In this excerpt, Dodson explains how children would work in the mills before becoming officially employed because their parents needed them to bring meals and watch machines during breaks. As a result, by the time a child became employed for the first time, he or she already had a good grasp on how the mill ran. Toward the end of the interview, he relates how he learned to be a loom fixer as a young man, training that facilitated his rise through the mill's hierarchy.