This is a living history interview with Terrell Sobey, Class of 1952, conducted by Marilyn Summers on April the 10th of the year 2002. 

We are at his office in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and the subject of our interview today is his life in general, his experiences at Georgia Tech. Mr. Sobey, thank you so much for letting us come visit you this afternoon. We're delighted to be here and looking forward to hearing your story. 

So, where did this all begin? 

Well, thank you for including me in this program. I appreciate this opportunity to do that. 

Where did you begin? 

Well, I came to being in Gainesville, Georgia, in the Downey Hospital there that's no longer in Gainesville, on April 1, 1931, right in the middle of the Depression. 

And what was your dad doing and your mom doing in Gainesville, Georgia? 

Why were they there? 

Did they live there for a long time? 

My father's mother and dad lived in Gainesville. 

My father's dad had been in the gold mining business, and he was in Alaska, and he heard about the gold rush in Dahlonega. 

So he came south to Dahlonega and met my grandmother. 

Her last name was Ann Miller, and she was an unusual lady in that she had a college degree even back in those days. Wow, very unusual. 

And they, of course, ended up there in Gainesville, I think over a period of time they were in Atlanta and different places, but they were in Gainesville when I was born. 

Could you make a living as a gold miner? 

Well, back then, apparently they'd hit gold, and I'm told that they had a beautiful home on Postaline Avenue at one point. 

So you could make a living? 

I think Granddaddy was sort of a speculator, you know, he'd be doing real well, and then and things would go bad, and they'd be, you know, not doing so well, and then back and forth all the time. He kept life interesting, huh? 

Up and down, up and down. 

What was your daddy doing? 

Well, my dad had gone to Oglethorpe and had some kind of a degree in accounting, and so he was a CPA. 

Well, he was the firecrack from his death then, wasn't he? 

He was stable. Right. 

But this was during the Depression, and Dad's last job as a CPA was going around auditing the banks that were closing, and when he finished with the last of his banks, and that was it for his CPA days. 

But he had worked some in a shoe repair shop in Gainesville when he was going to school, and he came to Hartwell and opened up a shoe repair shop. That's kind of interesting. Just a little nothing job ended up being the way he was going to survive. Right. 

So I guess we moved to Hartwell when I was probably three or four years old. Is that your earliest memory then, living in Hartwell? 

You don't remember Gainesville at all? 

No. And we moved from Gainesville to Kansas City, and he lived there for a while. 

I think he was with maybe a shoe machinery company that he was doing some selling for them because he had gotten to know that business working with them in Gainesville. 

But you didn't remember that? 

No, I don't remember that. The earliest remembrances I have was probably when we lived in Hartwell. I remember when my brother was born, he's two and a half years younger than I am. I can remember that. Yeah. 

He was born at my grandmother's house in Helen, Georgia, back when Helen was just a little mountain town. And he wasn't born in the hospital, he was born there. 

I remember being in the living room of grandmother's house knowing that the doctor and mother were in having the baby and finally the baby came and they let me go look at him. And they said he was up on a dresser, and I reached up to pull him down so I could see him. They didn't let me do that, of course, but I do remember that. You do. That's a great memory. Right. 

So how long did you settle into Hartwell? 

Hartwell. Hartwell. 

Well, we lived in Hartwell. Hartwell's up in the? 

It's near Anderson, South Carolina. 

Okay, it's up the northern part of the state, northeastern part of the state. Athens, and then Hartwell, and then you cross the river. 

But an interesting thing about living in Hartwell, when we first moved there, we lived in a house with another family. And that other family were the Bassingers. And this is Kim Bassinger's dad. Mr. and Miss Bassinger had two boys, Don and I forget the other one's name right now. 

But anyway, Don Bassinger married one of the girls in Hart County that was a great basketball player. And they had children, and Kim Basinger is one of the children. That's to be one of them. 

Now, I've never had a chance to meet Kim, but I've died to do so and let her know that I used to live with her grandparents. Yeah, you share her roots. 

So we lived in Hartwell and moved. We never did own a, my mother and dad never did own a house. They rented. It was tough in those days. Oh, absolutely. 

I remember there was a dentist in town and he was a good friend of the family and his office was right up the street from my dad's shop and every afternoon when he left his dental office he'd come by the shop and he and dad was a kid about who'd made the most money that day. Whether dad had made more money fixing shoes or he'd made more money fixing people's teeth. And neither one of them were getting rich. And neither one of them were getting rich. That's right. That's where you started school for the first time then. wasn't that well and how did you take to school well I enjoyed school dad always got along real well with all the teachers and you know they would visit with him on the way to school and today he he fixed issues and what have you and so it was a pleasant experience because we knew the teachers real well and they liked us and well they started out thinking that I would skip the first grade and so they had the first grade teacher kind of tutor me for the summer before school started and they finally concluded that I probably shouldn't skip the first grade and so I went ahead I'm glad I didn't because I would have been smaller than the rest of the group and that was a good thing right so you But you did well then in school, you liked school, you got to keep going. And how about sports, were you into sports? 

Yes, I played football in... When you got in the upper grades, you were... 

Well, I was a boy scout, so I went through all of the sports things with the scouts, the merit badges and swimming, and as I told you earlier, when we were talking, I was an Eagle Scout and I went ahead and got the bronze palm and the silver palm. Which is just an amazing accomplishment. Do you feel strongly about scouting that it was a good program? 

Oh, yeah. When I think back about it, I think probably that I've probably been as proud of... Scouting accomplishments as anything else in your life, yeah. Did your dad support scouting? 

Did he get involved with you? 

Yeah. It was a family activity then. What was it like growing up? 

He was kind of the assistant scoutmaster there. 

So he was around, taking the interest, keeping in mind what was going on. Hartwell is a small town. Yeah, about 2,000 people. That's a small town. 

What was it like growing up in a small town? 

Well, I tell you, I think it was great because everybody knew what everybody else was doing. 

So if you ever got... Which doesn't always sound great now. No, but I tell you, if you ever got in trouble, you're dead in your body. within a matter of about hours. Did it keep you straight that way? 

Well, yeah, it really did. And, you know, the policemen were good friends. 

And just to show you how it was, I had a lot of trouble with my tonsils when I was five, six years old, and I'd been resisting getting them taken out. 

And finally, my mother made me a deal that she would get me one of these little boats that you put in the bathtub and put a candle in it, and that makes the steam in the in the thing and it put puts around the the bathtub and so i agreed that if they would get one of these for me i'd let them take my tosses out so we go to the doctor's office they take them out at the office i'm about five years old we go in and uh i noticed that uh dr teasley harry teasley is a big georgia tech guy this is his dad he was a surgeon and And the surgeon, he was a doctor in Hartwell, and his dad, Harry's dad, was still a doctor. And so the two of them were in there. And I noticed this dentist was in there, my dad's friend. And I noticed that the chief of police was in there. Whoa. And mother and daddy. I wondered why all these people were there. 

And so they started, they got ready to do it, and I was going along with them until they came up, they were going to give me ether. And they put this thing over my face that looks like something you clean out a john with, you know. And boy, I had a fit. And it took them all just about to hold me down. Which is why they were all there. 

But when they got through and came out, while they had me out, the dentist had pulled a tooth that he'd been trying to get out for a long time. And so they thought that was a good time. And the chief of police was there just to make me behave, you know. I mean, he was a friend of the thing. That could only happen in a small town. Right. Only in a small town. What a great story. 

You must have had quite a little reputation going for yourself as being a rugged individualist who's going to do things your own way. 

So I think that, I really think my brother and I both have had a lot of success in life by having grown up in Hartwell where we were big shots, you know, in a little boom. And we got used to being big shots, and so we never got over it. 

You had, not only did you have somebody watching out for you all the time, but you had tons of love and support all the time. That was the other ingredient that comes from small towns. Today's neighborhoods people don't even know who lives next door to them. That's right. And that was impossible. You knew everybody, you knew everything that was going on. 

