THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL SOUTHERN ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview with LUCY BOWLES Winston-Salem, North Carolina July 26, 1990 By Robert Korstad Transcribed by Jovita Flynn Original transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection Louis Round Wilson Library
START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A 7/26/90 ROBERT KORSTAD: One thing that I'm interested in, in all of this, and the way we do these interviews, is to just get a little bit of background on your family where you grew up, what your parents did. Just so we go back in time as far as possible. Do you remember your grandparents? [Interruption] Why don't you tell me, you knew your grandmother on your mother's side? LUCY Yes. Where was she from? I don't know. They always lived in the country. They lived at Arab. Where's that? Is that outside Winston-Salem? Yeah, it's up there around Dobson. And they were farmers? Yes. Where did your parents grow up? What did they do? Av2-A<C_*T My mother grew up around Arab. And I don't know where my Daddy grew up at, because he lost his father and mother when he was little in a fire. And he didn't even know how old he was. But he worked. We lived at Laurel Bluff, and he worked at Mt. Airy at the quarry. Big granite quarry up there? Yes. 2
When did they come to Winston-Salem? Well, I don't know what year it was, but I was about eleven years old when we come to Winston. I worked in Old Salem Cotton Mill first. [Interruption] Other people in there? Yes, so we just worked eight hours. What were you doing there? What kind of job did you have? I worked on a packing machine, operated a packing machine. So you were actually packing the cigarettes into the packs. Right, the machine that packed the packs. Packed the packs. Why did your parents move to Winston-Salem? Do you remember? Well, Mr. Powers that worked over here at Old Salem Cotton Mill my older sisters and brother worked in the cotton mill there at Laurel Bluff and Mr. Powers from this Old Salem Cotton Mill come up there hunting hands. So we all come, and there were several others that come. So you came down to work in the cotton mill? To work in the cotton mill. Then I worked in the cotton mill a while. Did you go to work there when you were eleven? Yeah, they wanted me to go back to school when I 3
come down here, but I was so big I wouldn't go to school. So I went to work up in the cotton mill. I reckon I was about twelve years old. Then I went to Reynolds. Why did you go to work at Reynolds rather than stay in the textile mill? Well, I had a girl friend that I run with, and she worked over there. She wanted me to go over there so I could be with her. So that's why I went to Reynolds. Was that a better job, do you think, working in the tobacco factory than the textile mill? Yeah, I liked it better. Was it cleaner or pay more? Well, no, they didn't pay no more. We made about 2 0 cents a day, but it was cleaner work. Wasn't as dusty. You know, it was dusty in the cotton mill then. What year were you born? I was born in 1904. 1904, okay, so eleven, so this would have been right before the first World War? Yeah, I was working there before the first World War. So did you ever see, I guess Mr. Reynolds was still alive then. No, I never did see him that I know of. He was probably getting pretty old. Yeah, I know when he died, they shut down, and a 4
whole lot of us went to [where they] buried him. We didn't go to the funeral. We went over to the cemetery and seen him buried. But I don't ever remember seeing him personally. Where there a lot of people in the factory at that point? Yeah, there was a lot of them. What building did you work in? I worked in Number 12. So that was one of the early cigarette factories? Yeah. So the work was easier and everything. Could you kind of just explain to me one thing. One thing I'm trying to do is get good descriptions of the actual work people did. Maybe just explain to me what the packing machine was like then. I know it changed. Oh yeah, well, used to it would be, they had a big hopper. There's one girl that would feed two machines with a hopper, and the one that run the machine would sit there, and it had a turntable on it. Went round and round. It had pockets on it. Well, the ( ) would come down and cut off in certain lengths of pieces, and then it would come under the counter. We had a counter. It would count cigarettes into these pockets, and it would go around and go out at the back. Had a lever there that pushed them out, and a girl sit at the back and put cups on them as they come out. Then they'd go down the little belt, and they had two girls down at the end of the table that would stamp 5
there. Take the packs and put them in a thing and put stamps on them and then put them in cartons, and they'd go down the belt. So they'd go on out after that? Yes. So you were on one machine there by yourself packing those things? Yes. Were there a lot of other really young girls in there that age? Yeah, we had two lines, just worked eight hours. What they called a baby line, and we worked eight hours. So would you go in at the same time as everybody in the morning, and then you would just get off early? Yeah, we'd get off early in the evening. Where did you live when you moved here? Well, when we first moved here, we lived on Wachovia Street. Then we got a house it was bigger than the one we was a living in 'cause we was kind of crowded on Ellen Street then. It's Trade Street now, but it was Ellen Street when we moved here. They got a bigger house for us on Ellen Street, and we moved on Ellen Street, and we stayed there the rest of the time. Did Old Salem Cotton Mills own that house? Yes. So enough of them worked at the mill so you could work downtown and still stay in the house and everything? 6
