Family History
Why Hard Work Beats Education
The life of Albert McCauley and a small collection of his stories
Why I want to Focus on My Grandfather
Ever since I was born, my grandfather Albert McCauley has been my role model. I’ve always been fascinated by how someone with such humble beginnings could accomplish what he has in his lifetime. This project gives me a great opportunity to record my grandfather’s stories that shaped him into the man he has become. I’ve always wanted to have an opportunity to preserve a part of my grandfather, and now I finally have one. In this project I will record some of Albert McCauley’s accomplishments in life from fishing tournaments to starting a gas station chain, a paving company, and five moving companies.
5000 Dollars
My grandfather and grandmother had saved up 5000 dollars for him to start a moving company. Everyone tried to put him out of business to limit competition when he first started this company but he grew it into five separate companies. Each of these companies had their own set of trucks, employees, and warehouses. He also invented Quick Stop gas stations and owned 125 stores at one point. He began to invest the money he had made into real estate so his money was always “working for him.” He eventually sold out of the moving and gas station companies to enter the asphalt business which he still owns and is expanding today. He credits a lot of his success to his mother as he said he could not have been successful without her philosophy about life, you treat people right, and if you say you’re going to do something, then you do it.
“Don’t be late”
My grandfather says, “Back when I was in the moving business, I’d fire people for being late.” He pairs this philosophy with his mother’s that if you say you’re going to do something you do it, and when you have a job you are understood to be on time so you should be. He took and still takes being on time very seriously so when he slept through his alarm one day he threw on clothes, rushed to his car, and starting speeding to work before he even whipped out of the driveway. “I was going a little over a hundred in a fifty-five when the blue lights came on behind me,” he said. Still, he was too close to work to pull over when the cop car tailed him into the entrance of the warehouse complex.
The cop got out his badge and my grandfather told him he needed to wait a minute because he had people waiting by the door that he was paying by the hour and that was more important to him. The policeman told him to hold up a minute but he walked away and over to the door. He reached into his pocket and realized he had forgotten his keys in his other pants, so he just kicked the door in and everyone went inside. When he walked back over to the police officer, the man told him, “Son, you got more damn problems than I do,” and the police officer got back in his car and left without even giving him a ticket.
Central High School, 1958
Doug Maxwell’s body slapped hard against the wooden floor in the center lane. The basketball game stopped as he coughed up a tooth and spit out some of the blood that was accumulating in his mouth. Only he and my grandfather knew what had happened; my grandfather made sure of that before he hit him.
Edwards Military Institute, 1946
My grandfather Albert McCauley arrived at Edward’s Military Institute in Salemburg, North Carolina, when he was five years old. Hazel, his mother, was able to get a job there and avoid sending her three boys to an orphanage. Her family had suggested sending the boys to an orphanage after her husband Johnnie died in a car accident the year prior. Her husband’s death had made her living situation extremely difficult as her family had struggled financially before he died and now were barely able to make it by.
After arriving at this school, my grandfather and his two brothers Jerry and Stanley began to believe that they were tougher than the other boys there because they lived at the school year-round. They began to think of themselves as soldiers and would fight with one another daily. They even began to pollute the other boys with this roughness starting in the second grade when they arranged a brick war in the rubble of an old wooden building. Each one of the three brothers captained their own “troops.” After their battle four boys were sent to the hospital with injuries.
The fact that Hazel’s boys were wild made her job exponentially harder as she was also a houseparent in the dormitory and had to make sure that the other boys weren’t cutting up also. With her husband gone, she didn’t have help with her children and now had to take care of over twenty more in the dorm. She couldn’t do much about this predicament and switched her children daily for misbehavior, but no matter how much she punished her boys, the three carried on with their shenanigans.
