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Jimmy Hayes - Hayes Manufacturing
Jimmy Hayes
Hayes Manufacturing
Words of Wisdom
- Be honest. Never do anything under the table, in any form or fashion.
- You can work your whole life to establish a good reputation, but you can lose it over night with one bad decision.
- Find something to do that you know a lot about, really enjoy doing, and do better than anybody else. If you do that, you’ll make money.
- When you own a business, you work hard—twelve, fourteen, fifteen hour days. If you are afraid of hard work, you don’t need to be going into business for yourself.
- When you own a business, you are the last one to get paid
Entrepreneurial
League System Mentor Interview
Jimmy (James)
Anderson Hayes
Hayes Manufacturing
Date: 17 August 2009
Location: Pineville, Louisiana
Interviewer: Gary Perkins
Also present: James (Jimbo) Hayes, son, Hayes
Manufacturing.
Gary:”Tell me where you grew up. Where did you go to
school?”
“I was born in a little sawmill town, Weogulfka, Alabama on
February 9th, 1928. My daddy worked in the sawmill. He had one arm; he lost his other arm in a
cotton gin on the farm when he was fourteen. Daddy worked as a lumber checker at Black
Brothers Sawmill in Weogulfka. Later, Daddy got a job with my grandfather in West Point,
Mississippi, where my grandfather had a casket company, West Point Casket Company. He put
daddy to work. When I was in fourth grade, we moved to Pensacola, Florida, where daddy tried
his hand at a little casket business for two or three years.
“My mother’s brother, Uncle Frank Ingram, had a casket factory
in Alexandria, the Louisiana Casket Company. He offered my Daddy a job and we moved to
Alexandria, Louisiana. That’s how I got into this area.
“I went through the old West End Grammar School and then to
Bolton High School. I will tell you, and I am not ashamed to tell you, just like I told my
children, they think I am smart but I’m not smart. I was gifted. In high school I failed a few
subjects like literature, civics and things that I had to read and try to get interested in
and remember, and couldn’t do it. But in math, algebra, and geometry, I made straight A’s,
didn’t even have to study. I could always work a problem out, whether I used the correct
formula or not. I graduated and went straight into the Army. The war was almost ending and I
wanted to get into it. As a matter of fact, it ended in three months after I went into the
service. They sent me to Puerto Rico, where I was in the Ordinance Division.
“I met my wife in a hospital because I got trench foot from
not using sandals in the shower. They warned us, but I was hard-headed and wound up in the
hospital that was attached to the Red Cross Service. While I was over there, I noticed a craft
shop that was closed. I asked the Sergeant about it and he said, ‘Well, we don’t have anybody
that knows enough about crafts to put them in charge to open it up so it could entertain and
help the men in the hospital that are bedridden.’ I told him I was extremely interested in it
and he unlocked the place, let me look in, and boy, I will tell you, they had beautiful brand
new machines and all kinds of materials to work with. Immediately they became interested in me
and wanted to know if I would accept a transfer from the Ordinance into the Medics, where they
would give me a T-5 rating, which is an Occupational Therapist Technician, so I could run the
shop.
“About the time I was ready to get discharged, we got to the
point where we had agreed on a marriage. At that time I was only twenty years old and the Army
wouldn’t let me marry because I wasn’t twenty-one without my Mother and Father’s consent. So I
had to write home and tell Mama what I was going to do and get their consent. Mom and dad were
deathly scared that I wouldn’t get to come home. Anyway, we worked that out and I got married
in Puerto Rico before my discharge.”
Gary: “Let me just ask, it wasn’t too dangerous to be in the
Army and take a chance of getting killed, but it was too dangerous to get married? Is that
what the Army was thinking?”
“Yeah, it was way too dangerous for a twenty-year old to get
married.”
“I came home. We got to New Orleans, where I got discharged
with a little mustering out pay. The first thing I did was look for a used automobile. I found
a little 1933 Plymouth sedan. I think I paid $300 for it. It ran nice; we put our belongings
in it and took off for Alexandria. When we got to Alexandria, I started looking for a job, and
found an opening at Morock Ford.
“They paid me seventy-five cents an hour to rebuild
carburetors, so I rebuilt carburetors for almost a year. We were staying with mother and dad.
I found a house for sale in Pineville from Jimmy Konsinsky, used my G. I. Bill to buy it, and
my notes were $47 a month.
