Oral History Interview with Paul Hadley Part II

HADLEY: Guess what was the second thing that I put in the gift shop. Corn shuck dolls. It was the only thing I found. I found a lady way up a valley that I literally had to walk the last half a mile to get to. And she made the most beautiful kitsch corn shuck dolls. And I said, ‘Can you make a simpler one?’ ‘O sure, I can make it as simple as you’d like.’ So while I’m sitting there talking to her she makes one. I said, ‘You make it that fast?’ She said ‘Sure.’ And they’re not complicated really when you know how to make them like she did. I said, ‘Will you teach other people to do this?’ ‘I will not.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Well this is how I, whatever little money I make I get.’ I said, ‘What do they give you for them?’ She said, ‘O I get fifty cents sometimes, twenty-five, I get twenty-five at least.’ I said, ‘Would you take a dollar for it?’ ‘A dollar?!’ ‘Yea, will you make them for a dollar?’ ‘O you bet I will!’ ‘Will you teach somebody else so I can have enough of them so I can sell them? Cause I can’t sell them one at a time, but I can sell maybe a hundred of them.’ ‘You can?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well yea, I’ll teach people how to do that.’ That was how I got my first. O I could give you the story of the girl, the woman herself, she was a o I don’t know how, I think we have probably some of the most wonderful people in the world hidden up those hollers. The women in particular, o jolly there are great women up there. Some of the guys though leave a little to be desired here and there, but the women may not be beautiful, but they know what they’re doing, they’re sharp, and they learn quickly, and boy they’re workers, boy they’re workers. To give you a little side story, there’s a producer of, what’s his name, of Frankfurters here in town and he’s known for baking, I can’t remember the name. They came to me and asked me if I could make some corn shuck dolls for them, they’d like to sell a dozen wieners with a ticket attached to it that they could mail the ticket which has his name and address where to send it for a dollar in handling fees and they’d get a corn shuck doll. I said ‘well yea I can do that.’ ‘Can you get me two gross.’ That’s two hundred and forty-four corn shuck dolls. I said ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out for ya. I jump in my car and seven hours later I’m up in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky and I’m talking to that lady. She said, ‘Two hundred and fifty corn shuck dolls?’ I said ‘Yes.’ She said,’That’s a lot of dolls.’ I said ‘Yes it is.’ I said, ‘Two hundred and fifty dollars.’ She says, ‘No money like that anywhere I’ve ever seen.’ In fact the first dollar I gave her she cried. She said, ‘That’s the first folding money I’ve ever had in my hand in my life.’ She must have been at least 40 years old. Now remember this was back in the early 60s. And so when I was talking two hundred fifty dollars I was talking to her more money than she could even imagine even. And she said ‘Yea I guess we can do that.’ So I did notice that the corn was almost time for picking out there. Two weeks later when we went back up there, there wasn’t a corn field anywhere. I don’t know what they did, but they must have taken every corn shuck down, every corn stalk in the valley down. And they had my two hundred and fifty dolls. I delivered them to those guys to take care of them. Unfortunately, they didn’t last the first day, and they came at me with an order for a thousand gross. And there’s no way in God’s green earth that we could make a thousand gross. And I had to say no. But the corn shuck dolls were made and I delivered that many and that sold the lady and that’s why they were the second item in the gift shop. Then in my travels I ran into a chap by the name of - of shout I can’t remember his name - but he was the world champion basket maker. And the fellow who put me on it was a mayor of Harlan, Kentucky. He ran I think a clothing store up there or something. Great guy. And he said, ‘Yea, you know we got the world champion basket maker up in one of our hollers here.’ I said, ‘You have?’ ‘Yea.’ I said, ‘Where is he?’ And he told me. By the way, it wasn’t, it didn’t turn out to be up the holler after all, it was right on one of our state roads, concrete road. And he had ‘basket maker world champion,’ you know that’s all he had a little sign, handmade signs out. And he had baskets of all kinds hanging all around the shop. And I went in and the baskets were cheap. Beautiful. O my gosh. The guy comes out, I say ‘How do you get to be world champion? ‘O,’ he said, ‘my church sent me to the World’s Fair back in 1938.’ He said ‘I competed with the other basket makers and I made them faster and better than anybody else.’ And he had a certificate to prove it. And he some pictures that were in the paper apparently up in New York about it. So he was the world champion. I said ‘Will you teach others how to do it?’ ‘No, they don’t, I tried doing that, they don’t’ I said, ‘Look, if I come to you and say I want a gross of these baskets, can you produce them?’ ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well that’s what I need.’ So I don’t know what he did but I started getting baskets. So baskets went in. And gradually that way we put in, we got toy makers, we got other folks too. Of course with jewelry makers you can’t mass produce. You just make what’s available. And you take what they’ve made. And you sell that. And I finally got her to accept that stuff too. I said, ‘You could put some really fine things in there. Now we can take some wood carving.’ Because they cost a little more. Jewelry, like jewelry, they cost more. And I got her to take those. But to get back to it, this was in the early days. This was probably about maybe the sixth week I was there. I went to see the governor about that thing and I got a hold of Rudy and I talked to him, and I called George Hadley. And the Bybee Pottery man, I can’t remember his name, and I called each one of them and I said ‘Look. If I put together a meeting with the governor to sell him the idea of helping us to organize a group, will you join the group?’ And they all said ‘Sure, we’ll be there.’ And so I then got a hold of the judges of each county -- I don’t know if you know it or not but the judges at that time were very powerful people in each county. And they know everybody. And they know everything. And I said to them, I said ‘Judge, I’d like you to do this favor for the governor if you would.’ I could use his name because he let me do it that way. I said, ‘Bert would like you to make me a list of all the people that you can think of who make things - whittlers, quilters - anybody who makes really nice things that you’d be proud to have your name on. In other words, we’re not going to put your name on it, because if we put a name on it’ll be the maker. But the point I’m making is if you wouldn’t put your name on it, we don’t want it. That’s what I’m getting at, quality.’ He said, ‘You’re asking for a lot there.’ I said, ‘I know that. But that’s what we want.’ Out of all the, every county has one, there’s a mailing list of them so there was no problem for me to find who they were. I talked to each one of them individually and did a lot of traveling. I don’t think, I don’t know, I don’t remember exactly, but I think I put something like thirty-six thousand miles on that car the first year. I mean I traveled.

