March 6, 1937

Edward T. Snelling,  Charlotte, North Carolina

Ford factory worker

Interviewers: John Nisbet and Mike Lebov


"I was born in 1897 in a town called Charlotte, North Carolina, in Mecklenburg county. My Ma and Pa were quite well off with money and we lived in a nice house. In our house was my Ma, Pa, sister, and two brothers.
    Edward got his first real job at 14 sweeping the floor of  "Ray's" grocery store. His nickname as a kid was "Teddy" because he always carried a teddy bear around and with him to school and kids made fun of him. He is a 6 foot 2 inch white male who works at a local Ford manufacturing plant of automobiles. The plant employees 1000 people and produces 400 cars per day. It  is established in Charlotte to supply the demand for cars in the Southeast. In 1929, North Carolina was in love with cars, by that year North Carolina had 422,612 automobiles, that is one for about every seven people.
 

"I bought a 1926 Ford when I turned 29 years old. I loved that car so much. I am very fortunate to still own my carbecause most people lost their cars or could just not afford them after the depression. Most people at service stations no longer said "fill 'er up" because they could not afford the gas. About one sixth of  North Carolina's vehicles were in Charlotte. Ford was the most popular car in North Carolina because it was cheap, selling at $435. The runner up was Chevrolet."
 

Edward began to notice that employees were being laid off and production was slack.  He owned stock in Ford and it started dropping.  Therefore, he could take a hint and quickly sold his stock and retrieved all of his money from the bank. Some of his friends and people that he consulted about financial situations had warned him that this system was shaky and was bound to collapse at any moment. He put the cash in a safe in his house, because he did not trust the banks. Teddy could tell that business was low, even for Ford in North Carolina.  The sales of new motor vehicles plummeted from 73,792 in 1929 to 40,251 in 1930 to 18,998 in 1991.  Gas prices dropped due to low demand. It fell from 24 cents to 20 cents a gallon by 1930. Another sign of the depression was the number of  "bums" that were wondering around the street.

"Around every corner I saw more homeless people begging for some spare change. It even got hard to drive or walk to your destination because people are begging for your business. There are some people selling apples for a nickel, and people offering to shine your shoes or some other small act of courtesy. Since I am a religious man I would often give money to certain charities.   Then when the housing projects were built, some homeless went there. A lot of the factories and stores are going out of business due to not being able to pay their rent on their buildings and nobody has any money to support the businesses. I was lucky enough to be one of the few selected workers at my plant to keep their job, so therefore I made money to keep a steady income while many others lost everything they owned. I never did loose very much money because I was unaffiliated with the stock market and the banking system. I kept my beloved car and for me things where actually easier then before with the drop of gas prices and other things."

Although when Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the New Deal, Teddy could see things getting better for most of the unfortunate people. He thought the depression helped North Carolina.


 

Bibliography

1. Bell, John. Hard Times. Raleigh: North Carolina division of archives and history, 1982.

2.Brownlee, Farnbrough. Winsston-Salem: A Pictorial History. Norfolk, Virginia: Donning
       Copanny publishers, 1977.

3. (Collector Car Corral). Classic Cars 1998. http://www.carcoral.com/. May 19, 1999.

4.Tindall, George Brown. The Emergence of teh New South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
        University Press, 1967.

5.Terrill, Tom E., and Hirsch, Jerrold, Southern Voices of the Thirties. Chapel Hill: Univeersity of
        North Carolina press, 1978.

6.Robinson, John L. Living Hard: Southern Americans in the Great Depression. Washington: University Press of America, 1981.