Fayetteville, 1952
After six years at the military school, Hazel remarried a man named Allen in 1953 and moved in with him, his son, and her three boys to the city of Fayetteville, NC. They didn’t stay in the city long after they put up a basketball goal in their grass patched backyard. The boys played basketball all day and night after they put enough money together to put up bright yellow floodlights to illuminate the dirt court. It was always just the four of them until two of their neighbors tried to come over and play on a Saturday. Jerry the eldest of the boys told them they couldn’t play and that they should “go the hell home.” The two boys went home, but came back later that night and shot my grandfather and Jerry with bb guns while they were playing. Unluckily for them, Hazel and Allen were leaving town the next day on Sunday and wouldn’t be back until Monday. That Sunday night after their parents left Jerry and my grandfather went over there and as my grandfather said, “We beat the hell out of them. We beat them so bad their parents called the cops. When our parents got home we were in the back of a damn cop car.”
2061 Middle Road, Eastover, NC
After their run-in with the cops, my grandfather’s stepfather Allen decided he needed to move the boys to Eastover, a small country town just outside of Fayetteville, and put them to work. Here they would get up at 4 A.M. to work on the farm before school and work for hours after they got home. They would carry hundred-pound sacks of grain for miles a day in the hot sun and would work until the dirt on their shirts mixed with sweat to form mud. After the day was over they were finally able to rinse their muddied bodies in their “shower” which was nothing more than a hose fastened to the inside of a barrel hung from a large live oak tree. Every day was the same backbreaking work that my grandfather now credits his back pain too.
Although they were working outside of school that didn’t keep them out of trouble in school. Ever since arriving in Eastover, they were thought of as city slickers from Fayetteville that were soft. People didn’t think this for long after he began to fight anyone who challenged him to at recess in the seventh grade. He fought everyone except one kid, my grandfather said, “this one kid had been held back so many times was sixteen in the seventh grade, but he wouldn’t try me because he didn’t know whether or not he could take me.”
Big Rock
In 1986 my grandfather entered the Big Rock Marlin fishing tournament. This was and still is the largest fishing competition on the east coast. In 2019 the tournament consisted of over 200 boats and had just under a 2.9 million dollar purse or payout to the winner.
When he entered this tournament he had planned to go on a trolling boat with one of his friends, his friend’s wife, and his two sons. The boat they had rented couldn’t make it to the tournament in time so they rented a different 62-foot bottom fishing boat called the Shearwater instead. This boat was not designed for marlin fishing and it didn’t even have a door on the side of the boat if they caught one. They did not have any marlin fishing equipment either as it was on the other boat so my grandfather began to call around until he found a captain who was not fishing the tournament and rented roads, reels, and other equipment from him.
Now he faced the difficulty of finding a mate to man the cockpit of the boat. All the other mates had been hired by the other fishermen except for one who was in the hospital visiting his uncle who had suffered a heart attack. So seeing as it was his only option my grandfather found the man in the hospital and convinced him to join his team after his uncle had recovered and he did. On the third day of the tournament only two boats went out because the sea was so rough, one of them was my grandfather’s. Early in the day the scream of line ripping off the large reel sounded through the air. There was clearly a big blue marlin on the other end of the line and the six people on the boat took turns fighting it for hours before the enormous fish was floating parallel to the boat.
This fish was over 600 pounds and would surely win them the tournament, that is, if they were able to hoist the fish aboard. Albert’s two sons dove into the water and under the marlin lashing ropes to its sides to pull the great fish aboard. This took all the strength of all six people on the boat and they headed the 60 miles back to shore to weigh in the fish.
The fish weighed in at 608.5-pounds, it won them the tournament and was the second-largest marlin ever caught in a Big Rock tournament. My grandfather says, “I’m glad I persevered through all the problems we had before the tournament. If I hadn’t done that I don’t think myself or either of my sons would have ever won that tournament.” I personally do not believe he even thought about dropping out of the tournament at any point because when he puts his mind towards something he always finds a way to make it happen.