WILLIHNGANZ: Thirty-six thousand?

HADLEY: Yea. So after I got the judges to agree to send me the list I began getting lists. And I don’t know how many names we got but I think it’s something close to about four hundred. And I said ‘if you’re interested in being craftsmen or an artist, if you’re an artist, do you know of anybody that paints good pictures,’ O yea, they always knew somebody who was a painter. And somebody said ‘O what do you mean craftsmen, O somebody who can weave, well we got a lot of folks who can weave up around here. O it’s a lot of folk. Well, let’s see -- four of them. A lot? Well, four. That helps. So gradually we got their names and addresses and we sent them all an invitation from the governor to come to Frankfort on that date. We filled the House of Representatives’ Chamber. It wasn’t in session you see. With people who most of them I had never seen before in my life. And Hadley steps up in front of that group of people. And I said, ‘Now ladies and gentlemen, with great pride I introduce to you the governor of our state who’s going to help us to organize ourselves so that we can become recognized by the world as the greatest craftsmen and artists in the world. May I offer the honorable-- ‘ I couldn’t remember the name to save my life. And Bert says to me ‘Bert Combs, boy, Bert Combs.’ O Lord. Bert Combs. O Lord, I don’t know my face must have been the color of an orange. But Bert stepped up to the plate and he delivered a short, o, maybe five minute talk about how important the artists and craftsmen of this state were to the state. Because the nation had no concept of the tremendous value that was here. And one of the reasons why people wouldn’t hire us or wouldn’t put their plants down here was that they had no concept of how clever we really are here, how good we are, how what great workers we are and so on. And then he left the room. And I had an agenda and I wound up getting myself elected chairman of the meeting. And I wound up getting myself elected the first director of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen. We picked out the name and I had one of our artists in the government draw the symbol of it which I have a picture of it. And we put that, we had that up on the board there, boarded up of course so we got the name of it up there. Now I said ‘This may sound a little bit like there is a railroad train running around here someplace, kind of railroaded these things through. Here’s the point: we want to get started and get started quickly cause here’s the golden opportunity,’ I told them about the state park. And how none of them had anything, not one thing made in Kentucky in them. And I said, ‘I’ve already sold them my products, Churchill Weavers.’ I said, ‘I know they’ll take them if we can deliver them at a reasonable price. So what I want you to do is to sign one of the cards that we handed out to you now, give me your name, address, your telephone number if you have one and how to get to your place if it’s a little bit difficult for us. I’m a damn Yankee,’ and I said, ‘I’m a stranger to these parts, for I married a Kentucky girl and now I’m a Kentuckian.’ ‘You’re a damn Yankee,’ I was a damn Yankee all my life down here. And by George you know, it was really strange how it worked out because we got-- I guess everybody who came there signed the card, that they wanted to join. And so they became members. And my secretary put together the first newsletter we had. And we sent it out, told them about our meeting, how the governor, gave the copy of the speech, and I don’t know what all. Anyway, it was a first step. And we-- I was paid by the state because the organization had no money yet of course and we had no place at all. But we were so successful that we were able to convince, I was able to convince the owners of that new mall. There was a ‘Saint-something-or-other’ here, you drive out some road and here you are in this whole area. Maybe it’s not Saint, I don’t know what it is. You got a map of the city? Ok, just give me the suburbs going out west like toward Lexington. On sixty.

