Deadly Fire in Hamlet: This Date in History
- Thread starter donbosco
- Start date
- Replies: 1K
- Views: 133K
- Off-Topic
donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 4,216
Boll Weevil's existed as a label as far back as the Eisenhower days though you are right I suspect in that Thurmond may not have been specifically included...Without looking too hard, the earliest reference to the term that I can find in Newspapers.com is 1906, then again in 1934, and again in 1957 after which the term seems to have had some traction during the Eisenhower Administration. Gramm was definitely the guy whose actions resurrected the term in conjunction with Reaganomics.
Here's a source that refers to the 1950s Boll Weevil Democrats: Safire's Political Dictionary
All of that said, it looks like 99% of political historians and followers only associate the term with Gramm's group in the 1980s.
donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 4,216
#OTD (9/1) in 1976 Ohio Representative Wayne Hays (D) resigned from office after well-founded allegations surfaced that he had employed on his administrative payroll as a secretary Elizabeth Ray, whose actual job was serving as his mistress. Ray told all to the Washington Post in May of 1976. Her famous quote, "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone…” said it all.
Hays, a 14 term congressman headed the committee that controlled facilities in Congress and used that position to seek power. He was known as the “meanest man in the House.” Cross him and the air conditioning might be shut off in your Capitol Hill office.
In the aftermath of the news Ray published a tell-all book, The Washington Fringe Benefit, that exposed the sex for hire side of Washington. She posed for Playboy soon afterward but in a short time her fame receded. Elizabeth Ray was born Betty Lou Ray in 1943 in Marshall, NC. There are unconfirmed reports that she recently passed away at the age of 82.
Hays divorced his first wife of many years and married the longtime secretary in his Ohio congressional office.
This pissed off Elizabeth Ray; but, not in the way you might think.
“I was good enough to be his mistress for two years; but, not good enough to be invited to his wedding.”
This pissed off Elizabeth Ray; but, not in the way you might think.
“I was good enough to be his mistress for two years; but, not good enough to be invited to his wedding.”
donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 4,216
- Messages
- 1,484
Not really related, but I took a year long typing class as a sophmore in high school. I've not made many good decisions in my life, but that was definitely one of them. Before personal computers were a thing, knowing how to touch type, i.e., type without looking at the keyboard was nice, but after PC's came out, knowing how to touch type has been great. And I say this while typing on a mobile phone only using my two thumbs. Knowing where the keys are on QUERTY key board has been great thing for me. But the reason my posts have so many typos is because I touch type on such a small keyboard and my thumbs are too big.
donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 4,216
Now look what you did 05...
I well remember my high school typing class - luckily I took that half-year offering with most of the rest of my high school basketball team. That meant that it turned into a competition - and not just speed but one that gave equal weight to accuracy. This all took place in the classroom space dominated by Mrs. Dark. Because basketball was our life and North Carolina in our blood the fact that Mrs. Dark was a staunch Wake Forest fan while my buddies and I were all Carolina or State with Melvin Womble, a renegade Maryland fan thrown in for good measure, was significant and flavored the banter during our sessions. There were no dook fans to be seen as in those days only dyed-in-the-wool and sprinkled Methodists pulled for dook. I only knew one of those in high school.
For 1975-76, the Year of Typing - Carolina, State, and Wake were ranked squads with UNC finishing 25-4 #8, and NCSU 21-9 (as high as #8 but a late-season skid left them out of the top 20 at the end). WFU went 17-10 and rose to #18 only, like State, to falter in January. Wiley ole foot stomper Lefty Driesell’s ‘UCLA of the East’ team pulled a 22-6 record and a final ranking of #11. Dook was a sub .500 13-14 and never threatened. Virginia was on the rise.
My senior year - the Year of Typing - the Chatham Central Bears boys basketball team went 17-5, losing all five of those games to but two teams - the West Montgomery Warriors and, infuriatingly...our down-the-road rival, the Jordan Matthews Jets. In those contests we came up short by a grand a total of 8 points spread across those five losses. It was great to win so many games but overall one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. We were tall and fast and tended to play well together but at key junctures the wheels had fallen off the bus. (Someday I’ll write that story)
Mrs. Dark showed a lot of moxy in getting that rowdy bunch to behave. She would have probably been a good coach - certainly better than the one we had. To this day I’m a fast typer though my precision may have faltered a bit.
Typing was one of the two most important classes that I took in high school - the other was music. My music teacher, Polly Yow, was a toweringly positive figure my high school days. She was the absolute best. And yes, English and History provided some opportunities - in the former I did read excerpts from a few classics and a rebellious student teacher from Chapel Hill slipped me copies of ‘A Catcher in The Rye,’ and ‘Down All The Days,’ - both mind blowing to my sensibilities way back in the early 1970s - without that introductory material my first days in Chapel Hill the following August would have perhaps been too, too much for me to handle.
