THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL SOUTHERN ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Carolina Piedmont Project Interview with LOY CONNELLY GLONIGER June 18, 1980 Charlotte, North Carolina By Allen Tullos Transcribed by Jean Houston Original transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection Louis Round Wilson Library
ALLEN TULLOSi When were you born? LOY CONNELLY CLONIGERt June the seventh, 1893. ATj What did your parents do? CLONIGERi My dad was a contractor. ATi Built houses? CLONIGERi Yes. AT i What about your mother? CLONIGERi She didn't do any work. AT* How many brothers and sisters did you have? CLONIGERi There was five girls and four boys. AT i So your mother looked out for all the children and cooked and washed the clothes and kept house. CLONIGERi Yes. ATi When did you come here to Charlotte? CLONIGER, 1917. ATi What did you do? CLONIGERi I first started off oiling the motors on the streetcars and. switching the cars in at night when they come in. Had. eight tracks out there. Then I worked up to night foreman. That's when the strike took place, when I was night foreman. AT i How did you get that first job? CLONIGERi I had a brother; he was streetearring. ATt He worked for the streetcars. CLONIGERi He rode a bicycle from Gastonia [chuckle over here and got a job. ATi What was his job? CLONIGERi He was a streetcar man. ATi A conductor?
CLONIGER 2 CLONIGERi A conductor, yes. Well, he'd run the motor and conduct sometime. One-man car, he acted as the motorman and conductor. ATi And so he helped get you the job? CLONIGERi Yes. And my sister's husband used, to wind, the armatures, the motors. And he was the master mechanic here, too, over the streetcars. ATi What was his name? CLONIGERi W. V. Osborne. He's dead now. He's got a son that's a lawyer here, Wallace Osborne. ATi Did most of the people who worked for the streetcar company come from around this part of the country? CLONIGERi Different sections, and different towns around. AT i What do you remember about the strike? CLONIGERi I had charge of it at night, ATi Of the car barn? CLONIGERt Yes. And I was standing right in front of the streetcars; they was all in the barn. The policemen had cushions out of the cars, down between the streetcars, sitting on them. I was standing right in front of the guns when the shooting took place. They killed an engineer. Found him down there at that laundry. Another boy was killed in front of the streetcar. Pound, him under a big tree over there. There used to be a big two-storey home; a Lethco had it and owned the laundry. I forget how many was killed that night. ATt About five all together. CLONIGERi I was standing right there when them guns went off, AT i The police were on the outside? CLONIGERi The police was between the streetcars, only they had. cushions out of the streetcars, setting on them. ATi They were outside of the barn.
CLONIGER 3 CLONIGERi Yes, They were right in the front. The ends of the streetcars were right in the front of the barn. They were setting between there. That was a mess, I'm telling you, boy. ATi Where were you, exactly, In front of the policemen? CLONIGERi Standing right in front of a streetcar. And shooting ATi Who started the shooting? CLONIGERi Walter Orr was chief of police, and a fellow Wilson from north Charlotte I think he was kind, of a rough guy was out there, and some policeman knocked him down with his gun. When he did, why, there was a crowd around the lightpost in front of the barn there. Chief Orr said, "Get back, every damn one of you." And they commenced running, and the police commenced shooting. AT i So the police started the shooting first, CLONIGERt They was the only ones that shot, as I know of. Wasn't nobody Tthatl shot out there; they run, ATi They were running away from them. CLONIGERt Yes, Getting scattered out, AT i Why did the police shoot them? CLONIGERi I don't know. To break it up, I guess. AT i What did you do when all that was going on? CLONIGERi I just stood there right in front of a streetcar. Some of the police that was in the car had the windows down, shooting in windows. They'd lower them windows. (Interruption^ AT i Why was it that the Wilson man came to the car barn? CLONIGERi He come out of the crowd out there. ATi Why did he come over there?
CLONIGER 4 CLONIGERi See, we had strike-breakers back there, too. AT i Where were they from? CLONIGERt Oh, all over the North somewhere. ATt They weren't from around here, CLONIGERi No. They had. regular strike-breakers at that time. And. they slept in the paint shop back there and. would eat up in the powerhouse. The powerhouse was right next to the streetcar barn. A lot of people wanted to say they done the shooting. It wasn't them; it was the police done the shooting, because they was back in the paint shop. AT t Did Mr. Wilson work for the streetcar company? CLONIGERt No, he was from north Charlotte. AT i What was he doing down there? CLONIGERt I don't know. He just come down just like the crowd, ATi Just because there was a crowd, CLONIGERt He wanted to see what was going on, ATi Were any of the men that worked, on the streetcars in the crowd? CLONIGERi No. Wasn't none of them out there. ATi Why was it, you reckon, that crowd got together? What caused that crowd to form? CLONIGERt I don't know. Just because the strike was going on, and them strike-breakers was down there or something. Somebody said something about, they said they was going to go back there and get the strike-breakers, but man, they had all kind of guns and everything, _Chucklej And the strike-breakers would take a streetcar out and run it and keep what they took in. They sent them word from north Charlotte that they had a Hindenburg Line over there, to send a streetcar over there. rchucklej But they wouldn't send one over there. They'd tear it up, see, ATi They had a Hindenburg Line.
