Kim Clark - Author, Historian, and Radio Personality

We discuss the Marion Massacre a little known part of Marion history.  I think this is on of the most emotional episodes so far.  Told eloquently by Kim Clark.  Don't miss this one.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hello, I'm Jim Williams, and you're on the porch. Today my guest is Kim Clark. This is the first time I've ever met her, and I already like her. She's a an historian and an author, and probably a lot of other things that we're gonna find out about. Kim, thank you so much for coming up.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

This was a special request. I got your name as we've talked about. I wanted to talk about a specific thing in Marion's history, and we'll get to that. But uh tell me a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

I'm originally from Morganton, but I have deep roots here, and this will kind of come out in the story of the strike. My grandfather, although he was born near Morganton, he was intimately involved in the strike here in Marion in 1929. And only recently have I found out that I have deep roots in the Old Fort area, the Knoblet family, the pools. Do you remember um Irene Ryan that played Granny on the Beverly Hill Billys? Yes, oh yeah. My grandfather was from Old Fort. He's buried in Old Fort.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

And I'm related to them. She's my third cousin or something like that. So anyway, I have all these roots here, and it's just kind of funny that I ended up here, like I was pulled back here. But I have had many careers. I've worked in um retail and I've been a sales rep always with music. I've done a lot of things with music. Really? Yeah, my last job, I was a DJ and the program director at WNCW.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Well, I knew when I talked to you on the phone, you had that radio voice. And I told Janet, I said, this is going to be an interesting and easy interview for me because I could tell you're articulate and your voice is clear. And as I've told you, my my mentor, so to speak, is Annette Bryan, and she has that same radio voice that you can count on. So I plan on just kind of sitting back and enjoying the day today. I'm going to try not to interrupt you too much because there's so much that I want to know about. Let me ask you, because uh I'm looking at a book that you have uh published called Oh it's an Old Fort book. I think you did one on Marion.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

I did.

SPEAKER_01 2:43

How what other books have you done?

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Those are the only two official books. I also worked with Nada Carroll, who was a historian in the Old Fort area. She passed away several years ago, I think in 2017, but she had written a series of wonderful little stories about these cats that she had taken in in Old Fort and this little wildlife refuge that they just kind of fashioned around their house right there on the side of Batcave Road. And she had this all I actually met her when I was doing the Old Fort book, and she had this whole folder full of these stories. And she asked me if I would help her make a book out of them. And so I did, and it was called Grandfather's Ark. I think it's still available on Amazon.

SPEAKER_03 3:24

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

It's a sweet little book. I don't take credit for doing anything except putting her work in some kind of order, but I love it.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

You must be very pleased with a project like that.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

Yeah, the only thing I that's the heartbreaking part of it is I didn't get it finished before she passed away.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Oh, oh, that's a shame.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

Yeah. You obviously, and you you told me uh when you got here before we started really talking, you're pretty much interested in McDowell County, seems like. You've got this Marion book out and the old Fort book. You feel attached to Marion?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

It's more than being attached.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

It's a part of me. Even though I didn't grow up here, Morganton seems like a foreign place to me now.

SPEAKER_02 4:07

Really?

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah, when I go to Morganton, it's just like I pass through and do whatever I have to do and I come back. This is home.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

No kidding.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

Deep down to the bone, home.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Well, and I told you our story. We're the same way. We just feel comfortable here and we feel like it's home. Our friends are here and we get to say what we want to say, and they don't really hold me responsible for it. And that's always good.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Good friends anywhere will do that for you.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Yeah, they're forgiving. I like that. You got any projects in mind, or are you kind of in a plateau?

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Well, right now I am the about the busiest I have been in my life, which is funny. At age 67, retired, I'm the president of the of the friends board at the museum in Old Fort. And we're working on Pioneer Day right now as we're recording this, and there's all kinds of things coming down the pike for the museum. And I'm also the treasurer for the Ruitan Club in Old Fort. I live more toward Old Fort than I do Marion.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Uh, and I love Old Fort as well. Um, and yeah, there's there's two antique malls in Old Fort now, and I I sell vintage vinyl in both of those. And I also sell vintage vinyl at the Lake James Antique Mall in Nebo.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

So we know where that is. We've been there. Now, what is what does that mean? Vintage vinyl.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

The records you bought when you broke up.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 5:28

The kids call them vinyl now or vinyls. They actually call them vinyls. But we knew them as records.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Son of a gun.

SPEAKER_00 5:35

And they sell like crazy.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

No kidding.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

I I probably have some old records still. I've got a record player.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

But it's amazing how much the young people, and I sound so old when I say that, but how much the young people are into the vinyl.

SPEAKER_01 5:51

Well, you can't get sound out of Spotify like you can out of vinyl. That's just true.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

And they want the vinyl that was pressed prior to the digital age, because if you buy vinyl now, it's still been digitally mastered most of the time. They want the vintage stuff that's been analog all the way down the line.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

So do you do you and we'll get to we'll get on a subject here in a minute, but so do you uh like shop auctions and where do you get your vinyl?

SPEAKER_00 6:26

I used to have a lot of good luck at thrift stores and stuff like that, but though those days are over. Yeah. So now it's auctions, eBay when I need specific things, and I was lucky enough to hook up with a guy up in Freehold, New Jersey, who's an absolute beast when it comes to sniffing out vinyl, and he buys big lots of it, and then he calls me and I buy them from him, and then I, you know, sell them down here. Well, are you talking like 33 and a third or 45s or nobody cares about 45s and 78s might as well have never even been invented. Nobody cares about that. It's all the albums, the 33s. Huh. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

And the album covers sometimes are collectible.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Yes, they are. But the but the kids don't care so much about the covers. They just want that vinyl, they want that analog sound.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

Really?

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Well, that's kind of heartening for me to know that people care about that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Yeah. And books, classic literature is very popular now amongst younger people. See, there's hope. There is hope.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

I would not have thought that. I in fact I didn't think any young person could read, to tell you the truth.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

There's a couple generations that are they're MIA on this kind of stuff. But the really younger kids, I'd say from beginning college on back, high school, they're the ones who are into this. The girls are into something called Granny Chic, which is the old milk glass and all that kind of stuff. They're buying it like crazy. Now we don't sell that, but they love it.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Janet knows about that.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Okay. Well you're in style now.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

We have a basement. Uh our basement used to be my man cave. She has literally well over a hundred sets of dishes in the basement and probably twenty, thirty complete sets of silverware.

SPEAKER_00 8:29

Well, if you guys decide you need a little extra spending money, just put that stuff on eBay and you'll get it.

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Maybe maybe we've waited long enough and the time is right.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

Oh, you know, everything comes back around.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Now's your time.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

I wonder if my man cave could ever come back. Yeah, might be too late for that. You know that I ask you here to talk about the I I call it because I've only heard one term and that's the Marion Massacre. Is that a term you've heard?

