There are so many little things I miss out on putting in these pages. Gee, I’m going to have to had so much as time goes on.
Around February, Julie and I have this dream of owning a home now. I guess we decided to start looking around March, so somehow we ended up at a realtor’s office on Market Street almost out to Ogden, north of Wilmington. The guys running this realty were from up towards Wallace/Rose Hill area. Okay, maybe add Burgaw in there somewhere. They were the Sholar brothers. Some Sholars had worked with dad and me on the construction jobs with us over the little time I had worked with Daniels Construction. Anyway we struck it off right from the start. Kings Grant was just off Hwy 132 on the north side of the Hwy 17 overpass. He took us there first. The builder was Robert Hill of Robert Hill Housing Construction. Most of the houses in this subdivision were built by his company. They were typically eleven hundred square feet with garage. They were small, but to me they were just right. I didn’t intend to buy a big house. They sold for $27,500. We like them, but we asked to see something else. So off to Ogden we went. We were taken down Middle Sound Loop Road and turned into Brandywine subdivision. It was basically a race track type circle with two cul de sacs. One went in from the front to the right of the entrance road. The other came in almost directly across from the entrance road from the back of the circle. So we drove around to the back side of the circle and came into the back cul de sac and drove to the end and looked at a home that was under construction. These homes were also built by Robert Hill. They were the exact same house plan, so we asked the price here. Being told these were $20,650, we became intrigued. There was this one and one with the back against the woods on the back side of the circle. We like that one, but later that evening we found it was under contract. So we put a contract on the one on Homestead Court, the cul de sac one. While we were still not completely settled yet wanted to nail this house down, we still went looking some more.
We ended up at Wrightsville Beach. Just across the bridge to the left was Channel Walk. It was all townhouses and me and my country boy inside me didn’t like the idea of no yard. We did like the house though. We got some numbers on one of them and found we might well could have afforded it. Get this, payments on a beach townhome on Wrightsville Beach for $274 a month. Kick my butt now for not buying that one. Today’s weekly rental on such a home is $5000 a week during the summer. I’ve never felt so needful for that kick in the seat so many times. I had to have a yard. Ahhh!
Well, as time revealed my VA home loan capability put us in this Brandywine home with only $200 down and moved in on our first wedding anniversary. Margaret and Wardie Babson helped us move our stuff out of the little apartment into our brand new brick, three bedroom, bath and a half home with garage and ¾ acre yard. I loved it with full intentions of seeing that thirty year mortgage paid off at the age of 54. Time had a different story. But let’s not give away how that changed.
So, here we were settling into a new house, summer coming on and no a/c. I was getting used to having a controlled environment, so we went out and bought a small 110 volt, 5000 btu air conditioner and we stuck it into our bedroom window. Amazingly this little unit cooled our whole house for the first five or six years we lived there. It made a lot of noise, but hey, we enjoyed the cool on those hot summer nights. Besides, just before we got the thing we’d sleep with the windows up and every once and a while we’d have the neighborhood kids walk through our yard past our bedroom window. I really didn’t like that.
Here’s one last story about working construction at DuPont before I moved ahead here. Before I got drafted into the military I almost went to work for Waff Brothers construction. They were mostly earth movers and pile drivers. They had those big pans and bulldozers and cranes and stuff little boys always dream to run. Well, since I was raised on a farm I was game, but then again, I didn’t follow through with trying to get a job with them. This time around Waff Brothers had the contract to drive the piling on the DuPont job. Now I’m to learn it was probably smart to not have worked for this crowd. I knew the old man who owned the company and he was a pretty active guy, but he was a danger to himself and anyone around him when it came to actually running anything including an acetylene torch.
I had lain out the piling locations in several holes where footers for the building would be. Most of these footers would have anywhere between four and eight piling per hole. You have to know these buildings were several stories high and with motors and such running continuously the footers could crack or just fail causing the structure to do things that would endanger the worker’s lives inside. So, Mr. Waff had a steam operated pile driver. It’s really an amazing machine to watch operate. It was very front heavy and the crane operator had to be very careful not to let the boom out too far. Well, he had a rag tag crew of operators and they scared the hell out of about most anybody.
