Old Joe

I get a lot of grief about my Southern ways and view of the world. My life has been driven by the world as I see it and how I was raised. Being called a racist seems really odd considering my life experience.

The other day two young black men came out to my house to clean gutters and windows. They were efficient and did a good job, but I suspect that my home was bigger than they expected because it was dark and well past six when my wife and I headed out to dinner and they were still at it. 

While they were working on that final window I approached the two of them and thanked them for staying at it, asked if they needed anything and handed to team leader still on the ladder a hundred dollar bill, telling them both it was a little extra for the effort.

I got a fist bump from the guy on the ladder but the younger kid removed his gloved right hand to shake mine. 

I'm not surprised, as they both were super polite and respectful from the moment they rang the doorbell.

Which made me think about "Old Joe". 

Old Joe 

Years ago, my grandfather relocated his family to Tennessee to become the new superintendent of the International Harvester Company Chattanooga plant.  

The day the new “boss-man” arrived the local IH company men, were ready to proudly give their new boss a tour of the massive plant.

Offices, quality control, paint shop, the warehouse area, safety inspections department, and finally the shop floor were on the tour list. He shook hands with all he met. He greeted engineers, officer workers, draftsmen, welders, pressmen, fabricators, he shook hands with them all.

Working his way around the shop floor and lead by a group of men in suits and shop foremen in overalls, he had already met more than 50 employees when he noticed a shop worker pushing a broom and glancing his way. He also noticed that the man was wearing only one glove.

My grandfather asked the assistant super about the man pushing the broom. The super replied oh he’s nobody just a laborer. My grandfather pressed his junior about the man’s name. That’s “Old Joe” the assistant superintendent replied.

My grandfather then insisted on speaking to “Old Joe” promptly heading in the laborer’s direction.

Joe was an older black man, and my grandfather had noticed his gloveless right hand. You see Joe, hearing that the new boss man was going to tour the plant had removed his right-hand glove and tucked it into his back pocket, so that if the new boss came by, he would be ready to shake the new man’s hand. That fact was not lost on my grandfather who was happy to shake the black man’s hand.

In the Chattanooga plant at the time there were more than five hundred workers, but only 3 of them were black in the then highly segregated South. A white man shaking a black man's hand in the south was just not done at the time.

My grandfather would learn from Joe that he had been at the plant since Harvester took over the operation in 1919. 

A year after my grandfather’s arrival “Old Joe” was on the job when a fire broke out. The company fire team was unable to get water to the fire and the entire plant was in danger of burning.  Fortunately, “Old Joe” knew the location of necessary water standpipe valves to reroute water to the overhead sprinkler system and within minutes the fire was out. 

Today my grandfather’s large collection of scale working IH tractor models resides at the Smithsonian in Washington DC as does the original photo of “Old Joe” with the caption “typical southern negro”.