CLONIGER 5 CLONIGERt Yes. ATi Why did that happen in north Charlotte? CLONIGERi They were in favor of the streetcar men. ATi There were lots of the textile workers over there in north Charlotte. CLONIGERi Yes. They had textile mills over there. ATt And they were supporting the streetcar workers. CLONIGERt Yes. AT i Do you remember there being a textile strike before the streetcar strike, in north Charlotte? CLONIGERi NO, I don't remember nothing about that. (Interruption] ATi This story says that Clem Wilson was the Wilson fellow's name. CLONIGERI I believe that was his name. AT i And he was just a kind, of a trouble-maker sort of a character? CLONIGERI Yes, they figured he was kind of a rough kind of guy. ATi It says the policeman knocked him down. CLONIGERi Yes, hit him down. Hit him with a gun, and Walter Orr, the Chief of Police, was standing there with that bunch at the light, right in front of the barn. Oh, as far as from here to that lamp over there. And he said, "Get back, every damn one of you." He was talking to the crowd. When they started running, he run back to the streetcar before they commenced shooting. ATi This story that we have here says Clem Wilson came out and the policeman knocked him down, and then the Wilson boy's brother came out to see the chief. CLONIGERi Yes, he come out there, too, I think. AT i A little later on. CLONIGERi Yes. 1 Interruption]
CLONIGER 6 ATi One of the people that died was an engineer for the Southern Railway. CLONIGERi Yes. They found him over there at the laundry. It was kind of a little low place. They found him laying down in there. And they found one across the street under a big tree. And they commenced loading up what was shot in the legs around and getting them to the hospital in cars. ATi Did you know any of the people that were killed? CLONIGERt No, I didn't know them. T Interruption] AT i What did you think about all this union business while it was going on then? What side were you on? CLONIGERt I belonged to the union. But I was night foreman, and they let me work on. ATi You didn't go out on the strike. CLONIGERi NO. They agreed for me to stay there, because I was night foreman. ATi Who agreed? CLONIGERt The union, all the men. AT i Who was the leader of the union? CLONIGERi I don't remember now. iinterruption] ATt Did you ever hear of this man named A.E. Jones? CLONIGERi NO. ATi He's the name that we have as one of the organizers that came with the Amalgamated.,. CLONIGERi I didn't know ATi And there was a John J. Williams. Do you remember anybody named John J. Williams?
CLONIGER? CLONIGERi No. (Interruption^ ATi What led up to the strike? What kind of conditions, or why was it that the workers wanted to have a strike? CLONIGERi I think they wanted more money, so they got organized and then the company got strike-breakers in here. Try to knock it up, you know. The paint shop was back there next to the railroad. Some guy told some of the union men if they'd give him so much money, he'd blow them the strike-breakers Asked him how he would do it. He said he'd take dynamite and put him a board out of there. in the ground and light the dynamite and shoot it up on top of the paint shop. And dynamite pressure goes down, you know. The union streetcar men wouldn't agree to that. Said he'd blow them out. )Chucklej ATt The strike-breakers. CLONIGERi Yes. ATi So they didn't support any kind of violence. CLONIGERt No. AT i Were all the streetcar workers pretty much together? CLONIGERi Just a few of them didn't join the union. We had a boy that died here just a few weeks back. He wouldn't join, a mechanic. He lived back over here at He was from Griffin, Georgia, out from Atlanta, He never would join the union. Every time we'd get a raise, he'd brag about it. An old nigger back there greasing the busses said, "Mr. Bill, the union got it for you." He'd tell Fbim! that. AT i Did the black and the white workers both join the union? CLONIGERt Yes. AT t Did the black and white workers meet together? CLONIGERt Yes.
