From High School To First Jobs

This covers the period from 1958 until February or March 1961 - when she was working at the place where she would spend the rest of her life - and when I came on the scene.

Brenda wanted to go off to school - perhaps to one of the all-girl schools like Peace and maybe study design. She always had a flair for design (so did her father); when she was young she liked to draw dresses. Later in our own houses she made design projects out of various rooms. It was a running joke that she would sacrifice practicality for appearance. Statuary always decorated (and blocked) doorways. (Her modesty regarding her talent was extreme. She claimed to be retarded and liked to tell stories about how her father and other people would criticize her dress designs - calling them impractical.)

With Curtis’ business fully on the skids by now there wasn’t money to send Brenda off to school so she went Howard’s Business College in Shelby to learn how to be a secretary. I don’t know who paid for this - but I think her father managed to scrape up the money.

Howard’s was a small place that did not exist for too long. It was managed (owned?) by Hemon (sp?) Carpenter, the brother of Brenda’s boyfriend Jerry. I think Brenda went there for a year - maybe two. She took various business-related courses, including psychology. She liked the school and got along well with her classmates. It is my impression that she actually enjoyed hanging around the break room with other students drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and listening to bawdy stories told by some of the older women (Randy Logan, a famously wild woman from that era might have been a student at that time.)

Either during or shortly after Howard’s, Brenda worked part-time for her father as a secretary.

Her first full-time job was with a company called Woodward Warren. It was a commercial refrigeration company located in an old building somewhere downtown, maybe on DeKalb street near the First Baptist Church. Brenda said that the main office was in Charlotte and that owner opened this branch so that he could be near his girlfriend who evidently lived in Shelby. Brenda didn’t have much to do. She fed pork rinds to the rats who eventually became half-tame. She especially liked one black and white rat. Sometimes her mother would stay with her and feed the rats.

Her second job, the one that would last a lifetime was as a secretary with the local Right-of-Way branch of the Highway Department. She started sometime in the Spring of 1960, near her birthday on May 1st - when she became 20 years old. She stayed there until 2004.

I am not sure how she got the job. I think maybe Hilton Eades, the man who would become her first boss, called Howard’s and asked for a recommendation. From the beginning Eades treated her as more than a secretary. He taught her about reading plans - how the process worked. The job became Brenda’s refuge and salvation - in some respects, her life.

I am not sure where Jerry Carpenter - her boyfriend - was in all this. Her got a baseball scholarship to Carolina but was required to work in the school cafeteria to help pay expenses. He could not bear to serve food to the “rich kids” and quit. By the time I came on the scene in February or March of 1961 he was in the Army. At some point he had asked Brenda to marry him and she had refused. She never was exactly clear about their status when I called. But it was my understanding that they were no longer together. I don’t know - never thought to ask - who broke up with whom. Possibly it was he who gave up on her. Brenda tended not to initiate major moves - life happened to her, not the other way around.