WILLIHNGANZ: Shelbyville out there--

HADLEY: No no, this is in from that, way back, I’m talking about suburbs.

WILLIHNGANZ: Suburbs.

HADLEY: No. What’s inside of Eastwood? St. Matthews?

WILLIHNGANZ: No. Well, St. Matthews is off 64, but --

HADLEY: That’s what I’m talking about! St. Matthews! St. Matthews had a mall built out there.

WILLIHNGANZ: Right, St. Matthews Mall.

HADLEY: Right. At the backend of it, the furthest end of it, there was one shop that was the guild gallery. It was given to us by the organization for three years and we marketed there for the first time. And I’ve got pictures of it that I left with the historical society.

WILLIHNGANZ: Now was this before, this could have been before you did the, you had like fairs, craft fairs.

HADLEY: That was before the craft fairs.

WILLIHNGANZ: Before the craft fairs you already had the store in St. Matthews Mall?

HADLEY: Yup. And the fairs came after I left. That was entirely [ ]’s husband’s doing. What was his name.

WILLIHNGANZ: Richard.

HADLEY: Richard, Richard Bellando. Rich Richard Bellando. That was his idea of the fairs. He took over, he became the first director of it employed by it. But until I left I was the director of it. And of course the state paid me. And that was a part time thing I did, took care of the various things I needed. I was using it as a vehicle to contact people so that state would do business with us. And we established a fairly high level of production and quality. Quality was number one. And the quality part of it, I got George Hadley who was on the committee and Rudy was on the committee, and Mrs. Churchill was on the committee. And we had people, anybody could submit to it. And if they turned a product that was marketable even if they couldn’t produce that way, if they had it marketable, we let them be a member. So that’s how we build our membership. We became a sign of quality is what it was. And we gave them a nice sign to put up, ‘A member of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen.’ We didn’t do as well with the artists as I’d like to have done with them. They were a lot more individualistic. And we didn’t have as many in there as we would have liked to have had. We had a lot of folks who were very skilled hands craftsmen who considered themselves artists so they joined as artists but they were really just very skilled craftsmen. Artist to me is somebody who paints something or makes the music, he’s an artist, writes the music, you know that sort of thing, plays it, he’s an artist. That’s to me is the artist. Basically we did not get a single person who was known for their music. But we did get a dulcimer maker of course. And you got, I understand that the museum now has the first dulcimer that he ever made and sold. The museum is beginning to collect some really - I couldn’t believe what they have. They have every one of our samples. It’s a room full of stuff. And it’s a huge room. I mean it will take them years to get through all that stuff. There’s over twenty-five thousand items, can you imagine that? From the Churchill Weavers alone. And I don’t know what they are going to do about Rudy Sullivan but I think that he surely should be in a museum someplace. He was, at the time, as far as I’m concerned, the outstanding wood worker. His stuff, boy, it never stayed on our shelves in our gift shop at Churchill Weavers. And they never stayed long in the shop out there. His stuff will go, it was that good. And it was priced right. Rudy was a very clever and a very talented man. I sure miss him. So that’s how the guild started.

