Kenneth Wright

Cone Mills Employee, Dye House Supervisor

“I started working at Revolution January or February 1966. I was still in high school at Page and in DE. I got out of school at noon and went to work from 3pm - 11pm Monday - Friday. I was the second shift shipping clerk. I would check off boxes of cloth as they were loaded on trucks. After I graduated I was promoted to supervisor trainee in the dye house. My job entailed learning the different jobs in the dye house. I left in March 1967 to join the Air Force. I returned to the mill in 1972 and was again a supervisor trainee. They started up a machine on second shift 3pm-11pm and put me in charge of it was 3 people running it. We more or less washed the rolls of cloth before sending it to the napping room where the put the nap or fuss on it. It was a boring job. In 1973 or 1974 a supervisor job on third shift came open and I ask for that job. There were 5 people on the shift and we dyed the yard before it went to the weave room. It was very hot, dirty work and there were fumes from all the dyes and chemicals in there. In 1974 I started at Rockingham Community College in Textile Technology and Management. I graduated in 1976 with an Associate in Applied Science. In 1979 the plant in Salisbury NC had newer machines and could dye more yard than we could so they started closing the dye house down. They moved me up to the preparation department where they prepared the undyed yard for the weave room. Things went south up there in 1980 and the mill was shutting down. They sent me down to the cloth room where the finished cloth was inspected and packaged in boxes and sent to shipping. White Oka was running some stretch denim. One employee and me would run it thru a machine called a heat set machine. We would stretch the cloth as it ran thru heat in the machine. The mill was mostly shut down by then in 1981. I received a call from the Post Office for employment and I left the mill. I retired from the Post Office in 2008. Working at the mill was hard work. I was lucky to get into management. We naturally made more than the hourly paid people. We had a fair retirement but I couldn’t say that for the workers. My next door neighbor worked for Cone 50 years and maybe got $50 a month. I just remember thinking when I left for the Post Office, I could not believe I stayed there as long as I did. I enjoyed working there and there were a lot of good people working there.”