get a permit to go to work when you
was just fourteen, and they wouldn't let you work but eight hours a day
if you wasn't old enough.