I’ve re-written this post and split it into two posts since it got bigger than what I normally would post. Enjoy.
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In a few days Julie and Erick were to go home. I went to pick them up and we stopped by Economy Drugs right next to the hospital. Nancy, Julie’s sister, worked as a pharmacy tech there and we had prescriptions to fill. Nancy took a couple of pictures of us standing out by the car and not to keep the baby outside too long we were off to home as a family of three.
We had a neighborhood of good honest middle class folks. Our neighbor next to us was a husband who worked at Federal Paperboard in Riegelwood down below Wilmington, the neighbor nearest on the other side was Larry and Judy Wessel. Larry’s dad was a fairly well known insurance agent with something like the Independent Insurance Agency. I believe his name was Hardy Wessel. The neighbors down on the corner divorced and the woman had a son that I remember later dated the daughter of the woman who moved into a new home build next to us. There was the weird woman on the back row of houses in the subdivision who seemed to never be outside without one of those paper air filters over her face. Then there was Michael Michaelis and his wife Joyce who had a daughter about the same time Erick was born. He was a fireman with the Wilmington Fire Department. Next to them was a guy who got me started on bicycle repair in later years who worked at Ideal Cement next to the chromium plant I helped build before I went into the Army. It was in Castle Hayne. I could go on, but it would bore you even more. Suffice to say, we were a tightly knit group in the neighborhood in much the same way as you would expect in much early times. Kids didn’t do crap in the neighborhood, what the parents didn’t get wind of it because we all watched them.
Now that Erick was home, we had financial obligations to pay the hospital the balance after the insurance company paid out and with only me working, it was quite difficult. Okay, now back to the co-worker I mentioned earlier. His name was Bob Johnston. Turns out Bob and his wife lived right next door to Marlene’s mom and dad on Franklin Ave. Bob had been working at DuPont across the river in Brunswick County, where I had worked construction. He left there to sell insurance with us and soon found it a most undesirable occupation. I, too, was finding it was causing more worry than offering solutions, so Bob and I hatched an idea. Bob had heard that DuPont had opened the new spinning area of the building where I wrote about the new crane operator almost tipped the pile driver. We decided we’d go apply for the new jobs opening up in this new area.
So on a Wednesday after we balanced our books at work we grabbed some lunch and then headed across the river to the plant. Since Bob knew the process from his previous hiring experience it made it easy for me to follow right along. We went to the admin building and went straight to the personnel office and filled out our applications and were told we would be called for an interview. We both felt somewhat confident that we would at least get an interview.
I don’t think a week passed and we both got to work one morning and both of us had a story to tell. We both got interviews. Well, we went back and we went through the process and got our physicals out of the way. I remember one thing. I was good physically, but I weighed in at 199¾ pounds. I’d never weighed that much before. I was cringing at the scales from that.
Later I learned that DuPont’s hiring process was rather in depth. Only one in ten applicants was hired. Bob and I were both hired and were to report to work in less than two weeks and we both got the same shift. I think we both came in for the orientation days one week and then we went to our shift. The room was full that week. DuPont had hired for four shifts and the area we worked in was starting up three more spinning machines that required some thirty five to forty people per shift. The spinning cycle was only one hour and was very labor intensive. We were told the new machines would have a break in period and it would tax us pretty good.
Bob and I started our first shift on evenings in June 1974. We were taken to a smaller meeting room, but even at that it was full with our new guys about to be classroom trained and then taken on the floor to work with seasoned spinning operators. My first few days had me experiencing upset stomach because my sleeping and eating cycle was interrupted. But I endured and started graveyard shift the following week. Shifts were seven days at a stretch and then there was a 48 hour break exactly to the hour between evening and graveyard. Graveyard ran seven days straight and then we’d get off on a Wednesday morning and would return to day shift that Saturday. Then we worked from that Saturday till the next Friday with one day off during the week so we didn’t run over forty hours for that pay period. Then we’d get off that Friday and not have to go back to work till the following Tuesday at four. And the cycle started again.