“Ben Flynn had Flynn Manufacturing on Third Street and put out
an ad for a machinist. The Army gave me six weeks of machinist training and I made top honors.
I felt if I could tell Flynn what experience I had, he might let me work for him. Flynn had a
contract to build removable grass sprig planters for the Levee Board. He had to make a jaw
clutch, which required a machine he didn’t have. Flynn showed me the tools he had, gave me the
prints, and said, ‘If you can figure out a way to make that jaw clutch, you have the job.’ He
said he would pay me one dollar and twenty-five cents an hour. I stayed up all night working
out a plan, and figured out an unorthodox way to do it.
“From then on, I did the electrical repair work on the
overhead ridge crane, installed and hooked up new machinery, built a few machines like an
angle iron roller, besides taking care of customers and going out on jobs to fix customer
equipment.”
“Flynn had a union man, an iron worker who got his leg hurt on
the job. When he came back to the shop, Flynn put him in the little office to receive
customers. He didn’t know much about machine work. Whenever a customer came in, he’d bring
the customer out and say, ‘Jim, come help. This guy wants you to take this piece of machinery,
machine this off, weld this up, and then do this and do that.’
“I said, ‘Wait a minute Claude. You can’t weld that after it’s
machined. You have to do your welding first, and then weld this piece on there, and then
machine it.’ He said, ‘Bubba, you do exactly what I’m telling you.’ That’s the kind of stuff
he did; we were crossed up the whole time that I was there.
“One day, when Ben was out of town, I walked in and old Claude
was sitting behind his desk. He opened his drawer, pulled out a check, threw it down, and
said, ‘Jimmy, it looks like you ain’t going to make it. You just ain’t going to make it.’
“Well now, you talk about a guy coming close to passing out. I
couldn’t talk. I was confused, hurt, you name it. I choked up, shook my head a little bit,
took the check, walked out, got in my car and went home.
“The first thing the next morning, I got a telephone call from
Eddie Johnson , one of the boys at the shop. He said, ‘Jimmy, we heard what Claude did. Do you
want your job back? Just tell me.’ All the guys had decided they weren’t going to come back to
work. I told him I’d been thinking it over; never gave it much thought before, but I thought I
would kind of like to do some work on my own.
“Bill Hawthorn and Joe Carbo tried to get me to come over and
work for them. I had a garage beside my house and a few hand tools because I was making a hot
rod. I went to the place where we buy our welding supplies, told Claude Williams I wanted to
buy a little portable welding machine, two oxygen bottles with the gauges and hoses, a torch,
and a few supplies, but I didn’t have any money. I asked him if he could help me.’
“He said, ‘Pick out anything you want; we’ll put it on a list,
make a bill, and you can pay me what you can.’ That’s how I got started.
“I bought the frame, wheel and motor for a Model A pickup for
$10.00 from a junkyard, put everything together, got the Model A running, and put the welding
machine in truck bed.
“My first job was for John Cade at Alexandria Seed. Then Mr.
Cox would call me from the bakery at two o’clock in the morning, and I’d get his bread machine
going. I also took care of Martin Close’s machines, plus some others.”
“I started my business in 1958 and called it Economy Welding
Service. Then I got into manufacturing and built my own apron brake out of scrap iron from the
junk yard. I made the brake with a lathe and hand tools. About that time, Alpine Cable TV was
coming to town, and had these trucks that would run cable behind them. I built the first
headache rack in this area. John Cade was putting in a new building on Broadway with a
hundred foot grain elevator and needed a crane to set that up. I thought about it a little
bit, told John I knew a friend that had a wench truck with a ten foot gin pole. He said a ten
foot gin pole wasn’t going to raise a hundred foot grain elevator, but I told him I knew a way
to do it with a ten foot jig pole and a winch.”
James, son: “Now, daddy, aren’t those homemade wenches that
you made? They had homemade ratchets.”
“Yes, I made the wenches. I kept on until I got a hundred feet
up.”
Gary: “When did you move your shop out here?”
“There was little shack on the corner of Highway 28 and
Pelican Drive. I asked the owner, Mrs. Reynolds, if I could jack up the house three feet, add
to it, and pour a slab. She agreed and I fixed it up real nice. Next month she wanted double
the rent, $50.00 a month, for it.