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Yeah, it was used by a reporter, I think, early on after this event, because honestly, it kind of was a massacre at there at the end. And then Mike Long, who wrote a book in 2004, used that as a title of his book. So yeah, it's been bandied about. It wasn't in wide use, but it was used by a reporter.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

As I told you when you got here, I know nothing about this. I heard about it. It was intriguing to me. And then when I found out through Anne Swan that I could ask you to come up, and you were so gracious to accept my invitation, at that point I turned it off. I didn't want to know anything else about it. I'm just a sponge sitting here. I'm going to try not to interrupt you, but people who listen to the show know that's impossible. Uh I can't seem to keep my mouth shut. Uh I guess set the stage. Uh uh just tell me.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

Okay. I guess the stage would actually start at the Civil War. And we're not going to spend a whole lot of time back here, but after that, the South was in ruins, and it was seen as something to be taken advantage of by northern business people and also people who came from uh other countries. And the South kind of remained in that crippled state for a good while. And even on into the 1900s, Southern labor was still being exploited. In the late 1800s, there started to be a few um strikes or s uprisings, I guess is what they called them at that time, in some of the mills in the South. But it it didn't really go very far until 1929. For some reason it was time for things to get serious. The first big strike was in Elizabethan, Tennessee, at a rayon mill that was owned by some Germans. And the German way of doing business and the culture of Tennessee did not mix. And so there were 5,000 people up there that went on strike.

SPEAKER_02 11:05

Really?

SPEAKER_00 11:05

Yeah. Shortly after that, Greenville, South Carolina, 1,700. The Lorray Mill in Gastonia came on the heels of that. The biggest issue in any of these uprisings was something called the stretch out. And what that was was they would bring in a stopwatch engineer and they would watch each employee do their job right down to the second how much how much time it took to do each little task. And then they say, okay, do a little bit more.

unknown 11:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

And so they would just push them to the breaking point. They call it the stretch out. And what happened here in Marion that really caused that to explode was um the plant superintendent named uh Adam Hunt decided he wanted to do a stretch out without the aid of a stopwatch engineer. So he just started assigning extra work to these employees without really studying them. So he gave them way too many looms to to keep up with, way too much work to do. So what happened was a bunch of raw material was ruined. They lost, I think, $17,000 worth of material.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

Which at the time was a lot of money.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

A whole lot of money. And then he came up with a great idea how to recoup his losses, which was to ask them to come in ten minutes early every day and leave ten minutes later for no extra money.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

For free.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

For free. And that's when they said, enough.

SPEAKER_03 12:39

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Already they had complaints about the pay. They were working 60 to 65 hours a week.

SPEAKER_02 12:45

Oh man.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

Most of them were getting, depending on their job, between six and fifteen dollars a week.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

A week.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

A week. They lived in mill houses in the mill village. The mill houses are still there. You've probably driven through there and see. And each one of those houses, uh, their four-room houses, and each their rent was 20 cents a room per week. Well, that's 80 cents. That's a lot if you're making six dollars for the week.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

And the mill houses, let me just guess. The mill houses are owned by the mill. It's like that old song, I owe my soul to the company store, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:25

And the company store was there too.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Coming and going, they're locked in.

SPEAKER_00 13:32

Exactly. Nowhere to go. So after this stretch out fiasco, they decided we got to do something. So they elected a committee of men to go up to Asheville to what they called the labor temple. And I don't know exactly what that meant, but there were some labor leaders up there. It was my grandfather, Roy Price, a fella named Lawrence Hogan, and a fellow named Sam Finley. They went up there and conferred with a union, and the union said, We're interested. You need us. We'll come down.

SPEAKER_01 14:06

Oh, I'm going to interrupt you.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Please do.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

The union didn't come to Marion. Marion went to the union to seek help.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

Yep. And the interesting thing is the union never had control of Marion. Never.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

All right, I'm going to ask you a political question, even though I I try to stay away from politics. Now, North Carolina is a right-to-work state, right? Unions really don't have a stronghold here, do they, at this time?

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Not now, and I don't know about then, just to be honest. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 14:41

But they needed help from somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Yeah, so they go up there and they send back a guy named Alfred Hoffman, who was described as an overweight, rough Yankee. So you know he fit right in. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. Anyway, he came down and he started to tell them how to strategize a little bit, how to get the upper hand a little bit. And a lot of it just boiled down to harassing the overseers. Like they'd go around the overseers' house at night and make a bunch of noise so they couldn't sleep. That way they'd kind of have the upper hand on them the next day. But they still didn't have a union. They had, let's see, this was in May of 1929. They had a meeting in the courthouse here in Marion. And they had um, let's see, I could tell you, five hundred and some employees from Marion Manufacturing, which was 80% of the people who worked there, showed up at the meeting.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Clinchfield Mill, Mills, which is just across Highway 70, they didn't have any particular complaints yet other than just general, you know, this sucks kind of complaints. They had um 300 of their members, of their workers, joined as well down here at the courthouse. And then they elected their union um leadership, and it was my grandfather's president, and so forth. And Sheriff Oscar Adkins, who figures very prominently into this story, he came too because he was a friend of the strikers. He had he had run a store in East Marion and they were his customers until the company store opened. And he had just been elected um sheriff the November before this meeting in May of 29, with their support. And he came in a supportive role. They asked him to speak, but he didn't. But he was there. So then all of a sudden, as of May 1929, they've got a union.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 16:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Do you know who the owner of the mill was at that time?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. His name was Carol Baldwin. He was from Baltimore. And he was running the mill up until 1923. It was opened in about 1910. He ran it till 23 and then handed it over to his son Rignall. And Rignall was he didn't have a high opinion of his workers.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah. So after they held that open meeting, they decided, okay, we've got a reason, we've got a group of people now who can negotiate our our grievances. And so they had their list of demands, and basically their demands were we want to work a 10-hour shift a day. That was their that was their main demand. But when they showed up with their demands to this conference, um, Adam Hunt, who was the supervisor at Marion Manufacturing, he didn't even show up. Rignal Baldwin was there. He laughed at them. And he said, I'll give any man in here $10 if you dare to strike my mill.

SPEAKER_02 17:34

Really?

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Yeah. So the guys, my grandfather and the others, they're like, Well, we don't know what to do. That didn't go well. We're gonna have to call the union and see what they want us to do. So they left to go find a phone. Meanwhile, the result of this meeting had already gotten back to the mill. And they walked out. They shut down the machines and walked out. Strike. That's why the union leadership is not even there. They're a they're away making a phone call.

SPEAKER_02 18:00

Really?

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Yeah, and so they come back and it's already a strike. And the mill had nothing to do with I mean the union had nothing to do with it.