Did they have a junior school there, I mean did you go out of elementary into junior or just go all the way through elementary into high school or what was the school system in that? 

Well, there was an elementary school building and a high school building, but they were both on the same piece of property next door to each other. 

So you went... You weren't going too far. You went first seven, we just went 11 grades all together, so 8, 9, 10, 11. 

You went through the seventh grade in one building, and there there were about maybe 25 kids in our class and then we went to the high school and for two years the same small group was in the eighth and ninth grade but then in the tenth grade there was a there were schools out in the county and we had a consolidated high school and so they got fed in so in the tenth grade then our class got bigger and we had probably in my graduating class we there were about 80 people yeah but you had an opportunity to play sports once you got into the upper levels and you're pretty good at that well i was captain of the football team or co -captain there were two of us and i was a co-captain i bet you were a great athlete in your mind's eye weren't you right i mean captain that's really good um I think I wasn't the biggest or the strongest, but I think the coach thought I might be the smartest one, I think. Yeah, he was a good strategist. 

My brother says the reason he made me captain was because I hit that blocking machine harder than anybody else did. 

Well, you're a pretty good-sized fellow. I can see you doing that. 

When you were growing up, when you think back at the time of you growing up, did you feel that you were being influenced to always think about going on to college, or was that something that never occurred to you? 

Oh, no, there was never an end up in my mind that I was going to go to college. You knew that. Right. And I also, and I didn't know how I was going, I mean, but that didn't ever bother me. 

But you had the idea that you were going on to some other achievement academically. 

So you got good grades, and you were determined you were going to go to college. 

How were you going to make that happen? 

Well, first of all, let me talk a little bit about the grades. I did have great grades, and I never took a book home the whole time I was in high school. 

Well, it just wasn't that hard. I mean, Hartwell had never had anybody go to Georgia Tech before. 

Most of our people that went to college, and maybe only 20% of the high school class would go, would go to the University of Georgia and study elementary education, or go to maybe North Georgia and study business administration. 

And while I was in high school, they cracked down on the teachers and they started making them have more credentials, you know, to teach. 

So you were going to be a better quality teacher. 

Well, that's what they thought. 

But some of our elementary school teachers were some of, I think, some of the best ones that ever were. 

But anyway, these teachers, and at this point now, my mother was also teaching school. but they had to get degrees and they had to get certificates and all like that and and some of them had real problems with algebra and things like that and the county school superintendent would let them take some of these courses by correspondence and then he'd let them take the test home to do so I got several of my high school my grammar school teachers while I was in high school I could help them get there and that's so funny because I just aced the Georgia algebra courses and then when I went to Tech where I made a D in algebra first oh I tell you that was that was a real well this is a interesting Interesting story, too. 

When I was in high school, I had a paper out in the morning, I worked at the drugstore in the afternoon, and I played football. And that didn't leave me any time for studying or anything else. 

And every once in a while, the teachers would, somebody would be cutting up in class and they'd make the whole class write, I must not talk in Ms. Garrod's class, you know, and they'd have to write it 500 times. 

And The teachers had changed the language around a little bit, but I had a friend, a guy at Tech, and after school, we were both on the school paper staff, so we had reasons to be there many hours of the day and night. 

We'd always go around the trash cans after school and just take a quick run through, and if there were a bunch of these things in the trash can, we'd get them and we'd put them in a locker, and then when we got called upon to turn in our must-not-talk-in -somebody's class. We'd just go through and find one that had 500 and turn it in. 

Well, one day I was going through one of the teacher's rooms, and there was a big package in there that never had been opened. 

It was in brown paper, and I picked it up, and it was really about that big, and it was from the Navy Department. 

So I opened it up, and it was all about applying for a Naval scholarship. They had thrown it away without even looking at it. And so I opened it, I read all the stuff in it, and I applied for it. And the first thing we had to do was take a written test. 

So I went to Atlanta, and I think that test lasted about two days. It was a long one. Wow. 

And I more or less forgot about, you know, I didn't have any idea that I might have passed it, but, you know, I thought, I enjoyed getting to go to Atlanta, so I... Your parents were probably excited that you were taking... 

Well, my dad had passed away at this time, so... Oh, yeah, that's a hardship thing for you, then. 

Well, you know, like I told you, my brother and I... 

You knew your mom wasn't going to be able to pay for you to go to school, so you were looking for a way. Yeah, I could have co -opted with, and which my brother did for a while. 

But anyway, I took the test, and several weeks or maybe a month or so later, I was over at my girlfriend's house one afternoon, and Mother called, and I'd gotten this notice in the mail, and she says, You've passed that test. Then now I've got to go down and get a physical. 

Well, I had various problems with that. 

Our dentist, the fellow I was talking about a while ago, he'd had a ******, and we hadn't had a dentist in Hartwell for several years, and I had cavities all over everywhere. And I also had flat feet. Those two things that was wrong. 

I'd also gotten these front teeth knocked out playing football in high school, and they had been replaced with a bridge. 

So I let it be known in town that I had this problem about getting ready for this physical. 

And somebody told me about a dentist over in Royston, Georgia, which was just 12 miles down the road that had been a naval dentist. and that he was a big boy scout to support her. 

So he would know the right things to do. 

So some friend called him, and he said, we'll send him over. 

So I went over, and he looked at my paperwork that I had to pass. He called his girl in and told her to counsel all the rest of his apartment set that in. Oh, my word. Isn't that amazing? 

Only in a small town. Right. Only in a small town. 

So it was a community effort to get you ready. He drilled on me all morning. he called his wife up and said he's bringing somebody home for lunch. We went to his house, had lunch, came back. He drilled on me all afternoon. 

At one point, you know, these things they put in your teeth and tighten them up, he had four of them coming out of him. Went home again with him that night for, had dinner with him, came back to the office. He worked on me about 10 o 'clock that night. You had that many cavities? 

Oh my God. 

So then a day or two later, I went to Atlanta and I was going through the physical part and I was in a long line to look where they were looking at feet and then all. And I looked at my feet and there was just solid black. And I looked at these other guys and you know theirs were black except where the arch was. 

So I spit in my hand and I wiped me out an arch. You created your own arches. 

So I got up to the guy, the doctor that was checking the feet and of course I was standing up on the side of my feet and he looked at me and he said relax your feet and I said well I am relaxed he said no you're not I said well that's the way I stand all the time let me see the bottom of your feet so he looked at the bottom of my feet and it was great so he let me go so then I go up to this chief petty officer that's looking at the teeth and he's checking my teeth all around and and he tells me to bite down so I bite and he says well I'm sorry but he says you're going to fail because the book says you've got to have four bicuspids and functional occlusion. I didn't know what bicuspids were and functional occlusion. 

But he explained to me that if you were in an airplane and you had to bite down on an oxygen thing and you didn't have a good bite, that that was reason to fail you. And I said, well, look, these are false teeth right here. If there's something wrong with them, you know, it was a permanent bridge, but I can get it. He says, those are not real. 

Now, this is a chief petty officer, not a full dentist. 

And I said, well, that flunks you out right there because he says you've got to have four bicuspids in functional occlusion. 

So I have to go get interviewed by an officer. Sorry you failed and thanks for trying and all this, that and the other. 

So I stopped back at this dentist's office. 

I was at a dentist's home on my way back from Atlanta because you go through Royston before you get to Harlem and I told him about it he said be over here they look like in the morning we're going to Atlanta and we went there and he got a full cap a full striper and they went they got in there and they started looking at my teeth and he says you I think you've got eight bicuspids you don't just have these or something like that So I had plenty of bicuspids, and they were in functional occlusion enough, so I got in, and that's the way I went today. 

So you owe your military career to a dentist in Royston, huh? 

That's a wonderful story. 

A wonderful story of reaching out, isn't that correct? 

Well, and I don't think he would have done this for me had I not been an Eagle Scout. 