“I found an old three cylinder bulldozer with a cable lift on
the front, an RD6, that had been junked because it was broken in a place too expensive to
repair. I bought it for a hundred dollars because the main shaft was twisted off right behind
the engine. I tore it up, took the shaft out, and welded it, using a special type of welding I
discovered while studying some foundry work. I would get it cherry-red hot and go to the anvil
and hammer it at the forge. Now that’s what you call forging. Anytime you beat on a red-hot
piece of iron you start lining the molecules back up. You need to keep it red hot while
forging (hammering) it until your metal form a grain that goes right on through it, just like
a tree trunk, which strengthens it.
“I got a job for Bill Mabry, who wanted me to build him a
pond. I took my RD6 back there and built it; didn’t charge him nothing. Bill was building
houses. I told him I was paying $50.00 a month for a house I built over here on the corner. He
told me there was a lot next to Mrs. Reynolds that had never had been cleared. I asked Mrs.
Reynolds if she would sell that lot and she said she wanted $800.00 for it. I went to the
bank, told them who I was, but they wouldn’t lend me the money. My dad gave me the $800.00. I
told him I would pay him back, which I did.”
“Bill told me he could get me a loan through Winnfield First
Federal, the folks he was using to build his houses. I asked him how much was it going to cost
me. He said I wouldn’t have to make a down payment. I forgot what it was, but it was very
reasonable, $25.00 or $30.00 a month. Bill said he would build me a 30’ x 60’ x 10’ building.
I borrowed the money from Winnfield First Federal for the shop.”
Gary: “Where were you getting your jobs?”
“Word of mouth, regular customers, and then Cleco. Southern
Gas found out I was a pretty good welder, and wanted to know if I would weld some gas lines
for them. After that, I put in a new system in John Cade’s building, including new machinery
and tanks outside. Tucker Robinson’s company, Distran, was building substations for Cleco. I
put in the first Cleco substation in Marksville. It was a good thing I had my cutting torch
and my welding machine, because there were so many mistakes. Then Cleco called me and wanted
to know if I would prefab substations for them.”
James, son: “As far as I know, that substation is still
standing in Marksville.”
The next big job I had was the 138 KV Station, right down here
on the Red River levee in Alexandria. I had to put up two towers and a beam across, with four
air brake switches on the top.”
Gary: “You had a crane by then?”
“No, I had a two-ton GMC truck. I built a hundred foot of boom
out of light weight angle, put it behind that truck, put outriggers on it, and lifted all that
stuff up with that boom truck. We didn’t have any ropes with pulleys on them, they just pulled
stuff up by hand. The first crane I got was out of Robert Price’s junkyard, and it had a
twenty foot boom on it.”
Gary: “That’s where you shopped, the junkyard.”
“That’s right. I never bought a new crane in my life. James
bought the first one. But, anyway, I brought that little crane over here and built me a
hundred foot boom, made of two fifty foot sections that folded. The truck I mounted it on had
a headache rack in the front, and a headache rack behind the cab, and I had a joint from where
the crane went down right, and hit this first back piece. I unfolded the two pieces and put
them together.”
Gary: “You made some money out of that piece of
equipment.”
“It must have cost me every bit of a hundred dollars to fix
that crane up. I worked seven days a week, night and day. Sundays, Saturdays, hardly knew what
day it was, I was going full blast. On weekends and at night late, I built equipment in my
shop. I found a lathe in the junkyard at the airbase that was all beat up. I found it, brought
it to the shop, welded all the pieces they broke up, made some little pieces, and had my first
good lathe.
“Then we expanded our shop with some trusses from Jack Mule’s
Wrestling Arena on Lee Street. He brought them over here; I made the joists and finished the
building. I bought a great big old lathe from Harry Gamberg’s junk yard out on 165 near the
South Circle. I used to cut pipe for him out there. Whenever I found something I could fix, I
bought it and took it home.”
Gary:” When you were growing your business, did you ever have
a time when you were in a financial bind?”
“Well, yeah! I remember when people wouldn’t pay. I had money
coming in, but there was one time when I had to make a payroll, and couldn’t, so I went to the
bank and borrowed several hundred dollars, or either jumped in my little Volkswagen and beat
the bushes, trying to pick up some money from people who owed me. I stayed down like that for
a long time, but I never owed a bill and couldn’t pay it. The only thing I had trouble with,
every now and then, was making payroll. James is familiar with that; everybody in business is
familiar with that. My wife would be the only one that wouldn’t get a paycheck on the
15th. I said,’ by the 20th, I’ll get you a paycheck.’”
