Written by:
Herbert Russell Justice
[typed/submitted to the web by Cathy Ann Abernathy]
Papa was born an April 1, 1874, near Talladega, Alabama, and married the first time in February 1894. Perna was born born on April 14, 1895
He farmed or worked on a farm or at a sawmill until 1900. At this time he started to work for the Central of Georgia Railroad and we lived at Zuber, a railroad crossing about one mile below Bon Air. We [he] moved to Cresswell in 1901 and to Calcis in June 1902, as section foreman. He kept this job until 1905, when he took over a new railroad job from Henry Ellen to Margaret Mines. We continued to live here, and he had a crew of men who stayed in railroad camp cars.
My mother died on May 30, 1906, and we five children lived with Grandma and Grandpa Justice near Childersburg for about a year. Papa re-married in May 1907, and he took back the section foreman job at Calcis. He held this job until December 1908, at which time he quit the railroad.
We moved into a house about halfway between Calcis and Vincent. The house was torn down years ago. We farmed and he hauled logs to a sawmill.
We moved to the Tennessee Quarry near Calcis in 1910. We farmed there and Papa hired Uncle Gadis and my cousin, Wood Justice, who was Uncle Willie’s son. They cut and hauled logs to the Dinks Line, which is [was] a narrow gauge railroad that ran from the sawmill at Halma (about a mile southest of Sterrett) about ten or twelve miles toward Westover
We moved to the two-story house in 1911. (This house burned in 1935 while Uncle Gadis was living in it.) Mr. Turner’s property went into new hands and the two lime kilns re-opened. Papa got the job as nightwatchman and Uncle Gadis and Wood continued to work for a year or more hauling wood to the lime kilns. The kilns burned during Christmas 1913, or shortly thereafter.
Papa then bought eighty acres of timber land and hauled logs to Mr. Tom Elliott’s sawmill in 1914. We cleared up over twenty acres of this land and put a fence around it. There was no stock law here at that time; so all fields had to be fenced.
In 1915, we cultivated this land and a little other. We also farmed and cultivated it in 1916. In July 1916, on the fifth day it started raining, and it rained continuously for twenty-six days. We had twenty-two acres in cotton, which until the rain started, we thought would make at least fifteen bales. The boll weevils hit and almost cleaned it out and also everybody else’s cotton. We picked one and one-half bales; so this left us in a very bad shape financially.
I was twenty years old in April 1915, so I got a job in October with T. C. I. Inc. [Tennessee Coal and Iron Incorporated] in Birmingham, where I worked until August 1917, when I was drafted into the Army. On September 23, 1917, I left Birmingham for Camp Pike, Arkansas, which was north or Northwest of Little Rock.
In 1919, Papa, Mr. W. L. Garrett (Ed’s daddy) and Mr. C. S. Darling opened up a little business in the old store building,w hich we have operated ever since. They named their business Calcis Produce Co., the name it carried until Papa’s death.
Also, in 1919, I was discharged from the Army Hospital and got back home. A law was passed for the federal government to send all sidabled veterans to college if they wanted to go. I put in an application to go to Auburn, but could not get in at that time. They sent me to Mississippi A. & M., which is now Mississippi State. In about two months I was transferred to Auburn. I came home from Auburn in July 1922 and settled down here and worked with Papa in the business.
Our business grew and we spread into general furnishing business for farmers who lived close by. In 1925, Papa bought the store building and thw two houses next to the store, and we moved into the old Turner house next to the store.
Everything went good through 1928, and we gradually increased our business. All this time cotton brought from twenty to twenty-five cents per pound. In the late fall of 1928 and spring of 1929, it dropped to seventeen cents. I didn’t like the way things looked, but thought the Papa’s judgment was better than mine; and he was very bullish; so we plunged more in 1929 than at any prior time. We bought eleven cars of fertilizer and the other things in proportions, so that fall we had forty thousand dollars owing to us. We also owed a great deal.
In the fall of 1929 cotton dropped to five cents per pound; and although the farmers made a very good crop, they could not pay half of what they owed. So that put our business in a very bad shape.
Ed Garrett had lost his job in Birmingham and moved back to Calcis. I pulled out of the business as I had the post office and a small pension and could get along on this. Ed and Papa continued the business. The price of cotton stayed down at five cents; so that fall they could not pay what they owed. But Papa wa still bullish, so they conitnued on in 1931, buying a fertilizer bill on credit, so that fall they could not pay this bill, a bank loan of twenty-three hundred dollars, and about three thousand dollars of mercantile bills. Also that year the doctor found that Papa had tuberculosis and put him to bed for twelve months.
The next spring when it was time to start a new crop, I knew Papa was not able to get up and run the business. I asked him if he wanted me to come and run it, and he said he did.
I had an insurance policy that I borrowed fifteen hundred dollars on and managed by Mr. Mike Goldberg’s help to make a bank loan of fifteen hundred. So with this and some credit help from those I bought some of our goods from, I managed to get through until fall. I did not buy any fertilizer and got everybody on a much lower scale of living than they had been used to having, so I got the business turned around. This was 1932.
That fall cotton was still five cents per pound. But, instead of selling it at this price, Mr. Smith, who ran a warehouse and bank in Sylacauga made a deal with a cotton mill in Columbus, Georgia to take the cotton at five cents per pound and allowed us to hold title to it until July 1933, based on cotton futures market. I think we had something over two hundred bales that we put in this way. In march 1933 Franklin Roosevelt went in as President and the first thing he did was to close all the banks that had not already been forced out of business.
Congress then enacted an insurance law guranteeing all bank deposits which is commonly known as FDIC. After the banks were reopened, all the markets began to go up and the cotton price jumped briskly. Papa was able to sell what we had for around eight cents per pound, and got enough to pay his bank loan and all other debts that he owed, except the six thousand dollar fertilizer bill. He about fifteen hundred dollars over, which put him in a very good position.
He had one hundred fifty bales of cotton he put in Parker’s warehouse in the fall of 1931, so by 1933, the price had gone up so he sold it at twelve and one-half cents per pound and got enoguh out of it to pay all storage charges and the fertilizer bill.
He had recovered from tuberculosis, and now with all of his debts paid and about fifteen hundred dollars of his own money, I felt he was about the happiest man living. He bought a new Ford truck and got out quite a bit in the spring of 1934. He and Ed would go to the mule sales in Birmingham, and every week or two they would go to Birmingham and buy a load of feed, flour and other things they needed at the store. They expanded the bunisess a little, and everything went good until July.
At this time he got sick and took a bad stomach infection, called peritonitis. We carried him to the Woodlawn Hospital. We went there to see Dr. Stephens who owned and operated the hospital, but he was in Mississippi. So another doctor, Dr. Wallace, talked him and my step-mother into taking an operation, without consukting any other docotr or anyone else. The next day he died; which was the most tragic thing that ever happened to me, and of course to all the family.
Now, today I want to say as I felt at that time and have felt since, that all of his children and others wanted and expected me as much as I could to fill his place. This I have not been able to do, but I have done my best. I felt like then uf he could have expressed his will that he would have asked me to take his place.
Now, I have tried all this time (and it is now near the end of 1975) and am still trying to thank God that I and my brothers and sisters had such a great man as our father. He was the most honest man I ever knew. He was very kind and considerate, and had great sympathy for all that were in need. He was the most fearless man I [document ends mid-sentence...]
[Does anyone have the remainder of this text?]
—
Cathy
weavercat@gmail.com