For comedy relief I would go back after the piling were driven and mark a cut off on them and Mr. Waff would personally get his torch and go down into the hole and cut the excess off the hollow steel piling casings. Some of these could be as much as ten feet high above the cut off line. I watched him one morning doing this. He had cut maybe two or three and pushed the excess over as he run the torch around them. He was successfully going along when he had one that didn’t want to fall in a certain direction and he stepped back to avoid being a landing point for the heavy piece of pipe. When he stepped back he’d forgotten he was standing in front of a cut off piling, which was only a foot from the bottom of the hole. His foot went inside the pipe and his leg disappeared completely down the pipe and it stopped at his crotch. Was he hurt? Now isn’t that a dumb question. The pipe stopped at that important junction in a man’s body that would make most men squeamish and throw up, not to mention talk in higher octaves the rest of their lives. This man was smoking a cigar at the time he did this and he bit the end of the cigar off and all I could hear was cussing and other unmentionable things as he removed himself from his predicament and looked around to see who had been watching. I just stood there stifling a full bore laughing fit. The bitten off cigar was funny enough. You imagine the rest.
Back to his rag tag crew for just a minute here and we’ll move on. There was wind that they were gathering like a bunch of union workers to go ask for a raise for every man. Well, Waff turned them down. This was the last workday of the week. Come Monday morning none of them showed up for work. He had no people to run his equipment and a contract to fulfill. So what is he to do? He goes to the gate, where most people looking for work will be on Monday morning and he hires sight unseen every man it takes to fill his former crew numbers and puts them on his equipment and tells them to go at it.
You would think now he would hire experienced people, but he was desperate. The man he put in the crane with the pile driver on it hadn’t a clue how to balance the weight of a pile driver on the boom of a crane. I knew more about it than he did and I’d never stepped foot in a crane. Old man Waff got out there and started directing the young man to walk the crane forward to the hole where the next set of pilings were to be driven. When they reached the hole the operator stopped a bit sudden and when he did the pile driver swung forward of the boom and pulled the boom of the crane with it tipping the crane forward. The only reason this crane didn’t drop it’s boom completely to the ground was the pile driver hitting the bottom of the hole and jamming the top of the boom from moving any more forward. But the tracks of the crane were about a couple of feet in the air and thank goodness that’s as far as it went. So there we are, the story of the Waff Brothers Construction Company. Now, on to my new employment as an insurance agent.
Not long after we moved into the house I felt we needed something more stable so far as a job and I went to see a friend of Julie’s family that lived on the next block over from Franklin Ave. He sold us a life insurance policy. His name was Tommy Southerland and he worked for Western-Southern Life in the shopping center across from Julie’s work place. Gibson’s faced Kerr Ave back down by the railroad tracks, but Western Southern Life faced Market Street out front of the other shopping Center next to Longley supply.
So, after talking with Tommy it wasn’t long I was before I was guaranteed $150 a week for something like five or six months and then I’d go on commission. This allowed me to learn to sell life, accident & health, along with an occasion mortgage insurance policy. I learned by selling and in the process I started building a bank of sales commissions. I would take an average draw off of that per week, so as not to have a big week from a lot of sales and then possibly a no sale week with no pay. This way I got something every week. Anyway that $150 a week was big money. I had gotten a raise with Daniels when I became a party chief, but it only meant I cleared $110 a week. So this was a big raise.
I was required to have a physical to be hired, which to me was cursory to me. But where this physical was to take place was out of sync to me. I was told to go to this practice on Wrightsville Ave near the then Caper Fear Memorial Hospital. When I arrived and saw the sign out front I wondered had I gone to the wrong place or was my new employer pulling a practical joke on me to see how I’d take it. It was an OB/GYN office. And to top it off it was OB day. I went in and stepped up to the window and asked if I had an appointment scheduled her for today. To my surprise, they said I did and to take a seat and I would be called shortly. So there I sat between two very pregnant women. I remembered one was a very plump blonde who appeared to be about ready to pop her “done” button. You know, like the little thing that pops up on a turkey to tell you it’s done? Any way I followed through with the “visit” and passed with flying colors. I wasn’t pregnant and did need a mammo, so I was told I was fit for service.
Raymond Andrews. He was my division sales leader. Spurgeon Bailey was my district office manager. They were both good men. They worked with me every day and made sure I had all the tools of the trade to make me a dress shirt, tie and slacks wearing kind of guy. It just wasn’t me, but I was willing to give it a try. I’d heard there was this guy working for Met Life making a whopping $35 grand a year. I was up to the task of finding my ceiling.
