Howard Herron Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Howard Berron 64
Q: Did they ever have dances when you were in school?
A: No, see I never went past the eighth grade. That's as far as I got.
I had to quit the eighth, I quit school at the eighth grade and went to
work at the tile yard and from the tile yard to the coal mine in order to
help my father pay the doctor bills. We had a doctor come out here from
Springfield, a chiropractor and we just as well throwed our money in the
street. But we tried. As long as your mother's sick, you do anything to
help her. We learned to cook, all of us. And that was another thing Mr.
Hedrick and Ms. Lanham would do. I would sit home this week and do the
cooking and my mother would tell us from the bed what to do and we all
learned to cook. Everyone of us can prepare as good a meal as anybody
and I've stayed in good hands ever since. Well any way my older brother
and I would be working and staying home and cooking and the housework,
Ms. Hedrick would bring the homework home and she'd sketch it out and
then I'd do it and that's the only way we kept our schooling up.
Q: Well, that's good.
A: And Ms. Lanham did the same thing with my older brother. He was
ahead of me in school and when Ms. Lanham was teaching, well, she'd make
it out and give it to me and I'd take it home and give it to my brother.
Geography, arithmetic and that.
Q: When you were a boy, you had a lot of different jobs and you worked
hard. Did you ever at moments say I want to be something when I grow up?
Was there something in particular that you thought you'd like to do?
A: Well, yes. I never gave it much thought as long as I was, until I
was working in the coal mine and the coal mine was figuring on closing
down. There was rumor that they were closing down and I said, "I'm going
to get out of this business." I said, "I worked in a coal mine a11 my
life and I never will own one." And so I got a job selling cars for
Latham Motor Company and I had told you that before. So 1 sold cars for
Latham Motor Company for about a year and then he sold the business to
some fellows from Clinton or Lincoln, Illinois. A fellow named Bob
Tribbit came to manage it, the Ford Motor Sales, and so that's when I got
my fingers mashed off and I got $750. That's when I told you prior to
this when I went into the bank and got the backing of the bank to go to
the General Motors meeting in St. Louis and get the Chevrolet franchise.
I went two years after I started, or two and half years after I started.
I quit the coal mine and started to work there. I said, "I owned a
business of my own, so I was headed right." So I stayed, sold
automobiles until I was in the automobile business practically in and out
for--I sold the Chevrolet and brought the Ford. I kept it a while and I
sold it and the war come on and I volunteered. Well, before that, after
I had sold out, I sold cars for Metropolitan Chevrolet Company in
Springfield and then World War I1 came on and I volunteered for war work.
You had no cars to sell. There were seventeen salesmen there and I
belonged to the One-hundred Car Club and I sold one-hundred cars in a
year. You had to sell one-hundred cars a year and they all had a big
turkey banquet. The guys that won, divided up in teams and the team that