SPEAKER_01 18:08

My goodness.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Now, okay, I'm I'm not gonna interrupt you.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

No, please, no, no, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Well, uh so the union, if they are not the the reason that the strike took place, and and I I get where they're involved in this, but they're not there as the strikers, then are they gonna pull out uh uh altogether or are they still supporting the people that are okay, so now they find out, all right, the mill's on strike. So the union has to make a decision. Do we back them or do we pull away because we've already accomplished our goal, the mills on strike.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Well, this wasn't one long strike, it was a bunch of eruptions. And so this was the first eruption. And this kind of sort of got settled, and people went back to work to some degree, but they weren't happy still. And the union was kind of playing catch up, and they were trying to be supportive, but they were never in front of this parade, ever. They were always bringing up the rear. But picket lines after the fiasco at that meeting, the picket lines went up in Marion Manufacturing 24 hours a day, six days a week, or the half day on Saturday. They worked the mill hand, there the the mill was in operation all the time except for the last half of Saturday, and then of course it was closed on Sunday.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

So the picket line, is this a an active picket line? Because the picket lines that that I've seen in my life when uh companies that I've been involved with have gone on strike, if you break the picket line, you know, they call you a scab right off the bat. And as you walk into the picket line, in in fact, when I broke a picket line, I always made it clear to the people on the picket line, look, I'm part of the management, I'm not against you, I have to go to work. Because it got violent. They would yell at you, they would throw stuff at you. Is this the kind of picket line we're talking about?

SPEAKER_00 20:14

That's exactly the kind of picket line this was. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 20:16

Right here in Marion.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

Oh, yeah, and it got we got way worse than that. The next big eruption came in July of 29, and a load of cotton had come in that needed to be unloaded. And there weren't any there weren't any guys in the mill to unload it because they were being kept out by the picket line. There were some loyal workers in the mill, but nobody to unload this. And so Adam Hunt called Adkins and said Sheriff Adkins and says, Can you come over and help me get some people across the picket line so we can unload this stuff? So he shows up and at that time he's still friendly enough with the strikers that he's kind of chatting with them, hey, how you doing? You know, on the way in.

SPEAKER_04 20:55

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

Then when he gets there and they start trying to get men in to unload this load of cotton, a scuffle broke out.

SPEAKER_03 21:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Yeah. And again, um there was just there was no resolution. It was just a scuffle, and there was words thrown, and you know, it was a big upset. And Adkins withdrew, and everything kind of went back to where it was. What happened here was Mabry Hart, who was the superintendent over at Clinchfield, he caught wind of this and he said, uh-uh, I'm not having this at Clinchfield. And so what he decided to do for Clinchfield was to go ahead and preemptively fire the strikers or the the mil the union hands that he had. They weren't striking over there yet. He went ahead and fired the people who were in the union.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

Fired them just because they're in the union.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

And so you know what happened.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

Well, it didn't.

SPEAKER_00 21:48

They went on strike in Clinchfield.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 21:51

Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

And from there on, Clinchfield is where the action was. Because they tried to reopen and the strike Wouldn't let them open. And Hart, the plant superintendent over there, he wired the governor and asked for National Guard troops.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Okay. All right.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Okay, but and Governor Gardner, he did not send them because he was actually sympathetic to the strikers. He had said, and this is I'm just paraphrasing, he said, I'm not saying a man has to listen to his workers, but he's foolish if he doesn't. So he did not send troops. What he did was he sent Judge Nat Townsend as a representative, if somebody he'd known for a long time, that he thought could mediate this. Townsend goes to Clinchfield where there's a thousand people outside picketing. Alfred Hoffman from the Union is there, and Townsend goes up to him and says, You got to dispense these people. We got to get these other people back in here to work. And Hoffman said to him, or he's, and he said, or we're gonna have to bring troops in. And he said, It's up to you whether troops come in here or not. Some of the strikers heard that and they begin to chant, Bring on the troops. Bring on the troops. Oh my god. Bring on the troops. And so you know what happened. Well that afternoon, there were a hundred troops on the courthouse lawn in Marion. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:18

Son of a gun. And now we're this is 1929. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

We're in August at this point.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Okay, August of 29. I'm just trying to visualize. These are post-World War I troops, some of whom maybe had seen action.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

It's not impossible to think that, but if I remember correctly, their leader, and I don't remember what his office was, he was a veteran of World War I. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

All right.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

But what happened? Um they when the the guardsmen got here, they said, okay, let's have some more negotiations, see if we can get this thing settled. And they opened up the picket lines to let the mills reopen as fully as they could with people who wanted to work. But in Clinchfield, they had gotten into the bad habit of throwing dynamite around at night to keep to keep everybody awake. And they continued to do that while the negotiations were going on. So you know that didn't help.

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Well, okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

So then what Hart did, and there's still negotiations happening, and Mabry Hart, the superintendent and intendant at um Clinchfield, he said, okay, that's it. And he said, Everybody who's a member of union, out of your union out of your house, out of your greatly, out of the mill houses. He ordered them evicted. And then he left town.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

Well, smart move, I'm guessing.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Yeah. So the dynamiting got worse, and they even dynamited the Clinchfield mill itself and cost $1,500 in damages. And Sheriff Adkins showed up with some deputies and tried to help enforce these evictions because every time somebody was trying to be evicted from their house, a whole group of strikers would come and surround the house to keep people from being taken out. And if they moved out one family and then brought in another family of loyal workers, the strikers would come and move the loyal workers' stuff out. It was just a circus. It was terrible. And at one time, Atkins and his deputies came in to one of these houses to enforce an eviction, and there was a fight, and some of the deputies got pushed down steps and and all this kind of stuff, and they were hurt. I think one of them had to go to the hospital.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Uh-oh.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

Yeah. So you can see how this is just escalating.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

And at that point, um, the strikers again were taunting, and they said, Bring on the troops, bring on the troops, bring on the troops. So they put, after the the day that Atkins was physically assaulted out in front of a mill house, they put machine guns in the windows.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

At Clinchfield Mill. 148 people were arrested for insurrection. And they shut down all the picketing, and they had National Guardsmen all over East Marion and Clinchfield. And you couldn't even move on the street without getting stopped. And they were searching people's houses and searching cars for dynamite and guns and everything else.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

Wow. That's a lot of people. Just a lot of people, number one, right here in a little town like Marion. I'm assuming they probably weren't all locals. By now people are coming in from the outside, do you think? Or do you think it's just local people?

SPEAKER_00 26:39

You mean as far as the strikers? Yeah. It's all local.

SPEAKER_01 26:42

Really?

SPEAKER_00 26:43

There was really never any report of people coming of outside agitators at all.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Oh my goodness. Okay. Now that surprises me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

Now people came from the outside to observe.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Reporters started to show up.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

Well, yeah, that's a show, man.