Nevertheless, it was the typing that proved most productive in Chapel Hill and since. I am a good speller thanks to my Aunt Burdine and my grammar, while at times quirky, is sound. In my freshman year in Everett Dorm, once the Home of the ROGAH, I set up my typing shop. Among my peers there were a lot of 5-6 page papers assigned and I could punch out one of those in a half hour. I did that for .50 cents a page. For $1.00 a page I would correct spelling and grammar. That was beer money since a can of Schlitz down at Kirkpatrick’s went for .55 cents in those days. A pretty long-play (because we all became adept) pinball game went for .25 and a Greek Grill Cheese and fries at Hector’s on the way home from the bars at 1 am went for $1.44 if you drank water from the sink. Of course with the advent of computers the skill Mrs. Dark taught me became even more important and essential. I typed all my own papers in graduate school and every manuscript in the days since.
Thanks Mrs. Dark. You did more to get me through school than almost anybody else.
*Any typos and errors in this essay are all my responsibility. (Except for the one in the title of the linked article!)
Does Anyone Else Remember Taking Typing Class on Real Typewritters?
There's no question that our educational system has made dramatic changes over the last 25 years. Thanks to technology, kids are learning in ways we could have never imagined growing up, and the tools used to teach children have changed. One tool that many kids today wouldn't have any idea how to us
fun.shared.com
- Messages
- 1,484
Loved your story. One of the additional benefits for me of knowing how to type was that it cut 2 or 3 weeks out of my AIT in the Army. I (slang for defacation) you not, Army instruction in typing was, for four hours straight, sitting at a teletype keyboad (all CAPS) with the instructor saying "R" followed by "Y" with the occasional other letter throw in. The other four hours a day was spent listening to and sending Morse Code. Don't know why, but Morse Code was just easy for me. Never was I so glad to finish training early and get on to the "how to operate the equipment" classes. The Morse Code part actually drove some people nuts and they had to be deprogrammed at the on-base mental hospital and sent back to the non-Morse radio school.
ETA: When I say "drove some people nuts," I mean that these people couldn't listen to music or anything rythmic without hearing Morse Code and thinking someone was sending them some sort of weird message. Everytime I started hearing Code in music, I shook myself and thought, "There be dragons."
ETA: When I say "drove some people nuts," I mean that these people couldn't listen to music or anything rythmic without hearing Morse Code and thinking someone was sending them some sort of weird message. Everytime I started hearing Code in music, I shook myself and thought, "There be dragons."
Last edited:
fourheels
Honored Member
- Messages
- 800
Reminds me a bit of Holly Madison
#OTD (9/1) in 1976 Ohio Representative Wayne Hays (D) resigned from office after well-founded allegations surfaced that he had employed on his administrative payroll as a secretary Elizabeth Ray, whose actual job was serving as his mistress. Ray told all to the Washington Post in May of 1976. Her famous quote, "I can't type, I can't file, I can't even answer the phone…” said it all.
Hays, a 14 term congressman headed the committee that controlled facilities in Congress and used that position to seek power. He was known as the “meanest man in the House.” Cross him and the air conditioning might be shut off in your Capitol Hill office.
In the aftermath of the news Ray published a tell-all book, The Washington Fringe Benefit, that exposed the sex for hire side of Washington. She posed for Playboy soon afterward but in a short time her fame receded. Elizabeth Ray was born Betty Lou Ray in 1943 in Marshall, NC. There are unconfirmed reports that she recently passed away at the age of 82.
You’re just bragging about size.
- Messages
- 1,484
From your keyboard to the wish-fairy. But perhaps my thumbs are better described as fat and uncoordinated. Ah, wait, that's all of me.
donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 4,216
Four years ago right now (Sept. 2) I was a couple of weeks into teaching the fall semester of 2021. We were back in the classroom - foolishly I thought (and still think), but vaccinations had been available for some 6 months if I recall correctly (my first shot was on March 5, 2021). In my classroom students were spaced - no one directly beside one another - and masked. I, also masked, stood at the front of the room by a podium with computer projection capabilities behind a transparent plexiglass “sneeze guard” screen. All my classes were fully enrolled. A new vaccine addressing virus mutation was not yet available but was promised.
I had a lot of absences and I rigged my laptop into zoom set-up so that the sick, exposed, careful, and fearful could attend virtually. I also recorded everything for return viewing. It was far from ideal. Nothing about those times was except perhaps long, semi-solitary dog walks in the trails around campus. That said, I think some learning happened anyway.
As Labor Day approached I was missing my wife and daughter powerfully so setting up a class to go full-on Zoom Technology, I jumped in my 2008 Toyota Straight Drive with Prince and Maxie and headed north. Hurricane Ida was coming up the east coast but I thought I could outrun her.
