State College School of Textiles
William Friday describes the School of Textiles in the 1940s and recalls what it was like to operate textile machines.
Interview on 2011-09-13 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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My dad wanted me to take over the business that he had.
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I had worked in cotton mills as a kid, making a little money in the summertime,
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and I worked in a machine shop.
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You won't believe it but in those days you worked for eighteen and a half cents an hour
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and I made I think seventeen dollars a week
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and worked fifty-six hours to make that.
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Mr. Roosevelt became President; my pay went to thirty-seven and a half cents and hour, and I've been a Democrat ever since. [Laughs]
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Well in those days it was very simple.
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We had the standard mill equipment: We had spinning machines, carding machines,
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weaving machines, dying machines, all were necessary,
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and you had to take your turn learning how to operate all of them.
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My father's business was that he built these gigantic machines called slashers,
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which put the starch into the fabric that you buy.
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But it was all sort of what you'd learn today in a community college,
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it was that far back,
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and keep in mind now we're talking seventy years ago
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and more than that. It was just a little cotton mill really is what it was
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and you took your turn. I learned how to run all those machines
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and the more I worked at it the more I knew I was never going to do it.
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But then graduation came, and senior year was such a wonderful time at State
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because there were four of us that stuck together.
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Henry Rowe was editor of the Technician, Doug Kaley was editor of the Agromeck,
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I was president of the senior class, and Paul Lehman was president of the student body,
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and we four stuck together.
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They were all in one fraternity. I never joined a fraternity. It was money problems to start with.
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The night we graduated
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we sat together for awhile and we dispersed
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and the shock came that it was all over, and those glorious days at NC State are now history.
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We didn't have a big student union so the YMCA had a wonderful man named Ed King,
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and all of us became very much attached to an assistant dean of students named Romeo Lefort.
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He was a great, wonderful man, championship swimmer when he was a student at State.
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But it was a very small kind of package. There were less than three hundred people in our graduating class.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.