So he was putting himself out because of that. That's a wonderful story. that's there's different ways to skin a cat you cannot you didn't take no for an answer you found a way to go around it that's a wonderful story the Navy paid my way through school they bought my books they paid mother furnished me uniforms they even gave me fifty dollars a month to live on which was did they choose Georgia Tech or did you no that's interesting too after I passed all this stuff then I had to select the school I wanted to go to and you had to pick three and so you if you did if they didn't get you in one they got two other to pick from so I picked Tech Duke and Yale and how our kid oh George you need to pick those shoes I think well I think it was because I like their football teams quite frankly yeah and and oh yeah on Saturday afternoon when I worked in this drugstore we had a radio in there and that's all we did was listen to football games on Saturday afternoon on the radio and so you already had some partiality towards her right and I knew I wanted to go somewhere where when I got through with it it was gonna be worth something and I knew that that would be the case with those three schools well I kind of thought it all wanted to be a civil engineer and I never heard of MIT I don't even think it existed. Sure didn't in your book, as good as for us. No, they didn't have a football team, so I didn't know they were up there. 

So what happened is, is the Navy just happened to let you go to Georgia Tech. They picked Georgia Tech. 

Well, somebody did. That was my first choice. 

So you went home and you waited to see where you were going to be going to school, and they sent it to you by mail. Right. And then you found out you were going be a Yellow Jacket. And in the process you had to enlist in the Navy, be accepted in the Navy. 

What was your commitment for them in exchange? 

Well, at the time that I got into the program, you only had to agree to serve either 18 months or two years, but then the Korean War came along and they extended it to three. 

But even at that, three years was in exchange for four years of college. 

Yeah, but in addition to that, the commissions that we got in the program I was in were a regular officer. You weren't in the reserve officer. We had exactly the same credentials that the midshipmen from Annapolis had. And every summer, we'd go on cruises that the Annapolis people would go on. 

So this was really a good deal. Yeah. 

Now, at Tech back then, and maybe even today, they still have NROTC, but there are two classes. there's a contract group and a regular group the contract group they don't get all this money they don't get paid they don't I don't think they pay their tuition and they might furnish their uniforms but there's just a small group that are the regular students John Young the astronaut he was in my class he was usually our company commander because he was quite a leader even back in those So all of a sudden, here you are from this little town up in North Georgia, and you're going to the big city to go to school. Right. 

So you get bundled off amid a lot of excitement, I'm sure. You're going to be the first one from Hartwell to go to Georgia Tech. As far as I know. As far as you knew. Right. 

And I don't see how, oh, to get into Tech, after I got accepted, then we started looking at what the requirements were you know what classes you had to have and it didn't happen so i went to my principal along with my football coach and said look we got to do something about this so i taught myself a physics course and naturally i made a hundred in it and another chemistry course which i had to have so this high school gave me credit for the courses that i needed just so that you could make just search so I could get in then what happened is as you went down to Atlanta and you started school and I have a feeling reality hit you right between the eyes it did I was in in the Harris dorm and on my wing there were probably about 12 of us and there were guys there from all over the country and all of them had a better high school education that I did. 

How long did it take you to figure that out? 

It didn't take long just in talking with them, but that didn't bother me at all. I didn't worry about that too much. 

But anyway, we started classes, courses, and like I said, I made a D in algebra. And in chemistry, I was in a class with twenty-one students. 

Our professor was a German who had lost a leg in World War I or II, I forget which, and you could hear him coming down the hall, you know, and to make a long story short, he flunked nineteen out of the twenty -one and the two that passed, one of them got a D and one of them got a C. 

So I had flunked the chemistry and made a D in algebra and didn't do too well in anything else. I think I had a 1.1 or something that first one. Oh my God, you must have been just sick about it. 

So then I really started having to really burn the midnight oil and study. 

It was a shocking experience for you then, right? 

Because you'd already been a big fish in your little house. Yeah, never had to do anything, never had to study anything else. You had to teach yourself how to study then, probably. Oh yeah, I did. You were in a dormitory too with lots of other guys. 

Did you find that that was the general rule, everybody was buckling down? 

Oh, let me tell you, you could, back then, when there were a lot of veterans there, you could go through the Tech campus any time of the day or the night, weekends as well as weekdays, and most all the dormitory lights would be on. They'd be somebody in their studio. 

So the second semester... I'm surprised they let you stay a second semester. 

Well, I was worried about my Navy thing, too. 

But anyway, I stayed the next quarter. It was a quarter system then. And, no, I had to take out, wait a minute. I didn't flunk algebra. I made a D in algebra. And I flunked chemistry. 

So second quarter, I took trigonometry. And I was doing pretty good. I learned how to study a little bit. I had probably about a C average going into the final. 

And when we got ready to take the final exam, I couldn't find my little table book, you know, the book with all the cosine tables and all like that in it. 

But my roommate was taking the same course, and he had a book, so he let me borrow his. 

Well, we go in, and the teacher's got us, you know, every other seat or every third seat. And the test is a pretty long test, maybe two or three hours. 

And toward the end of the time, he goes, his teacher starts around the room, and he starts picking up everybody's table book and flipping through it and when he comes to mine he flips through it and my roommate's professor had told his students that they didn't need to memorize all these formulas they let them write them in the back of the book and so they were in the back of the book he told me he says you come see me after class so he he thought i was cheating and he I went in with him and he said he was going to have me expelled and I told him about my Navy scholarship and you know I really pleaded with him and so finally he says well he said I'll just give you an F unless you take it again so now I failed chemistry and trigonometry and I'm going into you know And I think the Navy was patient for the first year, but you had to get through the first year. 

So from that point on, I didn't fail anymore. And I forget what my grade point average was at the end of the freshman year, but it was not good. Maybe 1.7 or 1.8. 

Did you feel like anybody cared? 

Anybody mentored you? 

Or did you feel like, wow, this is the real world and I'm on my own? 

I didn't feel like anybody cared. You know, I hate to say this because there's so many people that love people like Dean Griffin. I never saw Dean Griffin the whole time when I was at Georgia State. Supposedly I had some faculty advisor, but I never did. You never really did either. 

But it was my fault. 

I mean, I could have if I wanted to, but I just wasn't used to depending on that kind of help to get me through. 

So you really just had to buckle down and learn it. You had to learn it. 

Well, I think my saving grace was in my sophomore year having to live with my aunt off campus. Oh, yeah. 

Now, let's talk about that first, before we go into your sophomore year. You were at a time at Tech when it was very congested. It was 1948 when you came, so a lot of GI Bill people, a lot of veterans and stuff. 

And so you said after the first year, you didn't get priority for housing, which is what? 

You've got to go find your own place to live. Yep. 

What the deal was at that time was that the incoming freshmen, they got housing, but they got housing in the oldest, worst, dumbest, or so world. 

Harris and Brown, and they've been redone now, and they're very nice, and they weren't bad then, but they were old. And then the seniors got the next preference, and then the juniors. 

And if there was anything left, the sophomores got them, but there wasn't anything left when I was there. 

So everybody had to find their own place to live. And I had an aunt that lived there and worked for the highway department, and... 

You were lucky that you lived there then, huh? 

And you said it was your saving grace because? 

Well, you know, she had a place out in the Emory section and I would ride the trolley, the tractor's trolley in to school and then I'd be there all day and have no place to hang out except, you know, a park bench or maybe the library. and then when I got back to the place that she and I lived I didn't have anything to do but study and I needed to study so I did and then that got me back on the track and and finally when I got to be I have one report card that I'm real proud of because I was so far behind with losing that many hours I had to make that whole thing up so I was taking 21 22 hours from that point on And I had one report card where I had about seven A's and one B. And the B was in safety engineering which was the easiest thing I was taking. And it was in the industrial engineering department. 

I took my report card to that professor, I forget his name, and I showed it to him and I said, look what you did to me. He said, if I'd known you were making all those A's, I'd have given you an A's. 

But I finally graduated I think with a two Isn't that something, even with getting all A's, it took that long for you to work it out of the hole in the ground that you were in. Yeah. It's amazing that you had enough stick -to-itiveness to stay. You didn't get discouraged? 