WILLIHNGANZ: Now, you were employed by Churchill Weavers you said from ‘39 to ‘49?

HADLEY: Well, yea, til well, January of ‘49 was when I left to go to the state.

WILLIHNGANZ: So you started at the state in 1950 basically.

HADLEY: No, 1949.

WILLIHNGANZ: 1949.

HADLEY: I believe it was 1949. My dates are a little hazy because I don’t really, I don’t have any records of that time at all.

WILLIHNGANZ: What was your position with the state at that time?

HADLEY: Director of the Arts and Crafts Division.

WILLIHNGANZ: Ok.

HADLEY: That’s the name we were given. And we got our own budget. I remember the first time at the legislature. I was out on the road traveling and I had the radio turned on. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon close to six when the legislature, Bert himself went to the legislature and introduced the budget for the Arts and Crafts Division. It was a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money. I think that’s what it was-- because by that time, I had four people working for me. Working with me, I should -- no, for me, they was working for me. Working with me. And I have two rather distinctive things to say about that. I was the first department director to employ a college graduate black man in state government.

WILLIHNGANZ: Wow.

HADLEY: I wish I could remember his name. I got the, the Historical Society has those records and they’re looking them up for us to see if they can find out what his name was. Sharp young man, excellent, right attitude, he was right, he was just like the rest of us craftsmen, a little different you know. Really he was not a craftsman but was a good man. His job was to encourage production within his own community. Because we were still pretty segregated you know. Right out of the school there in Frankfort which was highly segregated if you remember. Cause it wasn’t until after the Johnson administration that really things began to break for them. He was the first black graduate, as far as I know, in state government. And that was Bert Combs doing. Bert Combs was very impressed with the young man. And he called me and said, ‘I got somebody for you Paul and he’ll be just right for you.’ And I said, ‘Yes sir.’ I knew better than to argue with him! And I didn’t really want him because I had already had, it was hard to keep people busy. You know, you get too many people and I just knew that I wanted to keep them busy for the sake of being busy but I just didn’t have a need at that moment. But I didn’t spend fifteen minutes with him and I knew yes sir I can use this young man. He’s got a head on his shoulders and he can do things. He’s a self-starter, that’s what you need.

WILLIHNGANZ: So your position during the ‘50s was basically to encourage craft production, or the marketing of craft?

HADLEY: In the ‘50s I was running Churchill Weavers.

WILLIHNGANZ: Ok, during the ‘50s you are right Churchill Weavers.

HADLEY: It was the early ‘60s that I did that.

WILLIHNGANZ: So you were actually employed from ‘39 through ‘59 at Churchill Weavers?

HADLEY: Yea. Well there was a time when I wasn’t there, when the Navy took me away for about eighteen months.

WILLIHNGANZ: Right.

HADLEY: I was still on, still in the background.

WILLIHNGANZ: So you were about twenty years at Churchill Weavers?

HADLEY: No, about ten years.

WILLIHNGANZ: Ten years?

HADLEY: In the ‘40s I was in the Navy and then I went to college, and then I worked for a radio network until Churchills took me away.

WILLIHNGANZ: O so the Churchills took you away at ‘49 basically,

HADLEY: ‘48.

WILLIHNGANZ: ‘48.

HADLEY: I graduated in ‘48.

WILLIHNGANZ: Worked there until you started at the state?

HADLEY: Yea, I started with the Churchills January of ‘49. And then started with the state I think it was January of ‘50. But I’m not sure of that.