Yeah. So your mother and father and how many brothers and sisters moved with you? There was eight of us. There was eight of you all together. So did all the rest of them stay and work at Old Salem? Three of them did. What did your father do when he came here? Well, after we come to town, we all caught the measles and the mumps. No, really! And they like to killed Papa, and he never was able to work after that. He had a brother that lived at Arafv and he'd go up in the summertime and spend the summer with him and help him on the farm. He finally had to give that up. He didn't live long. After that. So how long did you end up working? Did you stay working at Reynolds? I worked at Reynolds for forty-five years. That would have been about 1916 until about 1960, I guess? I retired. I forget what year it was. It was 19 and 60 something. Did you do that job? Was that the only job you ever did? No, I done, it's called chief ( ) 7
[Interruption] inspector. What did you do if you were an inspector? Well, there was two girls that worked on the line. There was six machines on the line, and she'd have one end and I would have. We had to keep up that line. We had to inspect the work every hour to see that it was all right on all the line. Then we had these three operators. We had to keep their bad work out of the way and pick out loose ends and keep the work marked up. We had to mark up the loose ends and the number of packs we had. Had to mark up the box work. So you kind of kept up with the amount of work that each one of the operators was actually doing. Did you have charts and things that you kind of filled out? Yeah. Then you made sure that the machines were making good cigarettes. So you would kind of inspect and make sure there weren't any.... Yeah, had to inspect. 'Course that was before after they put the cellophane on them, we had to go up the line and inspect that every hour to see that the cellophane was all right. And we had to inspect the packs out of the machine to see that they was all right. Then we had to take and tear off a half of the ( ) and keep it. We had to take that down, and we'd have to take a piece of cellophane and put it on a file. They'd come by and check it. If anything happened to a machine, they'd always go to that file and see if the machine had 8
been checked and when it'd been checked. We had to put the time and everything on it, so they could tell how long it had been making bad work. Oh, I see, so they could go back and get them. So they could get them. As an inspector, did that kind of make you, you weren't really a supervisor? Yeah. You were kind of a supervisor? Yeah. So would you be able to kind of fire people if they didn't? No. You wouldn't do that. You reported to another who were the supervisors in this plant or the foreman? Well, Mr. Lowleen was the supervisor when I first went there, and he stayed there as long as he lived. That was a long time. And then Mr. Hill, he took his place when Mr. Lowleen died. Mr. Hill was there for a long time, but I forget who took his place when he got sick and died. I don't believe he was there when I retired. I guess there would be all kind of different foremen. There would be, what do they call them, a sub-foreman and then there was a foreman. Is this the plant that Mr. Whitaker worked in at some point? Mr. Whitaker was over all of it. 9
Did he actually ever work? Was he kind of a plant superintendent at some point in Number 12? Yeah. Did you ever see him? Oh yeah, I saw Mr. Whitaker a lot. He was a nice fellow. So he would come around on the floor and talk to you. Yeah, he was nice. He'd always speak to you everywhere he saw you. When did you start working full-time, get off the baby line? How old were you then? I was sixteen. And how many hours then did you work? Then I could work ten hours a day. You worked ten hours a day. How long did you do that, did you work ten hours? Well, I worked [laughter] ten hours until they started this law, you know, working forty-eight hours a week. Then they had to cut down. So that would be when Roosevelt came in in the 1930s they did that. So you would work ten hours a day. Would you work on Saturday, too? No, we didn't work on Saturday. So you'd work fifty hours a week, ten hours a day, fifty hours a week. When did you move out of your parents' house down in Old Salem? 10
