My Story - Ashley McGhee Whittle

TITLE: Paul Brigmon’s Work

AUTHOR: Ashley McGhee Whittle

PERMISSION TO PUBLISH granted by the author. All rights reserved.

Daddy went to work around that time.  He started as a porter down at Grove Park Inn. I don’t think that lasted long from what I have been told. My suspicion is because he was prideful.  He’d leave and go to the garbage dump to haul garbage, and he’d take a shower and put on nice clothes before he went. So my guess about why that didn’t last at Grove Park Inn was because he probably felt like he was being looked down on.  He did have traits of African American heritage: super curly fuzzy hair, super dark-skinned in the summertime. It probably didn’t take much for people to look at him and say, “He’s got more than white in him.” And at that time period, that was not a good thing. He didn’t look down on other people, and he didn’t expect to be looked down upon himself. So he didn’t stay.

After that, Daddy met my Nana. My Nana’s name was Peggy Brown.  They met at a bar, a club over there in Asheville.  She was over there with a sister of hers named Penny. Daddy and his brother Bud were there, and Bud and Nana’s sister started dating. After they dated, then the sister started dating Daddy.  And then the sister split up the Daddy, and Nana ended up with him. And they got married. They moved to Old Fort, because that’s where she was from. All her sisters and her parents all lived on the same road, and that’s where they moved. That’s where I grew up, along the Catawba River. We were right there near the headwaters.

Daddy worked for Old Fort Finishing when he first went down to Old Fort. It was textiles [dyeing and finishing rayon fabric]. I remember growing up I couldn’t paint my toenails or take toenail polish off in the house because the smell reminded him of working down there. There was no union there. Now Nana, she worked at Old Fort Finishing, too. She was on a strike line, a picket line, at Old Fort Finishing. This was after Daddy had already gone to Norfolk Southern, and she lost her job for picketing and striking for the union. There’s a picture of her on the strike line in The McDowell News.

A Norfolk Southern job was advertised in the newspaper. He went for an interview. You had to do a basic skills test, and he passed it and got on as a brakeman first. Then he ended up becoming a conductor. Norfolk Southern is one of the few places here in the South that has unions. Just as soon as he was eligible to join, he did. He was a UTU man – United Transportation Union. He believed what the union stood for was workers like him. He believed that the South should have unions. He believed that workers needed that kind of support and that kind of protection from big business. He had many hats with UTU across the front, and he would wear them out in public. I’ve got bumper stickers on my car still that have union stuff on them. He still gets union newsletters, and he’s been dead since 2012.

He was a railroad man through and through.  Part of the reason he became so intertwined in that culture was because it gave him a way up and out.  Norfolk Southern uplifted him.  It allowed him to make more than a living wage at the time, and even after he retired, his pension was excellent. The man made it through eighth grade, worked for Norfolk Southern for 30 years, and ended up with close to a million dollars in stock. Everything in his stock account was in Norfolk Southern stock. It wasn’t diversified.  His financial advisor tried for years to move some of it into other stocks, but Daddy wanted to keep it all in Norfolk Southern stock.  That’s how loyal he was to Norfolk Southern.

I think it irritated my Nana sometimes because he was on call all the time.  They had the old black rotary phone in the house.  That damn thing would ring sometimes at two, three, four o’clock in the morning.  So when Norfolk Southern called, he went.  He was on call as a conductor – by his choice.  It was because it was more money. People could take permanent jobs, where they were at a permanent location and on a permanent schedule for Norfolk Southern, or you could be on call.  Back then when he was working, you weren’t guaranteed a raise.  Sometimes they’d call him and he’d work a twelve-hour shift, then come home and maybe sleep for five hours and get two hours in the garden. Then they’d call him back, and he’d go. They’d call him at six in the morning and tell him he needed to be in the yard by seven. He’d get up and grab him a shower real quick, grab him something to eat, and he would drive into the Asheville yard over here.  He’d come to the roundhouse, and they’d put him on a train, and he would help couple the train cars, make sure everything went by the rulebook. Then they’d get on the train and go down to Salisbury or Newton or wherever it was they were going.  They never went west.

He was often on coal trains that were two miles long.  Those coal trains, they had hundreds and hundreds of cars.  You don’t see that anymore.  Coming down Old Fort Mountain, that’s not a fun ride.  That’s steep.  He had a couple of friends who worked for Norfolk Southern who derailed. He never derailed, and he was very proud of that. They jumped off the train, and that was a sin.  Sometimes when he came back through Old Fort going to Asheville, he’d call Nana and let her know when he was going to be in Old Fort. We’d get in the car and come downtown, and we’d catch his train there in Old Fort and we’d follow it all the way up Mills Creek.  He’d come out on the back of the red caboose and wave.  One time we got up there to Andrews Geyser – that’s as far as you can go to follow the train – and I remember we could see him on the back of the train waving, and I got so upset.  I remember Nana asking me, “Why are you crying?”  I couldn’t – I couldn’t tell you now.  And he went on over, and we went back home.  

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