SPEAKER_00 26:57

Yeah. But there was no outside agitators that that anybody was able to see. So after the guard is here in this accelerated or elevated stance, there was a settlement, another supposed settlement. And what they agreed to was a 55-hour per week work week, but for less money. So they all took a pay cut. And in East Marion, all but 12 of the strikers were rehired. Those 12, or I guess I didn't say that right. Twelve of them were were basically just ejected from the mill village and from their jobs and everything. It's like, you know, take hit the road. And the mill said they would try to take back all the workers and that they would try to increase wages in the future, but they didn't really agree to anything. It was a defeat for the for the strikers in the union. And at that point, um, my grandfather was getting, he was kind of out of the picture at that point because his wife, my grandmother, was within two weeks of giving birth, and right about this time when all this was really accelerating, she died giving birth to my father.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

Yeah, and so he'd lost his job. He'd been basically told to get out of town, but he couldn't leave yet because he had a new baby, he had to bury his wife, so all of this stuff is going on for him. So everything I've read says that he was kind of um a kind of a calming figure. Okay, he's out, he's unavailable. And after he got all of his personal business resolved, he had to leave town. He ended up in Detroit to get a job because he was blacklisted all over North Carolina. Um but after all that, after that supposed settlement, Sheriff Atkins went to the county commission and told them that eight deputies were not enough for him to handle what was going on in the mill villages.

SPEAKER_03 28:46

Uh-oh.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

And so they authorized up to 25 special deputies. Um, but they said you can just deputize people on the spot when you need them.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

That's a good sign.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Yeah, and with no training.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:59

Okay, so you can see what that set up.

SPEAKER_01 29:01

So some good old boys get their rifles.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Yep. Okay, and then as you go on through September, the troops left Marion because they think there's the strike has been settled. Rignal Baldwin from Marion Manufacturing, the owner, he left to go back to Baltimore. While he was gone, Adam Hunt, his plant superintendent, on his own, he's the guy that started the whole stretch out thing, decided he's gonna add a hundred more names to the blacklist. So it's like the the mill management just kept twisting the knife. Really? You know? And neither mill acted like they were going to rehire anybody, even though they had agreed to. So total loss of of faith there. Um at about the same time, this is like maybe a week later, all this is still churning. Every union leader who was still left in the mill villages went to Rock Hill for a conference. So you got all this crap happening, and everybody who could have done anything about it left.

SPEAKER_02 29:59

Leaves.

SPEAKER_00 30:00

Yeah. And so on October 2nd, during that, on that night, oh a lot of people say that this was already pre-planned, that they were going to walk out, have a wildcat walk out. But some other people said that it happened because um uh an overseer at night was harassing somebody who because who had been a member of the union, you know, calling them names, laughing and all that. For whatever reason, this guy shut off his machine and yelled, strike. This is in the wee hours of the morning. And somebody else ran around the mill, strike, strike, strike, strike, and they all left. So they're standing out in the rain in front of Marion Manufacturing. At this point, it's probably about four in the morning, and they're like, We're not going anywhere, we're gonna stay right here, and we're gonna stand in front of the gate to keep the day shift from coming in. Sheriff Atkins, of course, is called. And as the morning goes on, you've got Atkins, his deputies that he just deputized right on the spot with no experience from people who were anti-union.

SPEAKER_02 31:03

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00 31:04

He took some of the workers who were anti-union and deputized them on the spot. Okay, so they're out there. Then you get the day shift coming in, they want to work, the plant management has showed up, all these people are jammed in front of Marion Manufacturing Gates, and there was a fence, a big wire fence in front of the mill, and then you had a big brick wall, and then the company store complex right behind you. So it was just a very small strip of land right there, not much on either side of Baldwin Avenue, all crammed in there. And people did say that they saw the strikers with clubs and sticks. From what I've been able to determine, they didn't bring them, but they procured them really, really fast once things got going. Yeah. Um at some point, I think Atkins kept telling the strikers to break it up, let the people come in and work if they want to work, and nothing was moving. And at some point, Adam Hunt called Adkins over to the fence and said something to him, Sheriff Atkins. And when Adkins comes back, he takes a tear gas canister out and throws it.

unknown 32:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:15

And when he does that, of course, pandemonium breaks out. You got all these people hemmed into this little tiny space. Right. And you got tear gas in a misting rain, just nightmare. Yeah. Well, beside of him, I think it was uh Broad Robbins, who was the constable of Clinchfield, and he was acting as a deputy, he unleashed one as well. And then Atkins had another one, and he's getting ready to launch it. And there was a striker standing beside of him named James Jonas. Um he was an older fellow and he had a walking stick. He reached over and just clocked Atkins to keep him from throwing that tear gas.

SPEAKER_03 32:50

Uh-oh.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

And Atkins turned around and started to scuffle with him some, and they ended up on the ground wrestling. So when the deputies saw that happening, they thought, it's on. Somebody's attacking the deputy the the sheriff. So they started to shoot. And over the course of two minutes, they shot about 70 times.

SPEAKER_02 33:12

Really?

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Yeah. And within those two minutes, 31 strikers were hit. I'm probably going to get emotional, believe it or not, after all this time. One guy died instantly in the road. Five died in the hospital. There were 16 more wounded in the hospital, many more who just limped and crawled back home, who never reported any place. They just said, you know, we'll take care of our own wounds. But the ones who were dead were James Jonas, the old man, Sam Vickers, James Randolph Hall, Luther Bryson, James Will Roberts, and T. L. Carver. Nobody ever reported seeing any striker shoot a gun. Although the deputies said that they did. Some people said, well, maybe there were some shots coming from the direction of the strikers, but nobody could ever say who had a gun. And there were no guns ever found on any striker. One guy had bullets in his pocket, and they used that as evidence that they all had guns. And in the testimony after this, every striker testified to running and trying to get away. And no deputy sheriff ever testified about ducking or running or anything. Which kind of speaks volumes. And Time magazine did report at that time, some reporter there said that Atkins at some point yelled during the melee, for God's sake, stop shooting. But it didn't help. And actually, let me see if I can find this. There's one, there's a really cool quote that kind of describes this. It was a reporter who was there, and he said, I turned and saw guns blazing out of the mill gate. There was the wildest confusion, and everybody I saw was running. I saw several people fall in front of me, and I know that one man was shot near the north end of the platform. Several fell beside me. Bullets dug up the road like big drops of rain. Others went overhead, and many chipped the concrete beside the mill store. There were women in the crowd, and I heard them screaming and men groaning and writhing on the ground.

SPEAKER_01 35:27

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

That's right here on Baldwin Avenue in Marion.

SPEAKER_01 35:31

That's just hard to believe.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

I know. And as you can imagine, the next day this was front page news.

SPEAKER_02 35:38

Certainly.