Did you ever think about just going out the door? 

No. 

No? 

You just knew you were going to do it? 

I hate to even ask you this, but did you have any social life at all? 

Well, not much, but not much as a freshman and a sophomore. 

The first two years were just brutal, all you did was study. 

The Y had things all the time back then, dances on the weekend and stuff like that, and the girls had come down from Henry Grady and I didn't have a bad time. 

So you did go to some of them? 

Right. You allowed yourself little breaks? 

Yeah. Movies? 

Very, very seldom. That would have cost money. 

So you weren't, even though you were getting a stipend from the Navy, you were still on taxes? 

See, out of my $50 a month, I had to pay for my room and board and then food. Oh, very little to spend then. 

So yeah, if it wasn't free, you weren't there. My birthday's April 1st, and we'd get our checks around the first of the month. 

And I remember one year that I didn't get my check on April 1st, and I didn't eat all day on my birthday. Oh, that is so sad. I like to tell that one. Yeah, that's what you call being down as low as you can go, huh, as long as you can go. 

But you didn't get discouraged. You hung in there with it. No, I didn't. That's really pretty amazing. By your junior year, you were a gnarly veteran yourself. You knew you could do it. You were working your grades back up. Things lightened up a little bit for you. 

But you were also getting into your major. Right. And then I got a part -time job at a dry cleaning plant there in Atlanta. My dad later opened up a dry cleaning plant along with his shoe repair business. 

So you had some experience. 

So I had some experience at that. And I later joined a fraternity. Oh, you did? 

Yeah. Beta Theta Pi. And so I got to know some guys there. 

And one of the fellows there, his uncle, had Colonial laundry and dry cleaning out the Buckhead crowd. 

So that gave you an outlet for a little more income then? 

Yeah. You also, by this time, had made up your mind you weren't going to be a civil engineer. Yeah. 

I had another interesting thing in that an uncle of mine, the brother of this aunt that I lived with, he had been with the Georgia Highway Department for many years and he had been put in charge of building the expressway through Atlanta, the one that goes right by Tech. And so I used to go out when I'd have some time as a freshman before I changed majors. 

His little shack was nearby the Tech campus and I could get it, walk over or get a ride over and sort of spend some time with him and see what all was going on out there. And that just didn't look like what I wanted to do. And my uncle, his name was Pearson White, he was very pessimistic that they would ever get that done. 

He didn't believe that that thing would ever get completed because at that time, he was in charge of it. He was the engineer in charge of it. And he would say he did that. 

Well, at that time, they still hadn't decided whether they were going to go through Atlanta, go under Atlanta or around Atlanta. Oh, really? 

And they finally decided to go around. 

But after another year or so, they took him off the job. 

And he ended up his career with Highway Department down in South Georgia someplace and they brought somebody else in. 

But the fact that he, that wasn't influenced on you then because you were seeing that maybe that wasn't what you wanted to do. Right. That was a super opportunity for you then to take a look. 

So how did you pick IE? 

Well I didn't know exactly which kind of engineering I wanted. I knew I didn't want an I. M. degree. 

Not having spent the time to go to Tech, I wanted an engineering degree and I felt like industrial engineering was a good alternative so once you got into those classes out of the cores and into your major classes did it feel good you were comfortable then yeah yeah but we still had to take courses in all these other departments as a matter of fact that they yeah they that we had to take in my opinion in some cases like in electrical engineering and it and some of the The others, they'd boil down what they taught their students in a whole year into one quarter and expect us to pass it. It was a condensed... But, you know, back then, we had to build an electric motor from scratch. We had to make a wooden pattern to mold the end bells in the foundry. Then we had to go to the machine shop and turn the shaft and turn the end bells. and then we had to wind the rotor. They were still doing that in the 50s. And, you know, you didn't pass that course unless your motor ran. 

So that was a lesson you had to learn. Yeah. 

Do you regret that, or do you think that was a good experience? 

No, I think they miss something now when they don't get to do that. That was a good experience for you. 

So you were pretty comfortable with the IE classes, didn't you? 

Yeah. By the time you were a junior, you knew you were going to make it. Things were going well. Yeah. 

Going back a minute to the differences between high school and college and the activities that you had in both places, when I was in a senior in high school, I was on practically every page of our end, you know. You were it. You were the man. I was it. 

And at Tech, when I looked through my freshman yearbook, and my picture's not even in there, you know. It's like you were not in it. 

Whereas some of the folks like Julian LeCraw and others who had come out of big schools in Atlanta, they were all the campus leaders. 

And on my floor of the dorm there was a good friend that still is a friend, his name was Jimmy Perkins and he came from St. Petersburg, Virginia and had gone through some really great prep school there. He was also in the Navy program. Oh, he aced that freshman year. I mean, he didn't have a lick at a snake and was making A's in a lot of these subjects. 

But you know it took him five years to get through. Because reality is that it. Yeah, he didn't. He got caught before he realized he needed to start really putting his shoulder to the wheel. Yeah, that's unfortunately what happened to so many of them. And some of them didn't put their shoulder to the wheel. They couldn't do it, and not they would. 

But, you know, we were talking about the labs and the shops and things that we had to do back then, and we also had the mechanical drawing classes, which I thought were great disciplinary classes. And also if... That's because you had some talent for it. There were people in jail. 

But I really did. I loved those mechanical, and now they don't even take that. it. 

But the thing that really was a bone crusher for a lot of them was the physical, the PT courses we had to take. As a freshman we had to take track and swimming and gym. 

To make a good grade in those, I mean you had to run the 440, you had to do the hurdles, you had to do the low hurdles and the high hurdles, and you had to do these things in a decent time or you wouldn't get a very good grade. Plaxico was the coach and I think he was still there up until fairly recently. 

And you know, you'd get up in the morning and you'd be out there running that track around the football field. 

But that wasn't the course that really tore everybody up. I probably made a, I might have made an A, but I didn't make it any worse than a B in track. 

But the one that really was a killer was the swimming course. 

And You've heard this, I'm sure, but they call it a survival course or a drowning course or something like that. 

But that happened to be one thing I was good at. 

And so I ended up making a double-A, and it was a one-hour course, but by getting a double-A, you got five credit points for it, which didn't hurt my credit point average. They wouldn't let you take it more than once, though. No, they wouldn't let you take it more than once. Was Freddie Lanus still around at that time? 

Oh, yeah, that was in his prime. 

And in order to get a AA, you had to do all these crazy things, but one of the things you had to do was, the pool had the little ceramic tile squares on the bottom of the pool, and they would write a word down there, you know, one letter on each square. And if you could go down and read that word, then you got credit for that part of the course. 

But the only way you could read it was to go down, hold your breath, blow a bubble, and catch the bubble over your eye so that it would act as a sort of a lens, and then you could read it. But, you know, you had to hold your breath. You had to get down there. You had to be able to stay down there long enough to catch your bubble and read it. 

So that was one thing that very few people could do. 

And then another thing that you would do would be to throw a foot flipper into the deepest part of the pool, which was about 10 feet deep, and tie your hands behind you. and you had to go down and get that flipper with your teeth and come back up with it. 

You didn't have to do this to pass the course, but to get all the credit you could get, and of course you had to get out there and bob in the water for hours and hours and all kinds of things that were really easy, but these other things would get pretty tough. 

And then in gym, we had to do the parallel bars, and we had to climb ropes to the ceiling, And we had to do everything you see, you know, the gymnastic people do. In the Olympics, for goodness sake. And then in the sophomore year, we had to take wrestling. And I mean, we had to wrestle. And if you wanted to make a good grade in that course, you had to hold your own. And then we took wrestling. And I remember handball, not racquetball, but handball outside against the concrete walls. out there on the tennis court, and then I forget what the other thing we took was, but there was one other sport. 

But anyway, they don't have to take any of those things now. 

If you just did what was required, you could get a C and pass it. To get extras, you had to do all these little finessey things. 