Well, I stayed there until I was married. I got married when I was eighteen. Then I moved with my husband's people over on Wachovia Street. Who did you marry? Howard Lumley. Where did you meet him? I just don't remember. [Laughter] That's a long time ago. Because we used to, a whole crowd of us girls, we were all time going around meeting people, and I just don't remember where I did met him. So did most of your girl friends all work at Reynolds at that point? Yeah. So you would go out after work? What did you do when you say you'd go around and stuff? What kind of things would you do? Well, used to when we were on the baby line, we'd get out about 4:00, and we'd go to town and go to the show and around. Whole gang of us would go to the show. We could get in for five cents. We'd always go in and see a movie and then go home. So you all hung around. There used to be a show on Liberty Street, they called it a crumb show. That's the one we'd go it because we could go to it for a nickle. 11
Why was it called the crumb show? Well, just all the young'uns that went. And we'd eat, popcorn and stuff like that, and just throw it out. It was crumby. Oh, [laughter] I see. 'Cause they'd throw cups and everything all over the floor. You'd have to walk through them. How would you get to work every day? Walked. You walked from your house? From Trade Street there wasn't a highway on anything then, you could just walk right to the factory, I guess. Well, on Trade Street we'd go up to the corner and get on Liberty and Main. You see, go up Main Street and just turn down the corner there. That's be Number 12. Be Number 12 there. It wasn't far to walk. Did you wear uniforms in the factory when you worked, or did you change clothes? No, but back during World War II they took so many out of the factory, they put me to be a chief operator and I had to wear overalls. That's when I first started wearing pants. I had to wear overalls. That's the only thing that I ever wore that was different. So you just wore whatever dress or anything you want to go to work up there? 12
Yes. Did you have a dressing room or a restroom? Yes, we had dressing rooms and things to put our things, and then we had nice restrooms. We had a maid that kept them clean. Where did you eat during the day? Well, they used to be a Reynolds Inn. They had a lunchroom down there. We went there for lunch. A lot of people brought their lunch, but them that didn't, we went down there. They had a good lunchroom, and always served good things to eat. We would go down there to get our lunch. Would you get breaks and everything where the women would go in the restroom and stuff? No. You didn't get a scheduled break? No, you weren't allowed to eat nothing in there. factory? Oh, I see. Could you smoke and everything in the No. You'd go outside if you smoked at all? No, they never did smoke in there until just about a year or two before I retired when they desegregated.... Desegregated the factories and everything, yeah. Then they let them start smoking in the restrooms. They couldn't smoke nowheres else but they could smoke when they went to the restrooms. 13
Over that period of time did things change in the factory a lot, the kind of job you did? No, it stayed that way for years until they started putting in these new machinery. No, we worked the same thing for years. Do you remember when that was when the new machinery started coming in? No, I don't. Probably after World War II some time, that they started, probably in the 1950s is when a lot of the new stuff came in. What did you do after you got married and moved in with your husband's family? What did you do after work and at night and on weekends and things? I'm kind of interested in what people did outside of work, too. Well, I didn't do nothing much, as I remember, nothing special. Wasn't a lot of recreation and stuff, there weren't a lot of things to do? No, I went to church a lot. Where did you go? Salem Baptist. Salem Baptist Church. Did you go there for a long time? Yeah, I've been a going there all my, ever since I've been in town. And you're still going to the same place? 14
I went to Salem when it was down on Marshall Street. Then it moved up on the hill, and I've been a going there, biggest part of the time I've been here. Did most of the people at the church, did they work at Reynolds? A lot of them did. Or some people would work in the textile mills and stuff like that? Yeah. One thing people have told me is that people who got jobs in the tobacco industry kind of were somewhat better off and kind of felt better about themselves than the people who worked in the textile industry. Is that true, do you think? I don't know. I never did feel that way. You didn't feel like because you made a little bit more money? No. But you did probably make a little bit more money? Yeah, yeah. Than people who worked in textiles. So did you consider yourself kind of.... Because I know when I first, we'd make about three dollars a week at Reynolds when I first went there. Three dollars a week? That was when you were working on the baby line. 'Course when I went to work ten hours a day, I made 15
more. Did you have any kind of benefits or health insurance or any stuff like that, do you ever remember? No, not at first when we first went there, but they did put in, we did have a nurse. After they built the new office building, they put in a medical department and had doctors and stuff over there. If we got sick, we could go over there. If we got hurt, they carried us over there. They've taken good care of all their people, and we always had a nurse we could go to if we got sick. You had a nurse right there in the factory, right in Number 12? Yeah. END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A END OF INTERVIEW 16