One thing I haven’t mentioned is that in 1974 my starting pay was $3.17 an hour. But there was an .18 cent evening shift and .25 cent graveyard shift differential and time and a half for the Sundays worked. So, my first check was really quite a good one. Relief was in sight.
My first month on shift work was taxing on me physically. I weighed at the end of that month and found I’d lost twenty pounds. But it didn’t stop there. We had scales to weigh bags of wasted Dacron thread and they were the heavy duty kind so I’d weigh every shift and my weight loss that summer through fall came to a whopping sixty pounds. People started asking questions. One even asked me was I sick with cancer or something. But really, I was ecstatic. I was even lighter than I was when I got out of the Army, but with all the exercise I was getting lifting the Dacron tubes made me a tight muscled 140 pounds. I was back to a 29 inch waist.
I believe my first paycheck with DuPont was around $117 for a week’s pay from mostly straight day work. The next was better since it had weekend pay and shift differential pay on it. Life was now getting better. Julie didn’t go back to work and with a young baby we decided for a time she should just stay at home with Erick and we’d take it one day at a time to see how this would work out. As time went on we began to see the bills were being taken care of more and more and the threat of the wolves at the door began to disappear. Before too long the weekly take home pay began to equal a house payment. That was ideally where we wanted to be. Then the rest of the month would be for groceries, other bills, etc.
Some of the guys I hired in were to become friends. One of them was Warren Provost and along side of him was Frank Holland. Both of these guys drove to DuPont from Bear Creek every shift. Now Bear Creek is just north of Jacksonville NC. That’s a long haul. There was a guy I wasn’t real close to with the last name of Padgett from Jacksonville.
There was a group I was especially close to named Fulton Burns, of course Bob Johnston, Tony Kelly
Then came November with news that demand for Dacron had dropped. Layoffs were in the wind. They would occur with the last man in is the first man out. And guess what. My group of guys were the last men in. I got the pink slip and was told as soon as the economics improved and orders came in I would be called back to work. I was despondent. I went home from work that day and to Julie that I was out of work and starting job hunting. I checked the Star News classifieds and found an opening at the Federal Paperboard plant in Regalwood where my neighbor worked. Oh, by the way, his name was Harry Dyson. His wife’s name was Vancy. Anyway, he worked for Federal Paperboard and the job I saw was for Crowder Construction Company. They were looking for a Chief Field Engineer to oversee the foundation layout for new buildings and additions and layout of the overhead and underground piping. So I drove the long trip down in my little Honda car and was hired on the spot and went to work the next day. That was a blessing if I’ve ever had one. Julie wasn’t home when I got back after being hired, but for some reason I knew where she was. I can’t remember why, but I went to where ever she was and told her the good news. I was making just as good a money, so we didn’t miss a lick in pay.
The old fellow who was superintendant over the job was a cranky old guy. Very demanding yet as long as I did my job he didn’t bother me. I have to say that being a field engineer was in my blood. I was good at it. I could read blueprints and run a transit and level as good as any other professional field engineer. I really never had any problem with him except when he wanted me to work extra time. I wasn’t committed that much to a job I knew was temporary. I was always a family first sort and job second. I knew if I ever put my job ahead of my family priorities would get out of hand and issues would arise.
We started work at seven in the morning and worked till five thirty in the afternoon. That made for a ten hour day with a half hour for lunch. Friday’s I was sometimes expected to work at least a morning to tie up loose ends, but I wasn’t going to do that very often. Those ten hour days took a toll. The drive to work alone was almost an hour one way. One guy name David N. worked in the office trailer. He was the bookkeeper and general admin for the superintendant. He impressed me as coming from a white collar family, which struck me odd that he would be working in a blue collar job. Since he lived in Wilmington we struck a deal to car pool. I still had the little Honda car from the insurance days.