Right, and you know, back then you had to pass that swimming course to get out of tech, unless you had some kind of doctor's certificate. it. We had seniors still trying to pass that. You either loved Freddie Lindy or you hated Freddie Lindy. Right. There was no in between. You know, he was there, but I never paid that much attention to him as an individual. 

I mean, they would tell us what we had to do, and then I'd get in there and do it, or do it as best I could, and then if I didn't do it well the first time, I could keep doing it until I got it right. 

Well, that was one good thing about it. 

But you could try it, you had to try it until you got it done, right? 

No, before they tore that building down, I'm a big football fan. 

I go to all the games at Tech, and I went through the old building just a couple years ago before they tore it down. That swimming pool was still down there. Oh, yeah. And I'm surprised they'd let people get in there because it was pretty scary looking in there. 

But that pool was still there with all of its tile and everything. And you've got a lot of memories of that time. Yeah. A lot of memories. football games. Did you find time to do that? 

Oh yeah. Matter of fact, that's one way that I made a little extra money. I was, I sold tickets, you know, in one of the booths. 

I don't think they do that anymore, but back then there are cages all the way around that, well there are cages, at least three ticket cages around the football field and I worked for the athletic department sold tickets we'd go to the to the athletic down there and that building at the end of the field you know before the game and we'd get tickets they'd count out tickets to us and then we'd go sell them and then we had to stay in our booths for maybe 10 minutes after the game started and then we'd take our money and we'd go up to the press box with our money and the rest of the tickets. And then you were in. You could stay in. Yeah, stay in for the press box. 

And then after the game was over, we'd go back to the AA department and they'd count our money and count our tickets, and we had to balance out. 

Now, were you selling to the public? 

Yeah. 

So you were a ticket seller. Right. And then for this, you received some measly amount of money, I'm sure. 

Yeah, but what would happen to a lot of people, if it was raining or something like that, they'd just come and give me tickets you know to give to somebody well I'd be those are the ones I'd sell so it could turn into a lucrative little there would be weekends sometimes sadness would not come out pretty well now we were as far as the football team was concerned and our heyday those were the golden days about oh so football was big business we were people coming we were without we We were national champions in 1952. And so that meant that the whole city, the whole community was coming to the game. Oh yeah. And this was before the Falcons or any of that was in Atlanta. 

So Tech was the thing that people that were interested in sports, that was it. You could have a hot little industry going there, selling football tickets. 

And that was the beginning of your never missing games, always being there whenever you could be there. 

Well, you know, I've always enjoyed football. Living in Hartwell, we used to go to Athens a lot to watch them play over there. We could slip in over there. You could go under the fence so you could slip in with the football players. You could do all kinds of things, but in Atlanta you couldn't work that good. Did you ever go see any other sports or was it just football? 

It was just football. 

How were we doing for basketball at that time or baseball? 

Well, no, let me tell you that in basketball, it was in the Naval Army, that little basketball court in there, and you could just walk in any time. If they were playing, you could walk in, and there wouldn't be anybody there. There wouldn't be 10, 15 students in there watching. And until Bobby Crumlin's game, I guess it stayed that way. 

But as a result, going back to high school a minute, and this consolidated high school thing I was talking about? 

Well these county schools, none of them had football fields, but they all had an auditorium of some sort. 

So the kids in the county would get to play a lot of basketball, both the girls and the boys. 

So when they'd come into high school, you know, they were good basketball players. 

Whereas us city kids, we had a nice basketball court there too, but we didn't have teams that played until you really got high school. so we very few of the Hartwell City boys got to play basketball because the county guys were so much better. You yourself never considered going out for sports at Tech? 

No. First of all they probably would have killed you right? 

That's right. 

I did go down to I got invited to go down to the Citadel to try out for football one of two of us went down. Early in the Well, when we were still seniors in high school, but neither one of us got an offer. 

As the years went by and you were coming on to 1952, you knew you were going to graduate, you also knew you would be going in the Navy. Right. There was never any question that's what your commitment was. Right. 

So you didn't have to worry about interviewing or doing anything like that, you had to worry about whether there was going to be a war that was going to take you away or what was going to happen. 

So you graduated with a commission. Right. Got married. My wife graduated from the University of Georgia on one day. We got married that day, went down to St. Siemens for a long weekend, came back, and I graduated at the Fox Theater. And then we took off for Bayonne, New Jersey, where I had to go to supply for school. Because you already had your assignment where you were going. 

Now you didn't mention where you met your wife, so where was she from? 

Where had you met her? 

Well, she was from Elberton, Georgia, which is close to Hartwell, and she was at the University of Georgia. 

But did you meet her when you were still in Hartwell? 

No, I didn't meet her until I was about a junior in college. 

And how did that come about? 

You were both in the same part of the country, but you met later in the game? 

Well, that's a story, too. I think you better tell me. 

My high school sweetheart was a girl, her name was Charlotte Haley, and she had a brother named Chenault Haley. 

And they both started off in the same class with us, but Chenault was about a year younger and his mother decided to hold him back. Chenault has since become one of the most famous dermatologists in Atlanta. If you've ever talked to anybody about dermatologists, Chenault is, he's older now, but he was it. Have you ever heard of him? 

Well, most people have. 

Well anyway, Charlotte went to the university, she met a guy over there, she was hot to get married and I couldn't get married. I was in the Navy, you couldn't get married. 

And so she ended up getting married and Chenault felt sorry for me and so my wife had a twin sister and he was dating the twin sister so he ended up... He fixed you up? 

He fixed me up. 

Well that was really cool. 

So you started dating her, her name is Patricia. Her name is Ann. Ann. 

Okay, Ann. 

So you started dating Ann, junior year at Georgia Tech. Right. You had real potential then, you were going to be somebody, and she was going to Georgia. Right. 

So you had a long distance courtship, because that is 50, 60 miles of heart there, so. Right. 

But there was a fellow at Tech that had a car, and he was dating a girl in the same sorority, and so we'd go over there, fairly elfin'. You may do, huh? 

Right. 

So all of your celebratory things happened in one weekend. 

That's just astounding that you could have graduations and weddings and the whole thing, and off you went to New Jersey. Right. 

And what happened up there? 

How long did you stay there? 

Well, this aunt that I lived with, we didn't have a car or anything so she took my wife and I to New Jersey and she took my brother and Chenault. We all went. I don't know how we got in her car because it was a Chevrolet. It was a two-door Chevrolet that was not even a full two-door. 

They don't make them like that anymore but anyway we all went up there and my aunt and my brother and Chenault went on to New York and had a vacation. 

But they let us off in New Jersey, in Bayonne, New Jersey. 

Now that's the end of the world, I'm going to tell you. 

So we rented a little apartment in a little building that had, that you could, the people that lived there could, very few of them spoke English. It was a room. 

So the supply car thing, school lasted about six months. 

So you were going to school every day? 

Yeah. And what did him do? 

Just goofed off. Waited for you. That's right. Waited for you. 

What was your next assignment then? 

Then I went to Newport, Rhode Island and was assigned to destroy a tender there as a dispersing officer. And so you moved there for a little bit of time? 

Yeah. We lived in Newport. That's pretty nice. Yeah. 

For the rest of the time I was in the Navy, but I was on several different assignments while I was there. 

But that was home base for you then? 

Right, but we spent a lot of time at sea, too. My ship became the supply ship for the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean at one point. 

At that time, I had been promoted up to supply officer, so that was my job to supply, you know, be the supply officer for the destroyers in the 6th Fleet. 

And then I became a supply officer on a destroyer, and I finished my maybe career as a supply officer on a destroyer. 

So they got a commitment of four years, three years, three, four years out of you at that time. 

So that would have been 1955 that you were done. 

So I came back to Hartwell and... You did, you went that time. 