All went pretty well until somewhere around Allentown, Pennsylvania when the rain caught us. And then it went on ahead. Stopping seemed as foolish as continuing at the time. All the motels were full. By phone my wife was my Mission Control and frankly Twitter was useful. The night fell and the rain and wind blasted everything and everybody. The dogs and I spent a couple of hours in a shopping center parking lot somewhere near Newark.
I set out to try and get to - and cross - the George Washington Bridge. The New Jersey Turnpike was a mess…flooded in places. I maneuvered, at one point motoring the wrong way up an overpass exit. The dogs were riveted on the murky soaked scene outside.
Seventeen hours after leaving Western North Carolina we made it to #WestHarlem. I really don’t have any right to call anybody or anything foolish. But I did miss my gals an awful lot. Five days later I was back in my classroom.
Ida, she ‘bout got me.
donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 4,216
The Chicken Plant has been a key component in the economy of North Carolina for decades. Just as the long, single-story broiler houses dotted the landscape of the state’s rural roadways once, so too did the factories where those birds were hung, plucked, eviscerated, and made into parts, encircle small-town NC. Originally, the workers in those plants were mainly African American, and the conditions, pay, and treatment inside of them was often times a disgrace. Many years ago I was research assistant for Leon Fink, the Labor Historian, and the product of that liaison was the book ‘The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South.’ That study focused on the two worlds of indigenous Maya people from the highlands of Guatemala — their historic homeland in the Cuchumatán Mountains of Central America and their adopted one in the Appalachian foothills of Burke County, NC.
That story was a saga of modern Cold War-fostered civil war and violence (1961-1996) in which the Maya suffered and eventually fled the land that they had called home from ‘time immemorial.’ Their eventual landing place in that diaspora was Morganton, NC, and the pull there was The Chicken Plant. They had been brought there in the 1980s from their first refuge in Florida by industry management to fill jobs that literally no one else wanted. Soon other Maya people in flight began to find their way directly to Morganton for work. There they also formed a community around St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, a sanctuary, in every sense of the word, from the tumult that had been their lives for generations.
Eventually, the Maya of Morganton grew tired of the way they were being abused on the job and they organized themselves to resist. They did so with a resolve that was born of centuries of survival in the face of first, Spanish colonization, and subsequently, the depredations of a racial hierarchy left in place by that experience. Their subsequent organizing effort may be one of the only instances of a people’s unawareness of history being a good thing. The Maya of Morganton did not know that for working people to organize to stand up against the owner class in North Carolina was nigh forbidden. They did not know that in the late 1920s and 1930s that factory management with the help of government had literally murdered employees that had stood for better pay and conditions in textile mills. They didn’t know that in The Tar Heel State that “Right To Work” meant “Damn Right You’ll Work.” The Maya of Morganton were relatively successful in their efforts there in Morganton but they continue to struggle for their just due.
Industrial labor in the American South has always been in a fight for recognition of human and civil rights. There have been some victories and likely as many defeats. Sadly, too many times the wins have also been losses meaning that lives had to be ruined or lost in order for employers to be forced and regulated into proper, law-abiding comportment, and policies. An example of tragedy that helped to make at least a few people safer in the end happened on this day (#OTD - September 3) in 1991 when “a fire swept through the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, killing 25 people and injuring 56 others in one of the state’s deadliest industrial accidents.” Exit doors were locked and there was no sprinkler system-The Plant Owner was deeply culpable. “In time, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Imperial with 83 safety violations totaling $808,150 in penalties. Plant owner Emmett Roe filed bankruptcy and closed the plant. He accepted a plea agreement on involuntary manslaughter charges and was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison but was paroled in 1997 after serving four-and-a-half years. Around 20 civil suits were filed against Imperial. Bankruptcy court eventually paid about $16 million to survivors and victims’ families.”
That story was a saga of modern Cold War-fostered civil war and violence (1961-1996) in which the Maya suffered and eventually fled the land that they had called home from ‘time immemorial.’ Their eventual landing place in that diaspora was Morganton, NC, and the pull there was The Chicken Plant. They had been brought there in the 1980s from their first refuge in Florida by industry management to fill jobs that literally no one else wanted. Soon other Maya people in flight began to find their way directly to Morganton for work. There they also formed a community around St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, a sanctuary, in every sense of the word, from the tumult that had been their lives for generations.
Eventually, the Maya of Morganton grew tired of the way they were being abused on the job and they organized themselves to resist. They did so with a resolve that was born of centuries of survival in the face of first, Spanish colonization, and subsequently, the depredations of a racial hierarchy left in place by that experience. Their subsequent organizing effort may be one of the only instances of a people’s unawareness of history being a good thing. The Maya of Morganton did not know that for working people to organize to stand up against the owner class in North Carolina was nigh forbidden. They did not know that in the late 1920s and 1930s that factory management with the help of government had literally murdered employees that had stood for better pay and conditions in textile mills. They didn’t know that in The Tar Heel State that “Right To Work” meant “Damn Right You’ll Work.” The Maya of Morganton were relatively successful in their efforts there in Morganton but they continue to struggle for their just due.