Lost at Sea
In the late 1990s, my grandfather had bought a new boat and took it out fishing with his two sons and a friend of his. “I was excited about the boat, so we stayed out later than all the other fisherman around us until we were alone,” he said. This was the boat’s first time in the water and when they turned around to head back to shore the back end of the boat dipped in the water and the boat began to sink. The four men worked their way to the front of the boat until they were in the water as only the tip of the bow stayed above the water. The small pocket of air in the bow of the boat was the only thing keeping it from sinking to the ocean floor which it was now perpendicular to.
As it began to get dark the seas began to rise to thirteen-foot swells. A coastguard helicopter found them, spotlighted them, and left them because it was too dangerous for the helicopter to get close enough to rescue them. Every couple of seconds the men could make out the lights on land as they bobbed to the top of each wave. To avoid drifting out further to sea they had to take turns climbing onto the bow and resetting the anchor which kept breaking loose in the storm. My grandfather said, “If we had not done that I think we all would have drifted off and died.”
The next day my grandmother called around and got some of Albert’s friends to go out and look for him and her two sons. They found him ten miles from where they had been fishing. All the men were grateful that they had been able to work together to stay alive for the fourteen hours they were clinging to the sinking boat miles offshore for survival.
Horseback Riding
“I’ve gone out to Yellowstone twice, and ridden across the Appalachian trail multiple times,” my grandfather told me. He describes these long trips as a team effort with the friends that ride with you. It wasn’t like everyone had a specific job though you would all just work together on whatever you were doing like putting up a tarp tent or navigating.
There were always problems along the way through like having one of the mules carrying supplies fall down a mountain and having to pull it back up. my grandfather said, “I’ve seen three horses die up there and you either have to leave them or cut them up into pieces and carry them back.” The way he said this caught me off guard because he said it as if it’s just one of those things you have to deal with. He’s always been very wise about problems that have happened in the past.
Once when a firework blew up on his property and started to burn down the woods around his mountain house he turned to my grandmother who was screaming at him to do something and said, “Damnit Marianna what the hell do you want me to do something about it now, how the hell would a firetruck get up this mountain. There ain’t nothing you can do about it but let it burn out so why are you so damn worked up about it?” This memory sticks in my mind because while everyone else was panicking he was able to take a step back and realize that he couldn’t change anything so there was no reason to stress about it.
My grandfather also recounted a specific story about when he was riding out on the Appalachian trail and his friend Terry Wilson sliced the main artery in his leg cutting down a tree in the path. My grandfather made a tourniquet for him and carried him to a cabin where he called an emergency rescue team. They brought a stretcher and took turns carrying him to the road where he could be taken to the hospital. My grandfather saved his life that day and they still remain close friends today.
My grandfather liked to ride because it gave him time to think. He said “Riding along trails like that was a good way to get back out and enjoy nature. It was a good way to see people and get to spend time with them that you might not get to without going out there and riding.”
How Business Brought Him to Politics
With his moving companies so close to Fort Bragg, a military base in Fayetteville, my grandfather moved a lot of soldiers. He had a lot of respect for these men as they were fighting for our country and would give them a lot of breaks and leeway on payments. Over time people began to notice, even the president who gave him a certification of appreciation for his work with the military.
After supporting Governor Jim Martin, he added my grandfather to the North Carolina Board of Transportation and they became good friends.
My grandfather still remains active in politics today and recently met and scheduled an event for Vice President Mike Pence in Fayetteville North Carolina. He asked me, “Do you want to go to lunch with Mike Pence and myself this Wednesday?” and he wasn’t joking.
“Son, you got more problems than I do.”
A conversation with Albert McCauley
My grandfather flew in to see me on September 15, 2019. I had no idea he was going to be there as he sat hunched over a glass of sweet tea that sat on the metal table. He and his face lit up as he turned to me and said, “I knew you had to interview me and since you hadn’t called yet, I just assumed it be better to fly down here to talk to you.”
We got onto the plane and talked on the black Bose headsets the whole time so we were able to hear one another talk over the humming of the engines as we glided into the sky. After about thirty minutes of just talking we decided that it would be better to record the conversation over the phone so I could better transcribe it without having to worry about the overwhelming vibrations from the engines messing up the recording.