Well, because my dad had started this dry cleaning business that I was telling about before he died and I thought if I could get a job in the area there, you know, with a company where I'd have more income, then maybe I could sort of moonlight and build this dry cleaning business up to a better, bigger, more important business, and I was fortunate enough to get a job with Orange Corning Fiberglass, which has a big plant in Anderson, South Carolina, which is just 20 miles from Hartwell, but at the time I got that job, there was an economic slump, kind of like right now, or like it was a few months ago, and they weren't hiring anybody in Anderson, but the personnel man there, he was impressed enough with my credentials to do what he could to get me a job somewhere in the company, and so he got, they needed someone to do, to do a cost control type work in Toledo, Ohio in the corporate office. 

So in Anderson they told me, look, you go ahead and take this, we'll get your training done here in Anderson, and by the time your training period is over, this economic slump will be over and we can just keep you here. 

Well, that sounded like a good plan, so we did that, and I had to write a report every week on what I was doing to send to this fellow in Toledo that was the corporate cost control manager, Harvard Business School guy. 

Well, he was sufficiently impressed with the reports that I was writing where he got more and more convinced he wasn't going to let me stay in Anderson. He wanted me to come to Toledo. 

So my wife and I had to decide, do we stay in Hartwell and try to make something out of this dry cleaning plan, or do we go to Toledo, and we went to Toledo. And from there, this was kind of an interesting thing, in my opinion. Here I am in Toledo now. I'm working for this guy that's a Harvard Business School graduate. He's got two other guys that work for him. One's a Harvard Business School graduate. 

The other is a Wharton Business School manager. And I'm a Georgia Tech guy. 

Well, I get given the most menial tasks to do, which was calculating standard cost for the Textile Products Division, and every time they'd come up with a new product or some variation of an existing product, we'd have to cost it out, and cost it out to four decimal places, you know, and a bunch of things. 

We had these old Frieden calculators, which was probably before your time, but you'd put numbers in this calculator. 

If you wanted to divide something you'd put one number in and then you'd put the other number in and you'd hit the go button and this old calculator would go rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr, rawr, and then it'd finally stop and you'd read it and the answer would be.00257642321, but you just needed the four decimals. 

So I did this for about a month and there was a fellow sitting behind me. 

He was much older than I was and he had a master's degree in something and he was doing the same thing I was doing except for the general products division which makes insulation and the acoustical tile and that kind of thing. He'd been doing this for years. 

Well I finally, you know, I can do this a lot faster with a slide rule than I can with this. 

So I come to work one day with a slide rule. 

Well it's like to blow their mind. These are the accountants now here, you know, and here I am, I'm sliding these things out. And a couple of times, you know, they wanted to check what I had done, and they checked it. 

They didn't believe it could be right, huh? 

So then I realized that, you know, this is ridiculous because, you know, the answers keep coming out so close to the same. 

So one weekend I took my slide rule home and I sat my wife down on the sofa and I made up a table and I'd sit there and I'd slide the rule until it changed, you know, another digit in the fourth place and we'd say okay so so anything from here to here the answer is this and in no time at all it wasn't it wasn't taking me an hour a day to do these standard costs which had been taking a full -time job so then my boss uh the harvard business school guy he starts uh giving me some more interesting assignments to do and these other two guys was a Swarthmore guy. Did I say what in there? 

It was Swarthmore and the Harvard Business School guy. They couldn't understand why I was getting all these good assignments. And we used to play bridge with one of those two couples. And they used to say, well boy you sure do know how to ride a good horse. 

But what I would do when they'd give me something to do you know instead of just doing it i would make a big deal out of it you know if they wanted me to make some charts when i'd make charts elaborate elaborate sorry if they wanted me to write a report i'd write an elaborate report unfortunately i could type and we only had one secretary in the department so you could do your own typing so i could do my own typing and get my work in ahead of these other people and that's one of the best courses i took in high school was Isn't that interesting? 

It really served you well. And so it wasn't long before I got promoted. 

They kept wanting to get me back in Anderson and my boss there would have met me but he wanted me to get some experience in the plants so I got moved to Ashton, Rhode Island to be the cost control manager at that big plant and I was there about a year or so and then they moved me to New York to be the cost control manager of the whole textile products division. 

I'd been there for about a year or two, and then they wanted me to move back to Toledo to do some other bigger job, and my wife said I've had it. How many tires? 

She wanted to put some roots down. 

So I saw an ad in the New York Times that said cost account South $10,000 a year. I I was making less than that in New York. And so I applied and it turned out to be a textile company. 

Well I thought, Owens Corning was kind of textile related, but it wasn't a typical old textile company. 

And it, you know when I graduated from tech, regular engineers, a good engineer was making $400 a month. 

A textile engineer was making $225 a month, but it turned out to be Milliken and I came down and interviewed with them and the fellow that hired me at first he didn't think I had the age or the qualifications to do what they were looking for because they were putting in what they called an engineered cost system throughout Millikan Plants. 

This fellow had been a consultant with Stevenson, Jordan, Harrison who had developed an engineered type cost system but we'd had fiberglass we had the same system in fiberglass and I understood it quite well and so he let me you know come into the department and then and I was surprised I got a bonus on top of the $10,000 I got a thousand dollar bonus at the end of that year and you moved to this area right and we've lived here ever since. You put down your roots. Since then I've had a number of jobs but I always keep an office here. You keep this as home base so that Ann doesn't have to be pulling up stakes and going all over again. Right. 

So you were settled into Spartanburg and you went to work at Smilkin. How many years did you stay with them? 

I was there 18 years. and uh during that time you went from one department to another well when i was i started with this uh internal consulting company that they had putting in this cost system and then mr millican decided that uh he'd like to try to get the new york operation more integrated with the mills so that we could get new york to making forecasts and the mills could massage that and make profit forecasts and whatnot and my boss at which at that time it realized that that I had some real potential and so I was selected to do that job and I spent the next year I they wanted me to move to New York and I told my wife so they agreed to rent me an apartment up there and let me come to home on the weekends which I did for about a year and we got started gradually getting them into what computers were back in those days, which was pretty little or nothing. And that all worked out very well, and then Mr. 

Milliken hired one of the partners from Arthur Anderson to come in and be the chief financial officer, which the company had never had before, and I was given to him to work for this guy because I knew the ropes. And then Mr. Millican hired an older fellow to be in charge of long-range planning for the company. And this fellow had a heart attack and died after not having been there very long. And then Mr. Millican asked me to take that job, long-range planning, reporting directly to him. 

And so one of the plans, we did several acquisitions and all that I was involved in, but one of the big plans that I helped put together was a long-range plan for their computer systems and their management information center, which is where you all were at this morning, I guess. You were out there at the research center. 

And so I worked together with the chief financial officer who I had worked for before, and And he and I visited all over the country and saw what everybody was doing with computers back in those days. Mr. Milliken could open the door for any of, you know, to go about anywhere. 

So we took advantage of that, and we came up with this really terrific plan of consolidating all these mills and getting it all on a big computer, building a building and everything. 

But the Arthur Anderson partner that had been hired, he was more of an accountant than he was a data processing guy. And he had real cold feet about this, and he tried not to let it show, but I guess it did. Yes. 

So after we made a big presentation to Mr. Milliken and his troops, then Mr. Milliken fired at the guy. He recognized the weakness. And then they asked me to take that job. Did you like it? 

Did you have fun with it? 

Oh, yeah. I mean, I got an ulcer doing it. Oh, that doesn't sound like fun. 

But we really, we had a great period of time there. It was a terrific experience. Tom Newberry's crowd, when they were just getting started up, we got them in to help us some. And we got written up in Business Week magazine. Mr. Milliken's picture was on the cover. and I was there. 

So, you really were at the cutting edge of the computers coming in. 

Did you have any idea that it was going to be what it ended up being? 

I sort of thought it was, yeah. Yeah, you already did see that. 

As a matter of fact, the plan that we put together to do all this was in something we called a little brown book, and it had databases and everything in it which didn't come about for years later. 

But you were already anticipating it. 

We did the best we could with what we had in the way of equipment at that time, and it was quite revolutionary. 