James, son: “When you own a business, you are the last one to
get paid.”
“She would always ask why I got paid last, and I told her
that’s a part of it.”
Gary: “Did your wife help you run the office?”
“She got involved after a while. We did everything. Then I
used Al Randow, a Certified Bookkeeper, to keep the books.”
“My biggest problem, and I realize it now, was that I never
would charge enough—especially to the poor old guys that would come in here with their dump
trucks and log trucks. I did a lot of free work or charged them just what I could. In the
beginning my shop rate was $4.00 an hour for welding and $5.00 an hour to go outside and weld.
“I went as far away as Boyce. E. C. Manning called one time
about a bulldozer with a broken cast iron crankcase. All his oil flew out; he couldn’t start
the bulldozer or move it. I dug it out with shovels until I could crawl underneath it to weld
the cast iron, with that oily base on it. Manning wanted me to patch that sucker up so could
put oil in it and drive it off.”
James, son: “That’s amazing, because cast iron is hard to
weld. Welding cast iron upside down, overhead makes it that much more difficult, because cast
iron has to be perfectly clean before you can even weld it. I can’t believe that you did
that.”
Gary: “Did you ever encounter a problem you couldn’t deal
with?”
“I can’t think of one at the moment.”
James, son: “Gary, if I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a
hundred times. When Daddy was in the business, everyone in town knew that if something
couldn’t be fixed, the only place they could go was to Jimmy Hayes. He’d figure out a way to
fix it. Dad had a very good reputation. He doesn’t say he’s smart, but he’s really a genius.
He knows metal. My kids know computers; he knew that about metal. When you talk about
molecules lining up, he understands it completely.”
“My biggest problem, Gary, was getting the work out people
wanted me to do; I always had a backlog. I never, ever, ran out of work and didn’t advertise
one single time. I put my name on my truck, but I never advertised.”
James, son: “We still don’t to this day, which is unusual. We
never advertise.”
“Cleco had two or three stations for me to build. My work with
them had tripled. The shop was full of work, and I came down with what Dr. Rayburn called
Meniere’s syndrome. My wife and I were driving from my sister’s house in Parish, Tennessee.
Halfway home everything began to spin. I thought I was having a heart attack. When I stood
still, everything began to clear up, but the minute I turned my head, it would spin again.
When we got home, I went right straight to Dr. Rayburn’s office; he ran all kinds of tests and
said he figured I had something called Meniere’s syndrome. It made me sick and nauseated
whenever I moved.”
“I was right in the middle of that new construction at
Alexandria Seed. James was working over there. I told my son he was going to have to get with
this man and keep things going until I got to feeling better.
“I had all this work coming and couldn’t see how I was going
to get it done, but James was doing real well. The first week, I told them to call me if they
had any problems, but I didn’t hear a word. I thought I’d better go check, and when I went
down there, the whole shop was going smoothly. From then on, James more or less took the load
off me.
“We really needed a crane at that time. I’d never bought one,
because it cost a lot of money. James made payment arrangements with Horace Rand at American
Supply for a new crane, which added so much versatility to our business.”
James, son: “It took a long time to convince him; he was
afraid to buy, something that, at that time, was a quarter-of-a-million dollars piece of
equipment. I sat down and showed him, on paper, where this thing could pay for itself. Back in
those days they had what they called an investment tax credit. I showed him where we could buy
the machine, and how what we saved in taxes would pay for it, even if we never ran it. So that
was my way of convincing him to let me buy that crane.”
James, son: “Each crane, while it was being paid for, kind of
snowballed, but the manufacturing end of the business just kept picking. It picked up all the
way to the point now where the crane is what people know us for, because they see our cranes.
Last year, when I checked, the money we took in the crane business was 5% of what Hayes
Manufacturing took in.”
Gary: “I would have thought it was a big part of your
business.”
James, son: “Most people do. They think that the crane is
really our main business since we don’t advertise, but they don’t know what we have here. I
was about 21 when I started taking over the business. I did it reluctantly. I was afraid. I
was just a kid, 21 years old, taking over this business.”
Gary: “But you’d grown up working here.”
James, son: “Yeah. I started when I was twelve years
old.”