When I called him later that night I could imagine him walking to the back room of his house and sitting down on the green couch. I heard him plop down and knew he had his socked feet propped up on the old odd looking wooden table in their sunroom. We sat and talked for about forty minutes. I could tell the questions struck deep in his mind as I could hear him thinking in his silence. When we finished the interview I could tell that he was happy that I had taken so much interest in his story and I know he fell asleep proud of all of the things he had accomplished as he recounted telling me them on the phone.
When I called him later that night I could imagine him walking to the back room of his house and sitting down on the green couch. I heard him plop down and knew he had his socked feet propped up on the old odd looking wooden table in their sunroom. We sat and talked for about forty minutes. I could tell the questions struck deep in his mind as I could hear him thinking in his silence. When we finished the interview I could tell that he was happy that I had taken so much interest in his story and I know he went fell asleep proud of all of the things he had accomplished as he recounted telling me them on the phone.
1. Could you please state the date, your full name, and your date of birth? The date is September 15, 2019. My name is Albert Oscar McCauley. I was born on October 15, 1940.
2. Where were you born in North Carolina? I was born in Wake county.
3. How long were you there for? I don’t have any idea how long I was in Wake county.
4. What was it like growing up during the second world war, do you remember it? Yes, I remember the war. I lived on the outskirts of Durham, NC in a rural area. My daddy was a machinist and he worked at Wrightsville Automatic. His job was making parts for the war. He didn’t have to go into the service because he was performing a vital service providing much needed parts for the war.
5. How old were you when your dad died? After the war they closed Wrightsville Automatic because they weren’t making anymore parts for the military. We moved to Danville, Virginia, where my father found another machinist job. We shortly relocated back to Durham for another job position for my father. My father was killed in a car accident. He was on his way home and ran into the back of a McClain transfer truck that didn’t have any lights on during a foggy night in Virginia. I was only five years old.
6. Do you have any memories of him? Do I remember him? I only remember a few things. I remember him taking me swimming and taking me to a turnip patch. I don’t remember any conversations with him.
7. How close was your mother to sending you to an orphanage? Yes, my mother was very close to sending my brothers and I to an orphanage. My mother didn’t receive any insurance money when my father was killed. We were living off my father’s very small social security check. My mother’s family tried to encourage her to send us to an orphanage. She was determined to keep us. My mother got a job at EMI (Edwards Military Institute) in the junior barracks as a house mother. She did this so my brothers and I could stay together and go to school there instead of an orphanage.
8. What was your mom like? She was a very artistic, hard working lady
9. What was your experience at military school like? It was like being a little soldier. They had a lot of strict rules and regulations, you would have to go eat at a certain time and everything was very regimented like the military. If you did something wrong or were late for something you were punished. An example is they would make you walk around in a circle for so many hours. The school would also give out merits and demerits. Merits for doing good things and demerits for doing bad things. It felt like you were in the military.
10. Did you like it there? I did because it was all I knew.
11. Did you do well in school, if so why not? Most of the boys that were there were either like I was, boys that had a tragedy in their family, or they were wealthy, and their family didn’t want them at home to look after EMI didn’t have credited teachers. It was more about discipline than learning. You didn’t have to earn good grades. Public school was stronger in academics in those days. I didn’t learn much.
12. What memories or stories do you have from your time at military school? One of the memories I have is when my mother would see me walking the tour path when I got in trouble. I would be punished again by her. She would call me to her room, and she would go get a switch. She would switch me, and I can remember her saying, “Ha Ha you will see.” I always received double punishment when others only got punished once. Holidays were hard because we had to stay on campus when all the other boys went home. We didn’t have a home to go to.
What all did you get punished for?
I can’t remember that, but you know mischievous things that boys do, things like cussing and fighting with each other. I remember being punished for being late. We had to drill or march like soldiers did and the older boys were officers. It was kind of like the military and there was politics involved. They would discipline the boys they didn’t like, and I sometimes was that boy.