SPEAKER_00 35:39

Front page on the New York Times. Reporters from all over the country came here. Sinclair Lewis was here.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00 35:48

Yeah, they were all staying at the Mariana Hotel. And there were so many reporters here that they had to Western Union had to send in additional operators to handle all of the traffic, all of the dispatches being filed out of here.

SPEAKER_03 36:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

It was it was absolutely amazing. And the saddest part of this, and I you know what, I may get emotional telling you this. After the shooting, all of the employees who were outside there, the only thing they knew to do was to go to work.

SPEAKER_01 36:24

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

After they picked the bodies up off of the street, they just went in the mill and went to work.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

What a sad situation.

SPEAKER_00 36:39

Some of them went home, but most just turned around. The reports are that all but a hundred people went in, took their place at their machines, and went to work.

SPEAKER_03 36:50

Wow. Okay, and I I know.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Let me just add one more little footnote to that, because I think this is a powerful one, too. That afternoon, before that shift was finished, they sent a road drag out. Because Baldwin Avenue was a dirt road at that time.

SPEAKER_01 37:04

Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

To scrape up all the blood.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Oh, oh my gosh. That's a little bit sadder part of our history than I thought it would be.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

Well, it gets worse in a way.

SPEAKER_01 37:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

Because the mill owner, Carol Baldwin, he first started that, he also paid all the ministers in that part of the county. In East Marion. So when it came time for a funeral, there was no preacher in East Marion that would preach a funeral.

SPEAKER_01 37:36

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_00 37:37

No church would have it.

SPEAKER_01 37:39

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

These strikers. It's amazing to me how emotional I feel about this, telling you. These strikers were put on sawhorses in a field across from the mill. And that's where their funeral was preached. The mill ran the entire time. They never even shut down the machines. No preacher would preach it. Um there was a preacher who came down from Spruce Pine named Cicero Queen. And he part of what he said was, Oh, what would Jesus say if he came to Carolina?

SPEAKER_01 38:12

Oh my gosh.

unknown 38:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Boy, I'll tell you what, it's hard to speak after that. I had no idea that it was that brutal.

SPEAKER_00 38:23

It was, and I think that's why you've not ever heard anything about it. This was so horrific, and it ended so badly for everybody, that after it was over, there was uh a preliminary hearing, and the judge basically asked the deputies, Did you fire, did you fire, did you fire? The ones that said no, he let them go, the ones that said yes, they bound them over for trial. They went to trial up in Burnsville in December, all found not guilty. Have a good Christmas.

SPEAKER_03 38:53

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

And it was over. So there was so much there was blood spilled, lives ruined, a whole village, two villages just destroyed emotionally, and nobody wanted to talk about it anymore. It's like once once the the page was turned on this, nobody talked about it ever again. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen in history. They just like they blacklisted an entire sequence of events.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

That is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 39:30

It didn't even, it didn't come out until it's almost like about 1980, suddenly a signal was given, it's time to talk about this. Because part of the story comes back into my family. You know, I told you my grandfather was a president of the union. He never told anybody. My father, the baby that was born in the mill village, right, didn't know anything about it. It was a mystery to us why Papa Price, as we called him, went to Detroit and abandoned Daddy. He never set the story straight. He'd rather keep that secret than tell us why he left.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

My goodness.

SPEAKER_00 40:09

Yeah. The way we found out was after he died, there was an old trunk that came into our possession that had belonged to him. And my mother opened it up, and there was just stuff that had belonged to his wife, and in the bottom there's a mashed up box at the very bottom of the trunk. And in that box was the membership roles of the union.

SPEAKER_03 40:30

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_00 40:31

The handbooks, the pens, everything. It had been in that trunk since 1929. And he never told anybody about it. And when my mother pulled that stuff out, she's like, she asked my father, Don, what is this? And he said, I have no idea. It took a lot of research just for us to figure out why that stuff was even in that trunk.

SPEAKER_01 40:53

When I told people that I'd ask you up here to talk about this, more than one said to me, You need to be careful because emotions are high about this incident.

SPEAKER_04 41:07

Still.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

And I said, There's no way it was a hundred years ago. Nobody remembers it, or in fact, my words were, nobody cares. Obviously, I was wrong.

SPEAKER_00 41:19

I'm still crying about it. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

And you even made Janet cry about it.

SPEAKER_00 41:24

Sorry. It's a powerful story. Well, this is what happens. It happens with individuals. This is unprocessed trauma that happened on a town level. Unprocessed trauma. There was another um labor uprising that started up in 1934 in other cities, but and the the union organizers came to Marion, and all the people in the Mule Villages here said no, thank you. Sent them packing.

SPEAKER_02 41:48

Really?

SPEAKER_00 41:49

Yeah. So that trunk came to the attention of my family, and so we started digging. And about the same time, oddly enough, a fellow showed up here named Mike Blankenship, whose father had been one of the union organizers up in Asheville, and he had um he was doing a research for a I don't know, a thesis of some kind. And he came down here and he hooked up with a historian named Ruth Greenley. You may have heard of the Greenlee system. Yes. Okay. They kept a series of scrapbooks about all the his history of McDowell County. There was one that was nothing except the strike. All these newspaper articles about the strike from the very beginning all the way to the end. It's an incredible historical document. It is the only one of those scrapbooks that those sisters ever let leave the county. And I thought to myself many times, I don't think she gave that to Mike. He must have taken it because she wouldn't give that away. Now, in retrospect, I realize she gave it to him because she thought the people in this county would never want to know that history.

SPEAKER_03 42:49

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_00 42:50

Yeah. So he c he showed back up in town sometime around 2010 or something like that with the scrapbook. At the same time the mill was being torn down.

SPEAKER_01 43:03

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_00 43:04

Yeah. And so Patty Holda from the library and the I know Patty. Okay. And the folks who were at Mountain Gateway Museum, we got together and we did an exhibit about marin manufacturing, including the strike stuff. We had it at the library. It also went on tour. It had pretty wide reach. And the scrapbook became a central part of that. A lot of the information and the images we got out of her scrapbook. But what one thing I noticed in particular that really was, it just tells the story. During that the time that exhibit was up, I worked it every day, and I would watch people as they came in and came in. And a lot of the exhibit was just about the milk. And later on in the 50s and the 60s, post war World War II, it was an idyllic place to work and live. Everybody loved it. It's Mayberry, you know. And so most of the people came in, they reminisced about that, having a grand old time. But and they would look at the exhibit we had on the wall, but when they got to The part about the strike, I can't tell you how many times I watched them, turn their back and walk away. They would not even look at the exhibit.

SPEAKER_01 44:10

Really?

SPEAKER_00 44:11

Isn't that wild?

SPEAKER_01 44:13

Well, now I guess I know why when we first got back here, or we'd been back here a while, and someone mentioned the this to me. It might have been Patty Holda, as a matter of fact.