“I worked to get this thing started. When Jimbo took over, it
was just like he caught a pass, took off , and hit the goal line. That’s where I was trying to
go.”
James, son: “I watched him my whole life build machinery from
the junkyard.”
“That’s the only thing Jimbo did differently. He believed in
borrowing money and making it pay. His nerves are twice as strong as mine. I didn’t have nerve
enough to do that kind of stuff.”
Gary: “What kind of advice do you have for young people going
into business today?”
“Find something to do that you know a lot about, and really
enjoy doing, no matter what it is. If you do that, you’ll start making money at, it because
you’ll be good at it.”
Gary: “You obviously studied a lot. You said you found out how
to do those axles. You figured out a method and you just kept working and studying.”
“Yeah, I read how the molecules in iron work, and what heat,
chilling and making them hard does to them.”
Gary: “You weren’t only studying books, you also worked in
your shop, getting better at what you did.”
“Yeah. The things I didn’t have experience with, I learned
about them from reading. In other words, instead of you going through all the learning, you
can read it, and if you can absorb it, there it is. I’d look it up in books like the
Machinist Handbook. It’s got everything that you want to know about machine work, and
a lot about welding.”
James, son: “I want Daddy to tell you my favorite story about
what he did when he was in high school and gas was rationed. The kids had to walk to school or
ride the bus, but he had his own special way; he decided to build a car. But he didn’t have
the money to buy a motor for it. Tell him what you did.”
“Frank Ingram had a casket factory next to our house. I loved
to go inside. He had a lathe and woodworking tools. I built the first little go-cart. I took
one inch thick white oak, crisscrossed it, bolted it together, put it in the lathe, and turned
it round on the outside with a little wide groove. Then I took a rubber tire, and with a sharp
knife, cut a two-inch wide tread, put it around the wood, and put it together with nails that
go down, catch on, and hold the rubber on. I made my wheels. I drilled a hole in the center,
and drove a piece of half-inch pipe through it tight. That was my bearings.
“I had some half-inch or five-eighths steel rod that, over at
the casket factory, they used what they called a crushing board, to make wrinkled silk. I made
my axle out of it. I rode a bicycle down to the junk yard, got me a few pieces, but couldn’t
find a gasoline motor. At that time, they didn’t have a lawn mower with the motor turned
sideways. Everybody used reel mowers.
“Mrs. White, of White Real Estate, had a big yard on Masonic
Drive. They bought the first power mower in Alexandria. It had a little half-horsepower mower
on it, with a jackshaft to reduce it down to pull the wheels and turn the blades. Her son,
Paul White, and I were real good friends, and he used to go over there and use that mower to
cut the grass every week. And man, whenever I looked at that pretty little motor and that
little jackshaft, my mouth just watered.
“I finally got up the nerve to ask Paul to ask his Mama if she
would let me take that motor and jackshaft off and put it on my little car so I could ride it
to school. I said I’d put it back on every weekend, cut the grass for her, and then take it
off again. She let me do that, but gas was rationed, and you had to have those little coupons
for a few gallons of gas. I could go back and forth to school for a week on one quart of
gasoline.
“I drove that little thing to school and back. Boy, I was the
king of the hill. Everybody gathered around it at the school house where I left it. One day,
when I was coming home, the Town Talk man flagged me down. He wrote a nice little piece up in
the paper about how a high school kid solved the gas problem, and told all about the lawn
mower that held one quart of gasoline.”
James, son: “That’s innovation right there.”
“That’s what it’s all about—innovation. Of course, I made lots
of them after that. I even built my own motorcycle. My first one was an old junk Indian that
had been chained to a tree at an uptown service station for years. I bought it for $45, and
rebuilt it.”
James, son: “You know one of the reasons my father was so
successful is that he really, truly loved everything he did. He loved building and repairing
things, maybe with the exception of crawling underneath that bulldozer. He really took the
best of his God-given talent and combined that with knowledge, plus he wasn’t afraid of hard
work.”
James, son: “Daddy just loved building things, and I still do
too. I changed the business model a little bit, because the family got bigger. I watched my
daddy work hard seven days a week, building things. I had a different idea about how to do the
building. I didn’t have to start from nothing, like Daddy did. So, the second phase of Hayes
Manufacturing was really from all the hard work he did to get the business going.”