13. After seeing your mother struggle for years to take care of you did you have any aspirations to become wealthy? No, I just wanted to achieve something, and I enjoyed working. I never went into anything with the intention that I was going to make money. I had the belief that if I did the best job and did what needed to be done eventually the money would follow. I was honest and didn’t lie or cheat. I believed if you told somebody you were going to do something you better do it. If I told somebody I was going to do an hour’s worth of work, I worked my butt off for an hour. I didn’t lay around on the job. I guess I was taught this work ethic at military school. It is your responsibility to do the right thing and work hard.
14. When did you move to Fayetteville, and why? I moved to Fayetteville when I was in the fifth grade. My mother remarried and my stepfather was from Fayetteville. My mother met my stepfather at EMI where his son was a student. My stepfather owned a moving and storage company.
15. What was your stepbrother and your stepfather’s names? My stepbrother’s name was Mike my stepfather’s name was Allan Draughon.
16. Did you like him I had some resentment toward him because he wasn’t my real daddy. Looking back on it I shouldn’t have resented him. He took on the job of raising three boys. He was very strict. He believed in making boys work. He would take me out of school often to make me work.
17. What were your relationships with other family members like? We all got along well. Like most brothers we did fight occasionally. We were competitive sometimes.
18. Why did you move to Fayetteville? My brothers and I put up a basketball goal in our driveway. Our neighbors across the street wanted to come play with us. We didn’t care for them, so we didn’t let them play with us. Our neighbors were mad and shot us with their bb guns. The next day my brother Jerry and I went over to their house and called them out into the yard and took care of the problem. When my mother and stepdaddy came home, we were in back of a police car. The next thing I remember was we traded our house in Fayetteville for a house in the country. We grew and picked cotton and milked cows. We also raised hogs and chickens.
19. Where did you go to middle school? I went to Eastover.
20. Why did you fight so much in middle school? In those days, they would let you fight at recess. Every time I went outside somebody would grab me and we would fight because they said I was a city slicker. So, I had to whip everybody except for one fella that was was sixteen in the seventh grade. He didn’t know whether he could whip me, so he never tried.
21. What were your responsibilities like on your stepdad’s farm? I had to milk the cows and feed the hogs. I had to get the wood for the fire. We never had heat in the house. We had one room with a fireplace until I went to college for a year. When I came home from ECU for Thanksgiving, he had put heat in every room in the house. I was upset because he could afford to heat our house long before but because I was not there to chop the wood, he decides to heat the house.
22. Where did you go to high school? Central High School.
23. Are there any experiences from high school and middle school that stick out to you from others? I just remember I was constantly in trouble. I remember the principal calling me to the front of class and telling everyone I would be in jail before I was twenty-one. This past weekend I hosted my 60th class reunion. I am not a bragger, but I had been the most successful one out of all my classmates.
How long were you in college for and why did you drop out?
I went to ECU because my mother and her family wanted me to go to college. They wanted me to be a lawyer. I had a collapsed lung the second quarter and dropped out.
24. What happened that time the teacher told you that you couldn’t spell? I went to school out in the country and the other students went to school in town. The teacher asked the class to write a paper. I turned my paper in and a couple of days later I was sitting in the back of the class with a group of girls. The teacher announced she had this one paper that had excellent composition, but this gentleman just cannot spell. I slumped down and slid back into my seat because I knew what was coming. She said, Mr. McCauley how the hell did you get out of grammar school and I said I’ll be damned if I know.
25. Did you drop out of college with any intentions of starting a company, and if so what type of company? No, I didn’t really want to or think about it. I got a job at Sears.
26. Why did you decide to go into the moving business? I had worked for my stepfather in the moving business. I worked there for about 2 or three years.
27. What struggles or hardships did you encounter starting the moving company? Back then you had to represent a national company, like United or Global Lines. My wife and I saved up $5000 dollars between my job at Sears and her job as a schoolteacher so we could have representation.