CLONIGER 8 ATi Was there any race problem over that? CLONIGERi No. This is a union button I got here a while back. AT t What does that say? CLONIGERi Twenty year. ATi Which union? CLONIGERi The Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. ATi Why did the strike end? After those people were killed, then what happened? CLONIGERi The company officials and the men got together and agreed to go back to work, is all I know. ATi Did the union feel like it had won or not? CLONIGERt No, I don't believe they did. ATi Do you remember what you got out of the strike? CLONIGERt No, I don't remember whether they got a raise or what. I don't think we did, though. I think they told what wanted to come back to work to come; what didn't, why, they fired. ATi One of the things that the union wanted, as I understand it, was to be a part of the national union, the Amalgamated. Association. CLONIGERi Yes. ATi But they didn't get that. Mr. Taylor and those people wouldn't go along with that. CLONIGERi No. AT i Do you remember that? CLONIGERt Yes. Old man Z. V. Taylor was president at that time. ATi What did the union workers think about him during that time? CLONIGERt I don't think they liked him much )chucklej, but couldn't say much. ATi After the strike was over, did a lot of the men go back?
CLONIGER 9 CLONIGERt About all of them, yes. ATt Did the company fire any of them that were union leaders? CLONIGERi No, I don't think so. AT* What was your job? CLONIGERi I was night foreman at that time. ATi So you stayed on as night foreman, CLONIGERi Yes. ATt What were your other jobs? CLONIGERt I used to wind them armatures in motors. Did all kind of electrical work on the streetcar, controllers and all that stuff. Go out and put them on the track when you'd get off and everything. AT i How long did you work with the streetcar company? CLONIGERt I worked forty-one years in all, but I forget now how many years I worked for City Coach when they took over. The city's got it now. I think I worked five or six years for them. The rest of it was Duke Power. ATi So you stayed with that same company all the time that you worked. You never did any other kind of work? CLONIGERt No. ATi When did you retire? CLONIGERt When I was sixty-five. ATt And you retired from the City Coach? CLONIGERt Yes. ATi What were you doing then? CLONIGERi I was winding armatures, winding them motors. They had a meeting down there, and old man Dunket(?) was over all the streetcar boys. And Duke Power turned over $700,000 to City Coach for retirement money. Me and Ashe retired from City Coach. We get our retirement checks from
CLONIGER 10 Jacksonville, Florida, every month. ATt Was work on the streetcars in any way a dangerous kind of work to do? CLONIGERt Oh, yes. A fellow King got killed when this trolley fell out here next to Lakewood. We had pick-ups insulated out of fiber to pick the wire up and had a rope to tie it up somewhere. He got out and was trying to pick it up and got a-hold of it, and it killed him. I've been stuck hundreds of times on top. Grab a pole and get it all, 550. I expect I had it a hundred times. AT 1 Can you remember anything else about that time when the strike was going on that you hadn't talked about? CLONIGERi Only thing, Mr. Ramseur was the inspector over the streetcars, and he was there that night the shooting took place, standing behind one of them brick columns between the tracks. Old man Sutton was the claim agent for Duke Power. He had me and Mr. Ramseur up there in his office. And we told him just exactly what we thought, and he didn't have us back no more, AT* What did you all tell him? CLONIGERi We told him just what happened, about Chief Orr telling them to get back, every damn one of them, and the police started shooting. We told him all that. He didn't call us back any more. ATi Do you think a lot of the people who were in that crowd were from north Charlotte? CLONIGERt I don't know where they were from. ATi Were you and Mr. Ramseur the only streetcar workers that were there? CLONIGERt Yes, me and him was the only ones that was there, [interruption] AT 1 Where did you live when you were working then? CLONIGERt When I moved to Charlotte, I moved up here at the second light, right next there. They called it the Flatiron Building. I moved upstairs when I first come to Charlotte.
CLONIGER 11 AT* How long did you live there? CLONIGERt I don't remember, but I moved down then on Eustis Avenue, across from the streetcar barn. AT i Why did you do that? CLONIGERt I don't know. [Laughter AT* Was it so you could walk to work? CLONIGERi The rent, I believe, was cheaper. Then I moved back over there right off of South Tryon, and. I bought that place out yonder in 1920 and moved out there. I've been out there, it'll be sixty-one years, I believe, in August. ATi How would you get to work when you lived out there? CLONIGERt I had a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. [Laughter J Used to take my wife a-rewing around on it. I wouldn't have one now if you give it to me, I used to go out to the Fairgrounds and ride that thing around in there. Not now, though, ATt Tell me a little bit about your wife and her family and how you met her. What was her name? CLONIGERt Her name was Ellen Morris. AT i Where was she from? CLONIGERt She was born out from Old Fort. They had a farm out there, and. they sold it and moved to Cliff side, I believe they called it. And you know what they got an acre for that land? AT i A dollar? CLONIGERi A dollar an acre. ATi What did her family do? CLONIGERt They raised stuff on that farm in the mountains. There was eleven girls and no boys in her family. There's one living now in Gastonia, and ten dead.