James, son: “He had credit established at the bank, so when he
handed the business over to me, I actually could go to the bank, and they would say, how much
money do you want, instead of I’m sorry. He couldn’t get $800.00. They saw that we were
successful, that we were making good decisions, so I bought new machinery and borrowed the
money for it, which is how business really works if it’s going to grow at a rapid
pace.”
Gary: “Right! That’s the only way to grow. So did your
business really start growing when the industry started moving here? Did that
coincide?”
James, son: “I saw opportunities, and really took a lot more
chances, but those chances were based on the skills we already had, ones that we developed.
I’m still a pretty conservative person, just not quite as conservative as my Dad. Every time I
wanted to take a chance, there wasn’t a business decision early on that I didn’t go to daddy’s
house and sit down and said, ‘This is what I want to do,’ because if anyone could shoot it
down, he would shoot it down, and then he’d tell me all the bad things which a lot of people
don’t want to tell you, the bad part of the decisions. But he could look at it and tell me
everything that could go wrong.”
Gary: “That’s right. Look at all the businesses that go boom
and then they are gone.”
James, son: “I think that’s because they don’t want to listen
to the bad part. I got my advice from my father; a lot of the advice no one else wanted to
tell me. I put all the good with the bad, and that’s when I came up with the decision of
growing Hayes Manufacturing to what it is right now.”
Gary: “Tell me about this growth phase, because we want our
entrepreneurs to know that everything isn’t gravy. Tell me about some incident where you came
up and said, ‘This was going to be it, I can’t get past this one,’ and how did you get past
it.”
James, son: “First of all I worked very hard; twelve,
fourteen, fifteen hour days. If you are afraid of hard work, you don’t need to be going into
business for yourself. Some people think they can take the easy road. They think the people
sit behind a desk and just have it made. It’s hard, hard work. There were many days, after
Daddy got sick, that he would still come out and look at some of these jobs, and we would all
be working hard. A lot of days I had each truck working with me, because, unless you inherit
money, if you are going to make something happen, you have to work for it. But there were many
days that Daddy didn’t know that I had the same problem he did—people not paying their bills,
worrying about how I was going to pay the bills and still make payroll. Things were pretty
sketchy at times. There’s a lot of worry, but the hard work is what made it pay off, helped us
get through the hard times.”
“One of the most important things I made James understand, and
he accepted it and went with it, is being honest; never do anything under the table, in any
form or fashion. Tell your customers just exactly like it is, and like it’s going to be,
regardless if you might have to take a little loss or a little gain, but never, never go under
the table to make money. He stayed right on the top. I guarantee you, that’s one of the best
reputations that Hayes Manufacturing has—they are honest.”
Gary: “I am so glad to hear you say that, because when I
interview entrepreneurs to go into our program, I tell them, these people who have been in
business five or ten years, that I am trying to help. I ask them, what’s the most valuable
thing your company has? They will say they have this piece of equipment or that , and I will
say, no, it’s your reputation. That is the most valuable thing that you have. You cannot lose
that.”
James, son: “I tell my kids that you can work your whole life
to establish a good reputation, but you can lose it overnight with one bad decision. And most
of the time that decision is based on greed.”
James, son: “I took up where Daddy left off, and continued
designing and building machines for companies. We really took a giant leap when I started
making specialized machinery people could not get anywhere else. So, we have some special
machinery we made ourselves, for our business, that’s one-of-a-kind. We make parts and do
manufacturing that no one else can. If you can set yourself aside from everybody else, you can
do well. It goes back to what Daddy said, finding something you love to do, because otherwise,
you couldn’t go through the endless hours of work to get this. You couldn’t stand it.”
“Exactly, there’s the difference between work and play. I told
everybody, and James knows this; I never worked a day in my life. You know, Einstein said
that. He never worked a day in his life. He enjoyed every minute of it, and that’s what it
amounts to.”
James, son: “I tell my employees that I want them to enjoy
their job. If you don’t enjoy what you do, then you need to find another job, no matter how
talented you are, because there’s more to life than just going out and just working your butt
off, and coming home and saying I hate my job.”
“I want you to come to my little shop at home. You’d just love
it to death. I have more grown people toys in there than you can shake a stick at, little
machines I built to do certain things with because you can’t buy one.”
James. Son: “That’s an invitation that you can’t turn
down. That’s a special place.”
Gary: “I’m going to do that.”
Note: If you would like to read the entire interview, (19 pages), please email the Director of Web Content: cledbetter@cenla.org