And it was one of the first big management information centers that was completely done with modern technology. 

Now, it's been redone several times since then. Oh, I'm sure it has, because the technology changes, what, every week? 

Right. Certainly every year. 

So you were really at the beginning phase of seeing that implemented in a major basis. And so I was the, I think my title was Vice President for Financial Planning at the time. Mr. Milliken didn't believe in the word controller or anything like that. He felt like he was the controller. 

So I had market research and operations research and computers and cash management and a whole bunch of things that I was responsible for. and I did this for several years and occasionally Mr. 

Melker and I wouldn't see eye to eye on certain things and we could get pretty argumentative with each other. 

I had a blackboard in my office and he'd never had a blackboard before and we'd get up to that blackboard and we'd start arguing and putting things down and finally he had blackboards in every conference room. 

He loved those blackboards so I got to a point where he'd I think he'd gotten pretty well put out with me and he'd he told his group presidents there were three of them at the time that if anybody wanted me they could have me if not he was gonna let me go so one of them spoke up and said he'd like to have me because he had a business that was very in very bad shape and he'd had several other people try to run it and nobody had done anything done well with it and so mr. Mulliken said okay and so I then got given an operational job of running a business and I'm sure mr. 

Mulliken felt like I'd fail at this and he you know he said that my he told these guys the trouble with me was that everything with me was black or white now you know when you're right when you're doing a computer it is I mean it's off and on oh and I'm gonna skip ahead a minute now and tell you a quick one on that about I don't know how many years later when Barry Goldwater was running for president we had a big textual meeting and Roger was a big supporter of Barry Goldwater and he was they were gonna somebody going to introduce him and the fellow that was in charge of the whole program they just talked about who was going to introduce our next speaker and they thought that whoever did this would have to be the most conservative person in the world to introduce barry goldwater and they've gone through all the ranks and finally they concluded there wasn't but one man that could do that and that was Roger Millican who everything was either black or white I thought this was so funny I went to this business it was an industrial knit business at Lockhart South Carolina in an old building that was about on the ground and within just six eight months I had it making money and it was no and And they had a big inspection program of machinery and equipment and maintenance and all like that. And I had that right up to *****. And when they made one of the big final audits, Mr. 

Milken was at a board meeting with Westinghouse, and he called in, not to me, but to the fellow that worked for him that ran the audit program. And he was just tickling with that. We got this straightened out. 

So then they had another much bigger business. the one Tom Malone started out working in that had about 10 mills and had been losing money. 

They had switched the business from being in the great goods business to finished goods, and they built this big finishing plant, and it never had gotten straightened out. 

And so my boss at the time, well, no, a different boss, a different president, called me over one Sunday afternoon to come over to his house here in Spartanburg, and I went over. And he told me, Mr. Milliken wanted me to run this bigger business. 

And I'll never forget, I said, look, I'm not going to go up there and have him come up there every Saturday like he's been doing for the last five years and tell me how to run it. I'm just not going to do that. Life's too short. And Bill Humphrey, the president, said, well, he knew you'd say that. 

So he said he promises that he won't set foot in that building for six months. 

And if you don't have it straightened out in six months, then he reserves the right to come back again. 

Well, he never had to come back again. 

But you got it on track. 

But then I got an opportunity to be the president of M. 

Loewenstein, which was a big publicly owned New York Stock Exchange textile company that was in a whole lot of trouble. 

So they approached you when you were still at Milliken, and you had to consider that. 

I had to consider that, and I thought a lot about it and decided this is something I wanted to do, so I left. And he got mad about it, and he never has forgiven me for it. 

Oh, he thought you should have stayed in McMillican, huh? 

But it was a wonderful opportunity for you, and a challenge, because it was in trouble. Right. And were you able to turn it around? 

I was. 

Because as a matter of fact, when I got there, they had a credit line with a bunch of banks of about $55 million, and they'd used up about $52 million of the $55 million. And five of it was held by Citibank, on which Roger was a board member. 

Well, I hadn't been there but about a week until I got a call from Citibank saying that they felt like they needed to cut my credit line by about into half, which would have put us right at the edge of default and if they had done that these other banks that were part of the 55 million would have done the same thing so I went over and and pleaded with them to give me six months and I'd get out of debt with them and if they didn't we they were just gonna have a great big bankruptcy on their hands because another company it was just like Loewenstein United merchants and manufacturing they had just recently gone into chapter 11 and lost a lot of money. 

So the bank saw that what I was telling them was true and I convinced them. Lowenstein had this huge inventory. 

Some of it had been sitting there for years and I convinced them that I could sell that inventory and pay off this loan and they gave me a shot at it and sure enough in six months I didn't owe any of the banks anything. 

In only six months? 

Because they had this huge inventory and I just told our sales force look go sell it and I don't care what you get for it you know anything's better than sitting on the floor yeah and so then it worked and so then I was there for three years and then the the chairman of the company decided that he wanted some his job back which I when I went there I just did not like I can't deal with this guy and everybody knows was that. The family knew it, the directors knew it. 

But once we got the company back on his feet again, then he muscled his way back in and I left. And I had a contract and they paid me off and that's when I started my company here. That's when you decided you were ready to go as an independent. And I decided then that I wasn't ever going to work for anybody else again. You had already been around that role. Right. and you started Management Advisory Services Inc and that name came because you said you did not want to be a consultant I didn't want to be a consultant I my what I told people and I had several that I did this with look if you want me to manage something I'll manage it but I'm not gonna just come and consult with somebody I don't know how to do that but but I do know how to come in and if you let me take charge I can make it work so that was the position I took and I did a couple of smaller companies and got them straightened out and then Texfire came along and wanted me to come run that company but they wanted me to be an employee to start with and I told them I couldn't do that so we formed an Office of the Chairman as I was talking to you about earlier and sort of a triumph for it ran it for a couple of years and then the banks didn't like the way that was going but I did get them out of trouble. 

They were about to go bankrupt and we got them squared away and once we got them squared away then the bank was really wanting to see a more permanent type of an organization. 

So you could see from your experience, now by this time you've been in the business for 25, 30 years almost, that you didn't need to depend on anybody else, that your own skills you were marketable and you could be independent right you agreed to take that at the same time you would keep your own company and still be running it so literally you were doing two jobs at once you were managing another company managing your own company and taking clients and working and in that section of your life you were busy starting new companies but what happened did you find like niches in the market that needed to be filled and fill them, or how did they come about? 

What made you start doing something like that? 

Well there were all kinds of different reasons, but I guess the first company that I founded and put a group together, Texfly, the company I was working for, had a division that wasn't doing well at all. They were in the finished goods, the printing business. And they weren't mentally, you know, slanted in that direction. It takes a particular style of people to be in the printing business. 

You got to have all kind of artists and salesmen that know how to romance the stone and everything else. And they weren't doing well with that and they had a nice finishing plant or printing plant. And they needed money to liquidate some of the problems that they had. 

Tex-Fry was a company that grew up during the double knit days when the textured polyester double knits were the hottest thing since Grits and DuPont and everybody else ran out of polyester. And Tex-Fry built their own polyester plants. 

They had two of them that were turning out polyester and weaving and all this kind of stuff, knitting, the whole nine yards. New York Stock Exchange Company. 

So I felt like that I could put a group of separate people together to buy that plant from TexFi and not continue to be in the finished goods printing business but to be in the commission printing business where we would print for other people we wouldn't do the styling and the inventory and all like that we would just contract print for other people and so my group bought that plant from Texfy and we started this company called GoTex which we later took public and sold it sold stock in it and did quite well with it and later that company got bought out by the Japanese knees, they bought the whole thing. Which was very good for you. And after that, a series more of these niche. Right. 

Another case, another company that, Loewenstein owned a bunch of smaller companies that they had acquired over a period of time, and one of them that they bought was not doing well sell it all as a part of Loewenstein and the fellow that sold it to him bought it back and they let him buy it back. 