CLONIGER 12 AT i What did they do when they moved to Cliff side? CLONIGERt I think they worked in the mill up there in Cliffside. ATi All the children went to work in the mill. CLONIGERi What was old enough, yes. ATt How did you meet her? CLONIGERt My youngest sister lived there in Gastonia. They built them a house. Her husband is dead. And I met my wife at a Seventh Day Adventlst tent meeting. I took her home from that tent that night. That's when I first met her, right there where my sister lives now. ATi How long did you all go together before you got married? CLONIGERt I guess it was two years or over. All the boys tried to get her from me. My wife was a beautiful woman.old rich boy(?) over there wanted to know how Cloniger ever got that pretty little Morris girl. She was a good Christian, too. Her mother was church-going and a Christian, ATt What religion did they belong to? CLONIGERt I believe her mother belonged to the Lutheran Church. ATi What were you brought up as? CLONIGERt A Methodist. ATi When did you all get married? CLONIGERi 1915. My wife was seventeen, and. I think I was about twenty. AT* Did you go off to World War I? CLONIGERi No, I had one child, my oldest boy. I went up and registered up here at the courthouse, and they put me in Class IV, and I missed it. If they'd went on just a little longer, they'd have got me. AT 1 Do you remember the company giving you all a couple of little pay raises in 1918, before the strike took place? CLONIGERi No, I don't remember nothing about that.
CLONIGER 13 ATi The cost of living got to be higher while the War was going on. Do you remember? CLONIGERi No, I don't remember. I know I was working carpenter work in Gastonia. Two dollars a day was top pay for a finished carpenter. I come over here and went to work for $1.75 & night, thirteen hours a night, seven nights a week. And they offered me nine dollars a day to go to City Point, Virginia, to carpenter. Some of the boys went. I didn't go. They was building a powder plant for World War I at City Point, Virginia, But I was kind of glad I didn't go. That was a fly-by-night thing, [would have 1 km «been over with. But that was some money, nine dollars a day, go from two dollars to nine, ATi How many children did you have? CLONIGERt I've got two girls and two boys. AT* What did they do when they grew up? CLONIGER* The oldest boy worked up here for Duke Power in the office a few years, and then he went to Salisbury to that power plant out there, Buck(?) Steam Plant. And he was chief clerk out there, and he was with them about forty-two years. He retired here a while back at sixty-two. The other boy.,, BEGIN TAPE I SIDE II CLONIGER* He worked over in the streetcar stock room a while. He joined the Navy. When he come out, he rode on the county police(?) seven years. He went back up there then and was assistant court clerk for about twelve years, and the city took the county court over. And he went to dispatching, taking calls and sending cars out. He had twenty-some years, but he retired at fifty-seven. He's single, and he stayed with me. I lost my wife in '72.
CLONIGER 14 AT* What became of your daughters? CLONIGER* One of them works for a movie outfit up here now. She's got an office to herself, up on South Tryon. And the other one's over the ladies down at Stylecraft Packing, down here at the old Shell plant. AT* Going back to this strike business one more time, were there any hard feelings after that was over with in the company, from the workers? CLONIGERt Not as I know of. I Interruption J AT t Do you remember when the electricians were going to join the strike, and somebody cut the power off and had a blackout back then? CLONIGERt No, I don't remember that. ATi Do you remember some of them, after all this was over with, trying to have a recall election to vote out the mayor that they had while the strike was going on, McNinch, and have a new election? CLONIGERt No, I don't remember nothing about that. AT i Did the union that you all belonged to keep on going and help the streetcar workers out after the strike was over and everybody went back to work? CLONIGERi I don't remember. I think it fell through after a while. AT i Do you remember any strikes in the textile mills here in 1929 or 1934? CLONIGERt It seemed like there was a mill over there at north Charlotte that was on strike. ATi But you weren't involved in any of those. CLONIGERt No. j Interruption] CLONIGERi When the streetcars wasn't running, the city let the people with automobiles pick up people and charge them a dime apiece and take them r ** where they wanted to go. 1 Chucklej
CLONIGER 15 AT* Just ordinary people with cars. CLONIGER* An old T-Model's have eight or nine hanging on it. Old running boards on there all full, and they're hanging on the side, fchucklel city let the public do that and keep the money, charge them nothing. The Just charge the people a dime each. AT* Did the public get mad at anybody during the strike? CLONIGERi Not as I know of. [End of interview]