WILLIHNGANZ: It would have been --

HADLEY: ‘49. I think, whenever Bert Comb’s administration started was in that year. That year, it had to be that year that he interviewed me because he interviewed me in September I think it was. And I agreed to be there the first of January. So it would have been ‘50 I guess. And I was there for the three years of his administration. And I liked Ford, I think Ford he liked the program. And what they did after - I did a dumb thing. I went without sleep for two days at one point, just drove myself. I had some things that I had to get done, you see. And I passed out walking across the floor in the office. Down I went. They picked me up, sent me home, said ‘You stay there for the rest of the week -- don’t come back til Monday.’ So I stayed home for a week and almost went crazy. I was still living in Berea at that time. I had to move my family to Frankfort. Are we about finished? Ok.

[Break in recording]

WILLIHNGANZ: We’re recording. Okay. So you got the train going and you got the guild going and then Bellando took over some time during the later 60s?

HADLEYF: No. She got in there, I think it was about 1976, 1973, something like that.

WILLIHNGANZ: Okay.

HADLEY: I’m not sure what year it was.

WILLIHNGANZ: Now the guild was started, when, in ‘61?

HADLEY: Well, it was started within six weeks of when I started work.

WILLIHNGANZ: Uh-huh.

HADLEY: I mean, if you want the official, that’s when we agreed to. I had the -- the state governor supplied us with an attorney to make up the all of the articles of incorporation, bylaws and all that stuff.

WILLIHNGANZ: Mm-hmm.

HADLEY: And we also had copies of the Southern Highland Handcraft Guild to use that as our guide, so it probably followed a very similar pattern. Not being an attorney, I can’t respond to that.

WILLIHNGANZ: Right. But then you were the director of the guild?

HADLEY: Yeah.

WILLIHNGANZ: And then you turned it over to --

HADLEY: I didn’t turn it over. I just -- when I had to leave, when I left state government, I left the state and I moved to Jeffersonville, see. I took over a chamber of commerce in Jeffersonville and I went to work for the American Commercial Lines.

WILLIHNGANZ: Oh, sure, the barge lines.

HADLEY: Yeah. This is not of interest to your listeners, but you might find it interesting.

WILLIHNGANZ: Mm-hmm.

HADLEY: I took the chamber of commerce job because I knew Floyd Blaske was the chairman of the board of the barge line. I wanted so badly to go work for him. I had heard so much about him, I’d read a lot about him, and I wanted to work for him. And so I knew he was on the board and so one time I had a chance to talk to him, I said, Mr. Blaske, I said is there anything I can do to prove that would make a great employee. And off the cuff, he told me afterwards, it was just sort of an off the cuff remark, yeah, sure, I’ve got some property I want to buy, get it for me. And I said, ‘What’s the price that you’ll pay’. He told me. And I said, ‘Okay’. So I got a hold of the one of the auto dealers there in town who was on my board, a good guy I knew very well, and he went with me to the homes of those owners of the property that were living in houses on that property where the headquarters of the building is now. Have you ever been over there?

WILLIHNGANZ: Huh-uh.

HADLEY: Well, there’s a magnificent building there now, it’s huge. It’s five or six stories tall and it’s the headquarters of the entire barge line industry really because it’s the biggest industry on the river, they’re the biggest of them. They own Jeffboat.

WILLIHNGANZ: Right.