SPEAKER_00 44:25

Probably was Patty.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

I I asked around just doing a little bit of research, and everyone either did not know legitimately or they were just closed mouth about it. But no one talked to me. And so I finally, like probably most people, just gave up and thought, well, maybe this happened, maybe it didn't. And now I I'm starting to understand why that was that way, why people didn't talk to me about it. I am always, and I've said this before on this broadcast, that we're not political or anything, but it amazes me in this world how poor people are treated. You know, these are just poor people who are out to make a living. Nothing more, nothing less. Just cut because I'll I'll tell you, uh, my aunt, maybe a couple of my aunts, worked at Marion Manufacturing when I was just a child, so it was well into the 50s, 60s, something like that. They were just as happy as could be.

SPEAKER_00 45:33

They loved it. And I would never take that away from them. I'm so happy they had that, all those people. But it's like they just walked over top of what had come before.

SPEAKER_01 45:44

And see, that's the thing, is that like we talk about our veterans, you know, we just got through the Memorial Day, and and they're the the catchphrases are freedom isn't free. All gave some, some gave all. We we've heard those phrases, and I certainly endorse those phrases. I'm a veteran, I know what that means. I know what it means to give, but I also know what it means to be forgotten, because of my time in history when I was in service, and to forget these people, whether or not you agree with their side, whether or not you agree, to forget about that in history, I think is just it's just a real shame and should be brought out. That's kind of why we're here talking today.

SPEAKER_00 46:31

It's unhealed trauma. Yeah. If you don't honor this, and I'm not saying you say that they are they all did the right thing, but it happened. You have to bring that into your, you know, if you do any kind of somatic work, you know, for trauma release and stuff, you have to let it out of your body. Right, exactly. Marion never let that out of their body. And so when you don't do that, you just keep squishing and squishing and squishing and squishing, and it's not healthy.

SPEAKER_01 46:58

Yes. That's exactly right.

SPEAKER_00 47:00

Yeah, so um it's interesting to see how it continued to reverberate through the generations of these people who who were involved. Of course, I've already, you know, been crying and everything else. You can see how it went through my family. In 2009, I was doing an oral history project for the county, and I went up Lake Tahoma Road to talk to Pete and Betty Gibbs.

SPEAKER_02 47:21

Oh, sure.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

Okay. During the course of that, I found out that Betty, the Sheriff Atkins' daughter.

SPEAKER_02 47:28

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00 47:29

Yeah. And we didn't talk too much about it. It was just such a connection, like, oh my gosh, here we are all these years later, and you're Sheriff Atkins' daughter, and I'm kind of like she's representing him, I'm representing my grandfather, and here we are in this totally different um relationship now. She talked about it briefly about how it really affected her family, and I just for some reason looked up her obituary last night. She died in 2013, and the strike is mentioned in her obituary, and she was only two years old when it happened.

SPEAKER_02 48:00

Really?

SPEAKER_00 48:01

Yeah, it said even though she was only a child with uh the events of 1929 or however they worded it, it continued to affect her family throughout her life.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

It had an impact on the sheriff, obviously, that he carried with him his whole life, which impacted his daughter. Well, maybe I'm starting to understand a little bit more about why people were telling me you might want to leave this alone, because it it still manifests itself, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 48:31

It does. And I tell you kind of what I this is kind of how I feel about our conversation today. This might be the last telling of it. Because I don't know that there'll be any more books written, anybody else interviewing or anything else. This might be the last telling.

SPEAKER_01 48:47

Isn't that something?

SPEAKER_00 48:49

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 48:50

Well, I hope that it isn't, but I hope that if it is the last telling, we've told it properly, and you certainly have, I've in my opinion, given it a good representation. I I think that's a shame. I think that unfortunately this sort of tragedy happens all over, but to have it happen here with people we know, because I would bet you that if if you and I followed our friends and family trees back far enough, they're gonna cross somewhere. That's just what a small town is like. Whether we like it or not, we carry the burdens of the past with us.

SPEAKER_00 49:30

Absolutely. I'll tell you this, you know, my father never knew why he, you know, we didn't know anything about why Papa Price went away or anything like that. But my father for his entire life had an unexplained sense of shame about him. And I think he picked it up probably as a as a newborn, but also maybe just I'm I'm not sure. And it's been handed down to me. My brother and I both have it. That trauma has run through our bloodline. But Daddy was always very much in the shadows of any conversation that was ever happening or any kind of activity or event. Daddy was always going to be in the shadow.

SPEAKER_01 50:10

Isn't that something?

SPEAKER_00 50:11

And I I put a lot of that down to what happened in 1929, right down here on Baldwin Avenue.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

Now you see, as I told you, I was born here in Marion. And I live my younger days in a I'll just call it what it is, in a tar paper shack up on the Blue Ridge. Uh today we would call it maybe a cabin, I don't know. It wasn't. It was a whole my grandfather and grandmother, my parents, my uncles, all crammed into one little shack. Now, my grandfather certainly was aware of the history of Marion. He knew all about that time, and yet, as I told you, I have never heard about this until we came back and it was mentioned to me. My grandfather never ever mentioned it. And my grandmother worked in the mills, I don't know which ones. My mother worked in the mills uh back in the I would say early 50s. Don't you think she would have heard about it?

SPEAKER_00 51:18

Maybe not. You know, there was so much that happened immediately after this. You had the stock market crash, you had the depression, and all that. Right. Okay. There were so many national events that just pushed this to the side. And I think I guess a lot of that overshadows this local story. Um, and I think it's really possible that anybody who worked in any of these mills lived in the mill villages from the 1950s on and never heard a peep about it.

SPEAKER_01 51:44

You brought in an aspect of this story that I would never have thought about, and that's the mill villages. It never until you said this, I I mean, I don't know why, maybe I'm just naive, it never occurred to me that the mill workers lived in the mill village, owned by the mill. So the fact that you do something wrong, you do something that the mill disagrees with, they kick you out of your house. Where's the justice in that?

SPEAKER_00 52:18

I know. But you know, on the flip side, if you look at this from their point of view, when they first came to work in the mills when they got established, working in a mill village, working in a mill and living in a mill village was a step up for some people. If you worked on a mountain farm, you didn't work 12 and a half hours a day, you worked 15 or 16.

SPEAKER_04 52:36

Right.

SPEAKER_00 52:36

And you didn't get paid every week. Right. And if something happened to the crop, you didn't get paid at all. And maybe your house wasn't as even as good as these. So it was a step up for a lot of people. But it just became untenable. I mean, you can only take you can only be downtrodden for so long and for so hard.

SPEAKER_01 52:53

Right. Let's kind of go off on a little bit of a slant here. So let's say, yeah, you live in the mill village and you work in the mill, whatever you do. Was there any chance of advancement to where you could move into uh a middle class social status?