Industrial labor in the American South has always been in a fight for recognition of human and civil rights. There have been some victories and likely as many defeats. Sadly, too many times the wins have also been losses meaning that lives had to be ruined or lost in order for employers to be forced and regulated into proper, law-abiding comportment, and policies. An example of tragedy that helped to make at least a few people safer in the end happened on this day (#OTD - September 3) in 1991 when “a fire swept through the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, killing 25 people and injuring 56 others in one of the state’s deadliest industrial accidents.” Exit doors were locked and there was no sprinkler system-The Plant Owner was deeply culpable. “In time, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Imperial with 83 safety violations totaling $808,150 in penalties. Plant owner Emmett Roe filed bankruptcy and closed the plant. He accepted a plea agreement on involuntary manslaughter charges and was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison but was paroled in 1997 after serving four-and-a-half years. Around 20 civil suits were filed against Imperial. Bankruptcy court eventually paid about $16 million to survivors and victims’ families.”
DB, I can’t upvote this…no one should upvote this shit……I agree with all of this. That fire was such an eye-opener to working conditions in North Carolina…..and, it also wasn’t an eye-opener.The Chicken Plant has been a key component in the economy of North Carolina for decades. Just as the long, single-story broiler houses dotted the landscape of the state’s rural roadways once, so too did the factories where those birds were hung, plucked, eviscerated, and made into parts, encircle small-town NC. Originally, the workers in those plants were mainly African American, and the conditions, pay, and treatment inside of them was often times a disgrace. Many years ago I was research assistant for Leon Fink, the Labor Historian, and the product of that liaison was the book ‘The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South.’ That study focused on the two worlds of indigenous Maya people from the highlands of Guatemala — their historic homeland in the Cuchumatán Mountains of Central America and their adopted one in the Appalachian foothills of Burke County, NC.
That story was a saga of modern Cold War-fostered civil war and violence (1961-1996) in which the Maya suffered and eventually fled the land that they had called home from ‘time immemorial.’ Their eventual landing place in that diaspora was Morganton, NC, and the pull there was The Chicken Plant. They had been brought there in the 1980s from their first refuge in Florida by industry management to fill jobs that literally no one else wanted. Soon other Maya people in flight began to find their way directly to Morganton for work. There they also formed a community around St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, a sanctuary, in every sense of the word, from the tumult that had been their lives for generations.
Eventually, the Maya of Morganton grew tired of the way they were being abused on the job and they organized themselves to resist. They did so with a resolve that was born of centuries of survival in the face of first, Spanish colonization, and subsequently, the depredations of a racial hierarchy left in place by that experience. Their subsequent organizing effort may be one of the only instances of a people’s unawareness of history being a good thing. The Maya of Morganton did not know that for working people to organize to stand up against the owner class in North Carolina was nigh forbidden. They did not know that in the late 1920s and 1930s that factory management with the help of government had literally murdered employees that had stood for better pay and conditions in textile mills. They didn’t know that in The Tar Heel State that “Right To Work” meant “Damn Right You’ll Work.” The Maya of Morganton were relatively successful in their efforts there in Morganton but they continue to struggle for their just due.
Industrial labor in the American South has always been in a fight for recognition of human and civil rights. There have been some victories and likely as many defeats. Sadly, too many times the wins have also been losses meaning that lives had to be ruined or lost in order for employers to be forced and regulated into proper, law-abiding comportment, and policies. An example of tragedy that helped to make at least a few people safer in the end happened on this day (#OTD - September 3) in 1991 when “a fire swept through the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, killing 25 people and injuring 56 others in one of the state’s deadliest industrial accidents.” Exit doors were locked and there was no sprinkler system-The Plant Owner was deeply culpable. “In time, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Imperial with 83 safety violations totaling $808,150 in penalties. Plant owner Emmett Roe filed bankruptcy and closed the plant. He accepted a plea agreement on involuntary manslaughter charges and was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison but was paroled in 1997 after serving four-and-a-half years. Around 20 civil suits were filed against Imperial. Bankruptcy court eventually paid about $16 million to survivors and victims’ families.”
That fire and those deaths didn’t change ANYTHING in North Carolina.
donbosco
Inconceivable Member
- Messages
- 4,216
@Zoo_View
Friend Bryant Simon has written about Hamlet.
uncpress.org
Friend Bryant Simon has written about Hamlet.
The Hamlet Fire
For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a m...
uncpress.org