HADLEY: And they own a lot of other things too that people don’t know about. They own several ports, and owning a port is important because every barge has to be loaded in that port, so even if it’s not your barge, you’re getting paid for it, see. I said to him, I went to the families with the auto dealer with me, and I asked him to introduce me. And I was introduced as the President of the Chamber of Commerce. And I said, you know, you folks can help Jeffersonville so much if you will. I said we desperately need more jobs for our people here. I didn’t know it, but one of those families was unemployed at that moment. He really was unemployed, see. And I said we -- if we can buy your property we can bring a company here that employs, oh, gosh, at least 10,000 people. I said they won’t be all employed right here, but they do employ that many and right here they’ll have at least 3,000 employees. Well, at that time I knew it was 3,000 employees already working here, see, at the Jeffboat. So I was not lying, I was just saying, you know, not giving all the truth. But the point was that we would bring new jobs, no question about it, because we already had quite a number of employees in the building, but we had people working there and doing things that they should have had at least two people working with them, see. And so I said to -- I spent some time with them and before I left, I got them to sign an agreement to sell the property at the price we offered. Then I went to the other one, which he said you’ll never sell them because they’re tough old birds, and I spent -- I don’t know what I said to them, I really don’t remember it, but before I left there, I had their signed signature on it too. Anyway, we got it. Both of them sold to me. So I took the two signed pieces of paper to their attorney and I went up to Floyd Blaske’s office. Well, he said, Paul, you did exactly what you said you’d do, but he said, you know, right now, he said, I don’t know what I’d do with you. But he said, certainly, you’ve earned something for this. He said, ‘You certainly have earned a commission of it at least’. I said, ‘No, I don’t want the commission, I want a job’. Well, he said, ‘you’re really going to turn down; I think it was $15,000’. Well, that’s a little more than I made at the state at the time, not much, but it was more than I made at the state in a year. Oh, it was a temptation. And I said, no, sir, I don’t want that. I said, just keep that. That’s not going to cost you a dime. I’m glad that I got it done for you just as a chamber exec, that’s my job, so I’m paid for that, so don’t worry about that. What I want is a job. He stopped and said to me, ‘honestly, Paul; I don’t know what I’d do with you. I don’t want to hire you and then -- because I’ve got to pay you something better than just minimum wage, you know, so how do I justify it.’ I said, ‘well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.’ I said, ‘I’ll take the worst job you’ve got right now because you probably don’t have anybody doing it’. So Monday morning, I was told to put on the oldest clothes I had, [inaudible] I’ll be doing. And I showed up at the gate and told him I wanted to see a particular person. I didn’t know who he was, I just knew him by name because that’s what Floyd told me to ask for. And this fellow came to me and he was, boy, he looked like he could lift 50 tons if he needed to, you know, quite a tough -- he said, ‘all right, Hadley.’ He said, ‘Come with me.’ No more than that. And I followed him. He pointed to a truck. He said, ‘That’s your vehicle. Here are the keys to it and [inaudible] tools’. He said, ‘your job now is, you see all those little buildings, on every one of those barges that are in production there, there’s a building up there on deck, yup. You go to those buildings and clean them up, buff them out, biffies’. I mean, this was a honey wagon. And he said ‘when you get ready, you want one of those -- if we need a biffy, we’ll tell you, and you take it on the -- put it on the’-- he showed me where they were kept stored. He said ‘you put it on the back of your track there, see that little platform’? He said, ‘you can horse it up on there without any lifting because it’s not very heavy until you put the liquid in it, then it will get heavy.’ But he said, ‘put that in separately, it’s in those bottles.’ And he said, ‘what you do is you take that out and you get under right alongside of where you want it done and tell the foreman what it is and they’ll get the crane over and then take it up there for you.’ Fine, thank you. In the meantime, he said, ‘what you do is you go to each one of them each day and you clean them out.’ I went to the first one and I couldn’t believe the filthy. It was filthy. And I pumped it out first. And then I got -- there’s a water tank on the wagon that you can use to rinse with. I got that and I used up all the water in the water tank just on that first biffy trying to get it cleaned up. And I scrubbed it and I polished it and I worked on it and as a result, I got -- by noon, I got five of them done, and the foreman was right on me. And he said, you know, he said, ‘I’m sorry’, he said, ‘Hadley, but that’s not good enough’. He said, ‘You got to get them all done’. He said, ‘You’re supposed to be done at 4 o’clock this afternoon’ I said, ‘I won’t leave until they’re done’. I didn’t get done until 9 o’clock that night and I cleaned every one of those babies, polished them. There must’ve been probably 20 of them. And, of course, I filled the tank in back, you know, the big storage tank, I think three times that day and I dumped it into -- they’ve got a place right there that’s in the city sewer and they dump it down there and there’s a record right there by it that you fill in how many times you dump down because the city charges them for it. And I filled the water tank from the hydrant. There was a hydrant right there and I filled the water tank. I must’ve filled that tank, well, at least 20 times. And, oh, boy, it was a long day. And when I got finished, I was pooped like you wouldn’t believe. When I got home -- we had leather seats in the car, fortunately. When I got home, we got out of the car; my wife wouldn’t let me in the house. She took me out back and she turned the garden hose on me and she washed me down. Then she got a -- she had a soft brush that she uses on her back. She went and got that and loaded it up with soap and scrubbed me, clothes and all. And finally she said, take those clothes off. So I took those clothes off and I’m standing there naked and she hands me a pair of shorts. I put them on and she said, now go in the house and you get in the tub and you soak. I’m hungry. I’ll get your dinner, just get in the tub and soak. So I soaked and I showered twice. She wouldn’t let me in bed with her that night. I slept on the couch. Oh, lord. The next day, I thought, oh, God, if I’ve got to go through this again today, if they can mess this place up that fast. Well, as it turned out, they hadn’t been cleaned like that in a long time. They just sort of took stuff out, you know, didn’t bother to wipe off the graffiti and all that. There were some very clever sayings. I remember one of them in particular it said, here I sit brokenhearted, paid a nickel and only farted, and a few others like that, you follow me, a lot of graffiti. Well, the second day when I went back and I went up on the things, the things were remarkably clean, I thought. Really, if I’d wanted to, I guess I really didn’t have to do anything. There were a couple pieces of paper on the floor and that sort of thing; you always expect that, somebody won’t pick paper up. I don’t understand that. They dropped it, why won’t they pick it up, but they didn’t. And I cleaned it up and pumped it out, and I got down at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. And so I went to the foreman and I said, what else do you want me to do. And he said, ‘You’re through’? And I said, yeah. Well, he said, I can’t believe that. He didn’t know what time I left. He didn’t know that until he got my timecard at the end of the month and then I was already working in Blaske’s office and he brought it over and gave it to me and he said, Hadley, I want you to have this. He said, ‘You earned it’. And they actually paid me overtime for it. But to make a long story short, I got back there and I worked for a full week and Blaske called me to his office on Monday morning before I went in so I was dressed to go into work again, you know. I went in to see him and he said, ‘Go on home, change, get yourself dressed’. He said, ‘We’ve got a job for you’. And that’s how I went for work for them. I made $120,000 a year. It was a good job.

