Memories of Charlton County - by Gibson and Mays Back to Table of Contents 14. SOME OF MY FIRST JOBS (Pp 21-22) When my brothers and I were growing up we
learned to do most all of the farm work around our home. We didn't get paid for this as it was expected of us, but I can remember some of the jobs that I had which resulted in receiving some spending money. The first time I worked and received pay for it was when Papa, Henry Gilbert Gibson, was in the firewood business. Papa cut trees and split the wood and shipped it to Jacksonville for folks to use in their fireplaces. That was about the only way houses were heated at
that time. Papa sent me to Homeland to meet the freight train and to give the conductor a message. He wanted the railroad to leave an empty car the next day so he could load it with firewood and send it on to Jacksonville. When I got to the Homeland depot, an elderly man who owned a little store nearby told me it would be two hours before the train would come and he also said he needed his garden plowed and would give me fifteen cents an hour to do
that. Since I had to wait for two hours, and thirty cents looked like a lot of money to me, I hitched up his mule and plowed out his corn patch and the rest of the garden. Instead of giving me thirty cents when I finished, he made me take fifteen cents worth of candy and fifteen cents in money. This arrangement suited me fine, for I never would have bought fifteen cents worth of candy at one time! When I was a young man and the crops had been harvested on the farm, I
earned money in the fall by taking a team of mules and the wagon out to the woods and leading it up with lightwood and pineknots. I sold this to the people in Folkston who used this fat wood to get the fires started in their cookstoves and fireplaces. One day, after getting an order for wood from Mr. Billy Mizell, I drove up to his home and began tossing lightwood over the fence and Mr. Mizell came outside. He wanted to tell me about a new invention he had just bought. It
was called a "radio" and it seems that you could hear people from another town speaking through it. I said, "Can you actually hear people talking over it?" Mr. Mizell replied, "Madison, you've heard a person get up to make a speech and the first thing they do is clear their throat? Well, before this man began to speak yesterday, I heard him clear his throat! And this man was talking in Jacksonville when I heard him!" A
short time after that I was working for Georgia-Florida Investment Company on still another job helping herd up about five hundred cows so they could be dipped to get rid of the wood ticks. We began near Racepond and rode horses trying to gather the cows together. We were about half way to the dipping vat when we stopped to spend the night at the Archie Dinkins home. After supper that night, we were sitting on the porch and I told the Dinkins family about Mr. Mizell's new gadget called the
radio. I didn't convince everyone that heard me. The Victrola and records were reasonably common at that time and Mrs. Dinkins said, "Madison, you might make some people believe that, but you can't make me. It was probably a record in Mr. Mizell's machine that sounded like a person talking. You know they can't just send voices through the air!" | 