Well he started having the same problems he was having before they bought it before and he came to me and wanted me to be a partner with him and, you know, help pull that one back out again. 

And so I was, I became chairman of that company and we later consolidated that company with the print company and took them both public at the same time, but it was two separate companies that we joined together. 

And then a group of guys at Milliken decided that they wanted to get into business of cutting fabric to feed into the 807 program, which is a tax program that where you can assemble things in the Caribbean and and and bring them back in here and pay duty just on the value added and in order for that to work in the garment business you had to cut the fabric here in the United States then you could send it down there they could sew it together or assemble it and bring it back in here and it would be tax-free well the The Millican Group had made a big study of this and had consultants and everything else do it and it looked like a beautiful opportunity and they took it to Mr. Millican and he turned it down because he didn't want to be in competition with his customers. 

So one of the key guys there decided to resign from Millican and start his own, put a group together to start a business, but he needed somebody that was free and on the outside to put the deal together and he came to me and then he had several people at Milliken that were blind partners they didn't want Mr. 

Milliken to know they were in the deal so this other guy and I we started the business and we started cutting here in Spartanburg on computerized cutters Gerber cutters where you lay down a bunch of cloth and then the computer cuts it and we cut for a number of different people, but mainly Levi Strauss. Later we put a sowing plant in Costa Rica and we sewed as well as cut. Then we put a finishing plant down there where we packaged the stuff to go to the stores. And then we started another sowing operation in Nicaragua. And that business is still ongoing and I'm an active partner in that business today. All those different disciplines, all those different skills. 

How much of your tech education helped you with all of that? 

Well, I think the main thing that I got out of tech was that, you know, you just have to take the position that failure is not an option. You can do anything you put your mind to, and that's really what you learned. I have heard repeatedly over the years that tech is a place where people learn how to solve problems. 

Would you agree with that? 

You learn to solve problems, so it didn't matter whether it was a management problem or a cutting problem or a labor problem or a personnel problem, whatever, you could deal with it because you had been programmed that you could deal with it. Great skill to have. Great skill. Tell me about your family. We haven't talked about them. Did you build a house here, bought a house here, got yourself established in this area? 

Right. 

When we moved here from New York, we had a home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, which is a nice community outside New York City, and I commuted in. We sold that house, made a little profit on it. 

That house today would cost a fortune, and came to Spartanburg and bought a house in a in a new subdivision here in town a new house and at that time we had our first child a daughter her name her name is Catherine but we call her Kathy and I always have and I had been wanting to have some more children and part of the deal on me coming south was we'd have another one and my wife agreed to that so that this is seven years after the first one so So we had our son, and unfortunately he developed spinal meningitis when he was about six months old and just barely did make it, and he suffered a lot of nerve damage and whatnot while they were doing all the things they did to him. What was his name? 

Lewis. He was named after me. Okay. Okay. And so you had two dependents, and one of them with a lot of health problems. 

Well, he got over that. I mean, initially he did. They brought him through it. 

So he went to the Spartanburg Day School and went to North Carolina State to study textuals. He found out he didn't like that and then he finished at Furman in English. 

What about Kathy? 

What was her education? 

Well, she went two years to Columbia College and Columbia Girls School and then she got a degree at Florida State and later she got a master's degree at Converse here in Spartanburg. Okay. And then along came? 

And seven or eight years later, ***** came. You got them all three separate. Her name is Jacqueline, but we've always called her *****. And she was very good at sports and mathematics. And she and I, you know, we work on cars together and all like that. She's a big horseback rider and she's a beautiful girl. and wins, you know, she's got more ribbons for winning horse things than anything you ever saw. She got it in her head. She was going to Georgia Tech. Yep. Just like her daddy did. And she got in and she went. Yep. What was her degree in? 

In industrial engineering. Uh-huh. The whole family, my brother and cousins, all of us were industrial engineers. All I need, huh? 

But she's the only one that's really ever practiced it. She decided she wanted to co-op. She didn't have to, but she wanted to co-op. It's a great experience for her. And she worked with Northern Telecom as a co-op student. And when she graduated, she went with Pepsi Cola as a project engineer. And she's been within that 10 years. And she is right now supervising a big installation up in Knoxville, I believe. She operates out of Columbia, South Carolina. She lives in Camden, which is a horse country place. 

So she'd still have time for horses. She might have time. What year did she graduate? 

Ninety-one, I think. Oh, just in the last ten years. Yeah. Okay. I bet she did well in school, didn't she? 

Oh, yeah. She did extremely well. 

As I think I mentioned to you before we started the interview that all of my cousins and brother and I, we all went there and actually my brother ended up, he had to do some remedial stuff so he got a little bit better, you know, started in the real grades. 

He was in Tal Beta Pies at the Honorary Society, but my daughter was in it also and had a better point average than he did. 

So she's done better than any of the rest of the school was. And it's the only one of us that really ever practiced engineering. 

Well, engineering in the purest form of it, yeah, that's great. 

But she actually is, she's telling these people, you know, how to put these conveyors in and you know where I think the cement has to be and the whole nine yards and it's doing quite well and being paid quite well. 

The Sobe family are wrecks, the rambling wrecks, and have all done well with their degrees from Georgia Tech. 

I don't have to ask you if you would do it all over again the same way because you would, wouldn't you? 

Don't go to Georgia Tech. Yeah, I don't have any regrets. It's a good thing Duke and Harvard didn't get a crack at you. 

Well, it's a good thing I didn't go there because I probably couldn't have made it there financially if for no other reason. 

At least in Atlanta I was able to hitchhike home occasionally and this aunt that lived there, I had another aunt and uncle that lived in Demarest, Georgia, you know where Demarest is. And we'd go up there lots on the weekends and I'd get all my clothes washed and get fed real good. Nothing like family. This wonderful aunt was really in a way a great benefactor of me. She sounds like she was kind of fun too. Oh she was. 

When I was a little kid I never did know whether Aunt Betty was a boy or a girl because I never saw her with a dress on her. 

She was about six feet tall, and she and my dad loved to fish, and the two of them were great buddies as far as going fishing and all that's concerned. And Aunt Betty just never got married, and I never saw her even have an interest in it. 

But she helped all of the grandchildren through school. That's wonderful because she was a surrogate mother to all of you in that sense. 

Where would you have been without her? 

I mean, it's just great that it was an extension for your father who was gone by that time already. You worked hard. 

Obviously, you worked hard, and you're full of determination, and you saw your goals, and you went for them. 

But you were lucky, too, because you had good people around you, people to reach out. Tech didn't offer you a lot of mentoring, but thank God your family did. You would never have survived. 

Well, it's been a grand story, and I just, I feel like you're going to keep on doing what you've been doing, and that's been a good thing, and I feel like it was just a real blessing for us that you came to Georgia Tech and that we came to college. 

Well, I certainly have appreciated having that background, and it's always made me feel very confident with whatever group of people that I might happen to be working with, you know, at any time. I've never felt any form of inadequacy. That's a good thing. It gives you a security and a confidence in yourself. At Milliken I had PhDs working for me, I had a bunch of master's degree people working for me. And you know, I don't think they ever looked down on me just because I. I'm sure not. And I know, we noticed that there's pictures that you've been involved. we see a picture of our current president and you so you do know how to have now with the best of them as they say and be involved and things are you involved in in the civic community here in Spartburg I've always been a Republican even my father was a Republican back when there was nobody else in Georgia a Republican he even voted for Wendell Wilkie you get Roosevelt about but uh so I've been a big supporter I've never run for any kind of office and would never intend to but I've been on a number of different boards I bet you have been okay I have a hunch you give back to the community in lots of different ways well I was chairman of the board of the day school that my children went to and I was just recently chairman of the board of the YMCA and and usually I end up you know being in charge or whatever it is well you know the way to do that you see you learn that at Georgia Tech right that's wonderful well mr. so we thank you so much for taking time out of your business well thank you for doing this we're very happy to have your story in the archives with the living history program and thanks a million thank you.