WILLIHNGANZ: Yes, it was.

HADLEY: Good job. That was an awful lot of money in those days. This was back in the 60s.

WILLIHNGANZ: That’s not a bad salary now.

HADLEY: From $14,000 to $12,000 here at the chamber of commerce for about, oh, two months, and then to the first week I worked for the barge line I think I made $110, but then I was put on that salary. And I didn’t get that salary initially. I think if I remember right, it was something like $80,000, which was still a lot of money. I was his first -- I was kind of like his administrative assistant and I don’t think I’ve ever had a job that I enjoyed more. But to get back to the --

WILLIHNGANZ: The guild, yeah.

HADLEY: -- the guild.

WILLIHNGANZ: You were no longer involved in the guild during this time?

HADLEY: No, no. When I left, I heard about Blaske needing somebody. That’s what brought it out, see. And I knew the man by reputation. And because I ran the Chamber of Commerce in Berea, I started that there too, started the Chamber of Commerce in Berea and I was the first President of it for, oh, I guess maybe two or three years. We got two industries in and, boy, we did that right. Man, we did that right. I won’t tell you how we did it because it’s not part of this, but it was an interesting story too. When the guild reached that point where it was doing so well, I really had -- actually I had for the first time some opportunities to do something besides work for the state 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. About -- after my passing out and me going home and returning, they had a young lady they introduced me to. Her name was Susan Black. Her dad owned a horse farm that was immediately adjacent to the city of Frankfort on the east side. The first farm you come to as you go out of town going up that hill and if you take that road going over to Bardstown -- I think it’s Bardstown -- anyway, instead of going on over to a town and that goes into Lexington, if you go this way direct off the hill and then go straight, continue on straight, there’s a farm on the right. I don’t remember the name of the farm, but the family was the Black family. Mr. Black was one of the most southern gentlemanly gentlemen I ever met, true Kentucky Colonel in the true sense of the word, and his wife was a lovely lady, oh, she was a sweetheart of a person. They were just -- hospitality oozed from every pore, you know, that kind of people. Susan was a…

[End of Interview Part II]