SPEAKER_00 53:14

That's a good question, and I'm not sure that I can answer that. I know some did. Um some of the mill workers that didn't live in the mill village. There was some um, like I don't think my grandfather ever lived in the mill village. Oh, that's why he didn't get evicted. He lived in a rental house that was more on the outskirts. They're kind of on the the periphery of the mill village.

SPEAKER_04 53:33

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 53:33

Um I guess if you kept advancing up, you know, through the ranks, you at some point could graduate out of a mill house, but from what I've seen, I don't think it really happened.

SPEAKER_01 53:44

Do you think it was, and I this is just I know your personal opinion, and we'll take it at that. Do you think it was the goal of the company to keep everybody depressed so that they would get the menial labor out of them?

SPEAKER_00 54:02

Well, you know, uh th there's whole thought of keeping people in their place, keeping them controllable. Um, you know, we're not going to get political here, and I'm gonna say anything other than that dynamic exists all over today. It's just not in a mill village.

SPEAKER_01 54:18

Right. Uh there was a point in time when we just went ahead and and called slavery slavery, you know. Uh we did that, and we we identified a class of people who were slaves in our kind of, in my opinion, close-knit definition. Well, in my opinion, these people were just as much slaves because if you make no money and you try to live on that, or you make fifteen dollars a week, you know, slavery's still slavery. We just have removed the whip. Uh so that even makes it in my mind more tragic that those people who are just fighting for a little bit more. Now, I I don't want to take sides. I you know, I told you we're we're not political, and so we're not gonna take one side over the other. But boy, the way the picture is painted, uh it's kind of almost hard to not see it just one way.

SPEAKER_00 55:20

You know, it is, and I've been through every book that was written about this, and I've talked to people, and it's pretty clear where the most villainous activity was. Right. But it wasn't everybody wasn't a good guy on one side, and everybody wasn't a bad guy on the other. I think Sheriff Atkins is one of the most interesting characters in the whole thing because he was a friend of the strikers. Yeah. He did not want any of this to happen. And he was painted for a long time. Sinclair Lewis paints him like he's just the biggest southern buffoon ever. And I don't read it that way at all. I think Atkins did the best he could in a situation that got way out of hand. Right. Now I don't excuse him for when it was over. I think there were some things that were said in testimonies that maybe not were 100% truthful, but I think they just did what they had to do. They existed in the world as it was then, and they had to do what they had to do. He didn't want this to happen. No way did he want this to happen.

SPEAKER_01 56:16

When those uh deputies, you may not know this, when they went on trial, the ones that did go on trial, was that a jury trial, do you know, or just before a judge?

SPEAKER_00 56:27

It was a jury.

SPEAKER_01 56:28

Really?

SPEAKER_00 56:28

Mm-hmm. Yeah, they um the testimony was so contradictory, nobody could make head or tails out of it. And you know, the strikers would get up there and say they did all the shooting, and then the deputies would get up there and say they did all the shooting. And I think in the end, especially at that time, they're always going to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt.

SPEAKER_02 56:48

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 56:48

And when they found one of the guys who died, I think it was the last one that died, T. L. Carver, he did have bullets in his pocket, and they rode that for all it was worth to prove that they were all shooting.

SPEAKER_01 56:57

But no weapons were found.

SPEAKER_00 56:59

None. His wife said his pistol was a home.

SPEAKER_01 57:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:03

This is why, see, you right now, this is exactly why people stopped talking about this. Right now we're trying to make it make sense, trying to find a a place to cloak for closure.

SPEAKER_01 57:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 57:14

And there's not one. There's not a handle you can grab onto and carry this anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 57:19

Right.

SPEAKER_00 57:20

It's just a big sprawling mess, and nobody looks good. And it you can't make it make sense. You can't walk away from the story feeling good.

SPEAKER_01 57:28

It's kind of a black eye on the history of Marion, and yet, since we don't talk about it, I guess there's no black eye. Marion is now progressive and we're moving on to other things, but looks like we would grow up enough to embrace this part of our history.

SPEAKER_00 57:47

Yeah, uh you would think so, but it it's just water under the bridge for most people. You know, they don't think about it too much.

SPEAKER_01 57:55

Well, if you if you get emotional about this and you get chanted emotional about this, don't you think that there are other people who who carry this with them just as much as you do?

SPEAKER_00 58:09

Oh, for sure. Especially anybody who found out anything about it. During the course of doing that exhibit in um 2011 when the mill was getting torn down, I met Sam Finley's daughters, um, Jewel and Diesta. They carried it. It's almost like having a little bit of a virus or something. You know, they carried it. I met T.L. Carver's um granddaughter. I've met the granddaughter of one of the other men who died. And it's like, as soon as you see them, it's like you got it. You you carry this too. Really? Yeah. Betty Gibbs. Yes, Sheriff Atkins' daughter, she still carried it.

SPEAKER_01 58:46

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 58:47

We all carry it. Well and the community does too to a certain extent, but it's so diluted, I guess they don't notice.

SPEAKER_01 58:55

He doesn't know it yet, but I'm gonna try to get Joe Tisdale. Do you know Joe?

SPEAKER_00 59:00

I do know Joe. Uh I've met him before.

SPEAKER_01 59:04

He was with Marion Manufacturing for 44 years. I'm gonna try to get him to come up and talk to me. J Joe's a friend of mine, and I'm gonna play on that all I can. And I would just I'm not gonna, we're not gonna talk about this, but I am gonna touch on it to see if he has any if anybody ever talked about it, because 44 years back that would be certainly well past the time of the of the incident, I'm gonna call it. Uh so hopefully I can have him up here in a couple weeks, and I just want to go back and see to see if in his history with Marion Manufacturing, if it w ever came up, you know.

SPEAKER_00 59:47

Um I bet he's gonna say no.

SPEAKER_01 59:50

I bet you is too.

SPEAKER_00 59:51

And he represents the wonderful part of that history of marion manufacturing, which is just as real as what we spent the last hour and a half or whatever talking about. Um It was a wonderful place to work from all accounts after World War II, a wonderful place to live. That's just as real as any of the rest of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:08

Well, we're gonna leave it at that.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:10

I would like to say, give people a couple of or a few suggestions if they want to read more about this. Um probably the best source. There's a book called Unraveled. It's still in print. It's by Travis Byrd, is from the University of Tennessee Press. It's it's really good. He came to Marion. Okay. Yeah, he came to Marion and and did a really good job. Mike Lawing's The Marion Massacre, it's out of print, but you could probably find one somewhere. And there's a book that's in public domain now, so it's easily found online called When Southern Labor Stirs by Tom Tippett.

unknown 1:00:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:44

It's about all of the strikes that were taking place in 29, but he's got quite a bit about Marion in here and some really good pictures.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:50

Great.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:51

And also the scrapbooks from the Greenley sisters from Ruth Greenley, those are still online. You just go Google Mountain Express, um, I think it's called Mountain Shame.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:01

