From my senior year in high school to each of my three years at Clemson University, I worked during the summers at the Slater Mill. Working in a textile mill was like no other job I had ever had.
For the first time, I found out what the people in the mill village where I had grown up actually did in the mill. I knew just about everyone I encountered, from the secretary who helped me fill out my payroll paperwork, to my new “boss man” in the finishing department.
Everywhere I went in the various departments of the massive mill there were people I had grown up with. They were customers in my father’s barber shop or my mother’s beauty shop, or they were the parents of my friends at school, or people I went to church with. In some cases, they were my aunts and uncles. There were quite a number of my buddies who were doing the same thing as me: making money for the next year of college.
The first thing you have to do when working in a mill is to learn the lingo. The restroom is the “water house.” Some people still called the canteen the “dope wagon”; an employee was a “hand” (formerly an “operative”); and a forklift was a “tow motor.” The term “profit sharing” applied to anything the mill provided that you took home, things like D batteries, No. 2 pencils, masking tape (known as “paper tape,”) and rolls of off-color cloth.
There were jokesters throughout the mill and any newbie could expect a visit. I had not been on the job long before “Old Man” Haney showed up. I knew him from the barber shop. He was a short, slightly hump-shouldered, wiry sort of fellow, who always reminded me of Earnest T. Bass from “The Andy Griffith Show.”
He handed me a carton of milk he had gotten from the “dope wagon.” He had poured out half of the milk and replaced it with ammonia from the dye house. He slyly inquired, “Hey Dennis. My smelling’s not too good, but this milk tastes sour. How about smelling it and see if it’s gone bad?”
I put it up to my nose and took a big sniff. I just about passed out. Of course, this sent Haney and the onlookers into a hilarious, knee slapping, laughing fit.
Eventually somebody would come up to you and frantically ask you to “Run over to the cloth room and get the cloth stretcher.” Of course, there is no such a thing, and everybody knows what to do. When you get to the cloth room, one of the ladies would tell you, “Oh, I think they have it over in the weave room,” and this goes on until you eventually figure out the ruse. It was all a rite of passage.
We made fiberglass curtains, and my first job was middle man on a coronizer — a giant machine that pretreated, dried and dyed the fiberglass cloth. I will never forget the advice that my boss gave me: “The main-est thing is, don’t get excited,” which is good advice on any job, anytime, anywhere.
Dennis Chastain is a Pickens County naturalist, historian and former tour guide. He has been writing feature articles for South Carolina Wildlife magazine and other outdoor publications since 1989.