28. When did you meet granny? I met her when I moved out into the country and we were both in the seventh grade.
29. What was your worst experience in the moving company? I always got up around 4 in the morning and went to work. I was known to fire people for being late. I overslept one morning, and I got in my car and I was going about 100 miles an hour. I looked in my rearview mirror as I pulled into work and saw a blue light. I got out of the car and he was flashing his badge and said he was a US Marshal. I had about 15 people standing outside the door waiting to work and I told the marshal he was going to have to wait until I got through because I was paying these people to work. I went into my pocket and realized I had left my keys to the office at home. So, I just ran back and busted the lock in the door because I had to get my employees to work and the US Marshal looked at me and said , “Son, you got more problems than I do.” He got back in his car and left.
30. How small was the moving company when you started it, and how large did you grow it? When I started out, everyone tried to put me out of business. I was mainly moving soldiers from one military base to the other. I would also store their furniture before they would go overseas. The military gave out their business on a rotation and on your performance. When I got out of the moving business, I had five different moving companies because you had more opportunities to get more jobs if you had more companies. More jobs meant more money.
31. Did you continue to run the moving company when you went into the Quick Stop business? Yes, I stayed in the moving business until I sold the Quick Stop Company. I later purchased a paving company.
32. What was the largest number of stores you owned at once? I was in the Quick Stop business for about 25 years and sold them in 1999. I had 125 stores at one time.
33. Did you only sell all the stores to retire or did you have another motive? I never retired. When I sold the Quick Stop Corporation, I kept the real estate and rented the store fronts and I also kept the warehouse real estate from the moving company.
34. Why did you go into the paving business? I bought this little defunct paving business the same week of 9/11. We bought it because this man was in debt and fixing to lose it. I bought it and the next day I ordered a brand-new asphalt plant for ten million dollars.
35. How have things changed from starting a business now from the 70s?Back then it was still hard to borrow money but now it’s almost impossible. In the 70’s people would loan me money because they believed that if I was alive, I would pay them back. After that, I got to where I could borrow money because people knew I would pay them back. Now the banking regulations have changed and that’s not how it is done anymore. Today you must have people financially stable to back you.
36. When did you start horseback riding? I bought a horse when I was in high school. I had worked in tobacco and made me some money, so I bought a horse and road him around the farm. I was forty before I got into serious riding.
37. What do you regret in life? I do regret that I didn’t get any more education than I did. At the same time, I don’t because I don’t know that I would have worked as hard as I did. I do believe in education but also believe in hard work. I think our education system needs to promote actual work and not just books. Education is to help you with work not to prevent you from work. I think young people need more balance between studying and working.
Reflection
This interview changed my view on the community as I learned how inaccurate communities can be at predicting people’s future. My grandfather’s story manifests this as everyone doubted that he would even be outside of the walls of a prison after the age of twenty-one. His story shows that just because you aren’t the most advantaged or the smartest you still have the ability to be successful in life. This project inspired me to be more like my grandfather as he was able to persevere through all the difficulties he faced in life.
One of the problems I faced in this project was being able to understand the freedom we had with this project and getting used to that freedom because all of my previous projects have been so structured. In my next oral history, I think I would break it up into multiple calls and slowly become more in depth with the project. If I became the tradition bearer, I would like to be able to tell the stories about how I created a company of my own without help from my family just like my grandfather did with the 5000 dollars he saved to start his first company.
Sources
Hill, Michael E. “The South In the ‘60s.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 27 Feb. 2000.
Johnson, Lloyd. “Fayetteville, City Of.” North Carolina History Project.
King, Martin L., Jr. “I Have a Dream.” Speech. Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D. C. 28 Aug. 1963.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: A Work Of Fiction. New York : Broadway Books, 1998. Print.
Shaeffer, Mathew. “Fort Bragg.” North Carolina History Project.
Tisch, S., Finerman, W., Zemeckis, R., Roth, E., Hanks, T., Wright, R., Sinise, G., … Paramount Pictures Corporation (1914–1927). (1995). Forrest Gump.
