Finding “suckers in the void”
This story takes place about 30 years ago (in the mid 1980’s) in West Point Georgia, a small town nestled up against the Alabama border. It’s a town with a very southern history. General Sherman’s troops destroyed the town back in 1864 and its citizens have never forgotten it.
The town came back to life when an enormous textile mill was built to take advantage of water from the Chattahoochee River. That mill is where this story takes place.
At the time I was working for a software development company that specialized in bar code data collection. It was the first job I had as a “Systems Architect.” I wrote the document that allowed both management and programmers to create the end product. I used to brag that I wrote my best programs in English.
The company had negotiated a consulting contract where we would design the system then bid on implementing it. My boss wouldn’t tell me much about what the project was all about, but assured me that my partner, Julio Arroyo from Brooklyn New York, was totally up to speed.
By the time we landed in Atlanta we were both convinced that neither of us had a clue what the project was. Julio called the office and left a message while I went looking for out rented car. As we were standing in the terminal a page came over the speaker system for one “Hulio Arrroyo.” I nudged Julio, “That’s a phone call for you.”
“Na,” He said in his thick Brooklyn accent, “that’s not me.”
I laughed and said, “No Julio, that’s how they pronounce your name here.”
“Oh,” he said and wandered off to find the phone. When he came back he said our task was to find the “suckers in the void.”
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
He just shrugged, “no clue.”
We spent the next four hours driving the hundred and fifty miles into the back woods and ante-bellum times of rural Georgia. The next morning we assembled in the board room of the factory for a conference. Vernon, the plant manager, gave us a complete history of West Point Georgia and the Westpoint Pepperal factory we were sitting in. They made terrycloth. All kinds of terrycloth, washcloths, dishtowels, bathrobes, and towels of every size, finish, and color. Out task, Vern said, was to “find the suckers in the void.”
Julio and I looked at each other, hoping the other had figured out what Vern was talking about but in the end we both shrugged.
Julio finally said, “How about giving us a tour of the plant so that we can see the process?”
I apologize in advance for the stereotypes I’m about to describe but this was 1985, going on 1900.
At one end of the factory were three floors of looms. Each floor was an enormous room with 300+ looms running as fast and as loudly as they could. When the loom came to the end of its warp it would stop and a yellow light would flash. Everyone on this floor was black, over 75, and skinny, or so it seemed. When a yellow light flashed one of the elderly black men, would very slowly cut the bolt of cloth loose in the 100+ degree heat. A new warp would be set up and the loom would resume its noisy operation. At this point the old man would throw the bolt over his shoulder and walk about as slowly as anyone can to the “countin table” where a white teenager would weigh the bolt and attach a bar coded label to it. Then the old man would slowly and cautiously pick up the bolt and take it to a storage room with with up to 3000 identical bolts of cloth.
When it was time to create the final product the same old black man (I only saw half a dozen men fitting this description at this end of the building) would fetch the bolt, one at a time, from the storage room and place it on a table where the bar code would be scanned by a white, middle aged, man who would then sew the bolts together, end to end, until he had 10 to 20,000 feet of cloth. The cloth would then be slowly dropped down into a 20 x 20 x 60 foot vat on the dying floor. It took about a month to process an entire order starting with the lighter colors and working slowly to dark blue.
When the terrycloth has been sufficiently died it would quickly run through a large vat of water then into a 200 foot long furnace that would continuously dry the cloth. As it came out the other end it would fill a pallet sized cart. When the cart was full the cloth would be arbitrarily cut and a new cart moved into position to receive the next 300 lbs. of cloth.
Occasionally, the cloth would snag inside the oven. White high school teenagers with wet towels thrown over their heads and asbestos gloves would dive into the furnace in 20 second shifts until the cloth was freed. No black men on this floor.
When the terrycloth was ready to be finished, the pallets would be wheeled over to a shoot that would draw the cloth up to the finishing room where the wives of the elderly black men worked 12 hour shifts sewing washcloths, bath towels, and in one fancy corner of the floor, elegant bathrobes monogrammed with the logo of the hotel or chain store for whom the articles were being made.
It turns out that the furnace was “The Void” and “suckers” was a southern pronunciation version of out word “seconds.”
The problem was that only after the cloth reached the finishing room could “suckers” be determined. What they wanted to know (It took us a week to figure this out) was what looms were creating bolts of cloth that were snagging inside the drying furnace.
I designed a very cool system but we never got the job so I don’t think Vernon ever did find his “suckers in the void.”
