My Home Town--Part 3

The Inland Shoe Factory building still stands in Advance. A variety of businesses have occupied it over the years. Today, it is being renovated for the Stoddard County Gospel Mission, which hopes to move into the building in about a month.

First-hand history of Advance

In part two of the article "My Home Town," I mentioned that, back in the early 50's, the Inland Shoe Factory was growing just as fast as the town of Advance, MO could provide a building for John Lamarr to put his workers in. As I look back at the process of providing this space, I see it as being very much like a circus coming to town.

There may have been a carpenter or construction worker somewhere in this group, but 99 percent of the volunteer labor force on this building project consisted of a farmer with hayseed in his hair, a school teacher with chalk dust on his pants, a small town merchant with a pencil behind his ear, or an automobile mechanic, wearing a pair of greasy overalls.

In this group of willing workers, there were some who admitted that their greatest expertise would be driving a wheelbarrow, while others said that they had experience in driving nails and showed a battered thumb to prove it. There were also the fellows who had mud on their shoes, indicating that they were accustomed to using a shovel. Then, we had that individual who could make a saw hum a tune.

This work was all done during the summer, and the work day began about 6 p.m., after everyone had finished their regular jobs for the day. We would work until nearly midnight. We didn't have any one man doing a complete operation by himself. In other words, when a piece of lumber was needed on the roof, one man measured the length needed and called the dimensions down to a man at the lumber pile, who measured and marked the piece. Another man, with saw in hand, cut the piece, and another one would hoist it to the roof, where a man at each end of the board would nail it in place, while another piece was being cut.

When pouring the concrete floor, we didn't have a cement plant we could call to have the cement dumped into our forms, so we set up a small mixer between a huge pile of gravel on one side, a pile of sand on the other, and a supply of water in a 500-gallon tank. This was an electric-powered mixer, and, once the operation was started, we never let it stop until the job was done. One man shoveled in his quota of gravel, while the man on the other side did the same with the sand. A third man dumped in the correct amount of cement, while another man put in his buckets of water. In a matter of minutes, the mixed cement was being dumped in a line of wheelbarrows and rushed to the desired location, where a crew was waiting with trowels in hand to smooth and level the finished product. By the time the wheelbarrows made it back to the mixer, another load was ready for them. Sometimes, there might be ten to fifteen men working at one job, and it was amazing how fast these jobs could be accomplished.

It is a wonder that I didn't get clobbered with a 2 x 4, because I really didn't do any of the work, and I even had some help on the job of supervising. A fellow by the name of Charles Mahaffey was there every day. He usually wore a white shirt and tie, and he never did drive a nail in any board or pick up a shovel. He said he didn't have a license to drive a wheelbarrow. Charles just wandered from one operation to another, and he seemed to have the ability to discover a mistake before it happened.

By working together, we kept the ball rolling. The workers must have done a pretty good job, as these buildings have--for over 50 years--provided a workplace for the people of "My Home Town."