"I remember when they built the mill. Lola Mill was the old mill and after Mr. Bob Craig came in he
built the two story mill. I remember the silk mill. They dug the foundation, pulled every bit of that
foundation out with drag pans and a mule."
"My aunt Edna died while they were digging it; mama's baby sister. The flu was so bad. She came and
stayed with us a week and the took the flu and grandma came and got her and Dr. Taylor would come to
the front door with a handkerchief around his nose and hand you the medicine through the door. He was
scared to death of it because it was killing people like flies."
"I remember when the first theater was built in Stanley. Right where Mr. and Mrs. Fox used to live.
[Next to Lutheran church.] They lived where Mr. John Wallace lived. The building where the furniture store is now was built for
a theater and that is what is was for a while. Mr. James Wallace ran it to start with."
"The post office was right there too. Perry Stroup ran it. The Foxes had a public water pump in their
front yard. And right there on the side of the road was a watering trough where you watered your mules
or horses. It was still there when they built Highway 27 because that is where we watered the
horses."
"Stanley used to run two passenger trains a day. I was a young man when they quit that. They had one
up and down in the morning and one in the afternoon. A lot of people used to ride it to Lincolnton
to shop every morning, then a lot of people would ride it just to ride a train."
"They built the airport as part of the mail system. That is what the one in
Charlotte right now was supposed to be. That was supposed to have been the
airport in Stanley. But Charlotte said they could not put the airport that far
out of town so they had to bring in to Charlotte. In Stanley, the pilots a lot
of times would stop their plane out there and leave their plane overnight and go
to bed at Aunt Zetties with the mail under the bed and go to sleep for 10 to 12
hours with the plane still out there waiting on them. Then they would just
travel somewhere else."
"You know they had a four wheel wagon up there at the train depot. They
put that thing on top of the depot one halloween night, tore it down and rebuilt
it on top of it. There it sat until the next morning. Some of the bigger boys
went up there and took it apart and rebuilt it on top of the depot."
"The ballpark was over behind the Holiness Church. Then they had to
clean the rocks out of it before they could play ball. That was the rockiest
place you have ever seen, the lower side of it. It wasn't even a level field and
the other part was in corn. I saw people go out in the cornfield to catch a fly
ball."
"I drove a taxi (bus) for Lewis Ballard. He had an office out of the
George Watts Cafe building. There was a pressing club and a barber shop in the
basement. It had rooms upstairs in that building (on corner of East College and
North Main Streets) that you could spend the night in if you had too. If a
salesman was in town he could spend the night. They didn't have a public sign
out there, nothing like that. Everybody that knew about it knew they could spend
the night there if they wanted too."
(Back in the World War I and Depression years) "A freight train would
stop in Stanley and they would throw coal off. About 10 or 15 boys would get up
on top of those coal cars and they would throw that coal off. One night the
brakeman came along and said, 'boys don't get it all, leave some for the Mt.
Holly boys.' The kids would then take the coal home in wheelbarrows, for their
family to burn to warm their house."
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