Mountain Shame.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:02

Yeah, that was the name of the feature that they ran, and you can you can just scroll down and you'll see where those scrapbooks are still in there. You can just flip through them.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:11

Really? Okay. Mountain Shame. Janet taking notes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:16

It's the best way to relive it because you're doing it day by day as they started clipping the newspapers.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:23

I would hope that some of the people who listen to this broadcast will be interested enough to follow it just a little further. Honestly, if we could get the word out to another dozen people, I think our task is accomplished. You know, I and I'd agree. And trust me, before you came, I wasn't a torch carrier for this, or you know, I didn't care one way or the other, to tell you the truth. I just wanted to hear the story. It's more of a poignant story than I expected it to be. Because a strike's a strike, you know. I I watch on TV all the time where there's a riot one place or another, or a protest, as they call it now, and I don't I don't care one way or the other, really, uh to be honest with you. So these people had some skin in the game.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:16

You know, these were they had all their skin in the game.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:18

Yeah, yeah. All right. Enough pontification for me. Anything else you want to talk about while I got you here? Because I've certainly enjoying this.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:28

Well, I am too. Uh I think we've pretty much covered it. It's just it's funny, every time I get into this story, and I was immersed in it for a few years doing the exhibit and everything. Um, and then I put it aside for a long time and I had to refresh my memory. That's why I have all these notes here.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:46

Um and once I really get into it, I'm like you. I I was sitting on my couch going, oh my gosh. Yeah. You know, I I'm reading this stuff that I've read a probably 25 times by now, and going, Oh my gosh. And every time I get to the part where the people are going back to work, when the bodies are just I swear every time I'll shed a tear. It just I can't not do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:11

That is I think the most poignant part of the story is that it's just they don't have a place to go. They don't have a home. They need to put some sort of structure back in their life, and the only thing they know to do is go back in and start up the machine.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:31

They'd lost everything. They had lost everything at that point except work. That's all they had. Um, and if you go by where Marion Manufacturing stood, there's a monument there. I don't know if you've ever noticed it. I have. Okay, Tina Thompson, who, as I recall, was quote unquote just a somebody who lived in Mary and she had no particular connection to anybody. She was very taken with this story. And she and her husband, I believe his name's Dennis. I apologize, I apologize if that's not right. They just raised the money to put that up. And it was unveiled on July 4th, let's say 2004, something like that. There was a little ceremony out there. She just did that because she wanted it done.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:13

Uh-uh.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:14

And it's really and the mill was still standing at that time. Of course, the mill's gone now.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:18

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:18

Um, so it's really great that she did that because the marker is still there, of course, with the smokestack. But I'll tell you one other thing, when the mill was torn down, which was happening while we were doing that exhibit at the library, you could almost feel oh gosh, the the county, or at least East Marion, exhale.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:37

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:38

It's like there was some energy released when that mill went down. Yes. And Swan and I talked about that because she used to she talked about how she used to just drive through there sometimes through that little canyon where everybody was when the shooting was happening, and how you could just feel it when you drove through there. And once that mill went down and the sun came down on that street, it's like it was gone.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:02

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:04

Well, maybe you're right. Maybe this is the last telling of the story.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:07

I kind of feel like it might be.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:08

I I hope that uh somewhere this is preserved. You have in these places that you've identified, we've got pictures, but I'm a firm believer in the Appalachian storyteller. I believe in the passing of history verbally. And we've done that today. I'm proud of us. I don't know that we could find a more noble cause than what you've described today.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:34

I appreciate hearing that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:35

Well, that's we've blown an hour easily, well over an hour. Let's let's at least plug your book a little bit. You've got two books out that are very nice, Old Fort and Marion, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:47

Yeah, they're part of the series of uh it's the Arcadia Publishing does these. They're called Images of America. They're basically photo albums with captions, and it's it's interesting putting those together because you're only allowed. So many words and it's very formulaic.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:02

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:02

It's very formulaic, but that kind of makes you have to be really thrifty with your words and clear and all that kind of stuff. So I enjoy doing them. But I just took both of those books just follow the history of the respective towns chronologically. Did the best I could with the photos that I could find. The photos are the starting point. Then you write around those, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:21

Well, I tell people once in a while on this show that uh I lived the first hundred and eighty days of my life in Old Fort. And there's a picture of it's actually a storefront, but we lived up on the second story of that storefront. Or my mom and did, my mom and dad did, and we kept an uh a baby there that was uh several days old. So I guess that's my tie to Old Fort. And I almost died in Old Fort. I had scarlet fever there.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:48

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:49

Yeah. So uh well it was called Scarlet Tina. Uh we couldn't afford scarlet fever, so I had to have Scarletina. Uh but the only doctor available that could handle it was in Old Fort. And so my folks took me to Old Fort, and I had an aunt and uncle there, and they just left me with the aunt and uncle, and he treated me for some time. I was out of commission for a long time. Where can we get these books if we want to?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:18

Uh you can order them online. Arcadia uh has a storefront online. They're also, if you want to find one cheaper, they're on eBay. They're also at the visitor center here in Marion. The museum has them in Old Fort.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:31

Okay. So they're right. All right. Say hello to Roanne, would you?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:35

I'll do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:35

Hopefully she'll still remember me, and uh maybe I can get her to come down here and talk to us.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:42

I told her I was coming to do this, and she remembered being in Rotary with you, and I said I told her I was gonna put a bug in your ear about talking to her and so. Oh, I'd love to see her.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:50

She's been primed. Okay, all right. Well maybe we can get her up here to talk about some history. Kim, I just can't tell you how much I thank you for coming up. You you didn't know who I was, and you just came up and talked to us anyway, and and golly, what a nice show we put together, or you put together.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:10

I hope so.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:10

So thank you. I appreciate you coming.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:12

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:13

There's some new events coming up I want to talk to you about. We're gonna get into the uh B-24 plane crash here in a few weeks. My friends are coming up that we hiked into the mountains and found the plane crash site. So I think you're gonna enjoy that. Annette Bryant is coming up pretty soon to talk about photography. I thank her every time I can. She's the one that took my picture. That's when you go to the podcast site, whichever one you use, and you see a picture of this old guy there kind of in the shadow. That's me. And I only look that good because of Annette in real life. I I don't look that good. You can contact me. It's on the porch with Jim Williams. That's one word. On the porch with Jim Williams at gmail.com. If you got any ideas, I'd really love to hear some opinions on the our program today. Pros or cons, I can I can take it if if you want to criticize us, uh, you're certainly welcome to. Although I don't take criticism too well, so you'll be a whole lot better off if you send words of praise. Uh I ask you to uh continue to support us. I'm now over 600 followers, thanks to you, and I appreciate that. We'll see you next week on the board.