Inspecting Foils and 1976, An Eventful Year

While working at Metro Center, my good friend Bob Greene secured a contract with the Remington Razor Company to put rails on their electric razor foils and needed a way to ship them to Bridgeport CT. He came to me to see if I could make a box so they could be shipped without damage, I did the job for him and they were very happy with the design. Later, after we had worked on this project, Remington came to Bob and wanted come to town to visit and see how the razor foils were being inspected in Charlotte. They had spent $160,000 on a projector that was created to inspect the foils but it was not doing the job they wanted. They were surprised to find that we were using a $1.99 flood lamp to do the job. Bob came back to me to see if I could do the job for them. Hazel and I took on the task of inspecting ten thousand foils and Remington was pleased with the job. They sent another ten thousand to make sure that we could meet their standards. They were more than happy and wanted us to do all of them through Bob. We started out doing five to ten thousand a week for a while and it grew to 40 to 80 thousand a week. We had to get help! Hazel and I could not keep up with the demand so we hired Mildred Bidwick, Becky Cooke, and Libby Ingram to help us part time. We were even big enough to have a company Christmas party. We made this an annual event at Christmas until we moved to the beach. At that point Bob was able to take over the inspections. This was another way God took care of us when I still could not do much work. This is a picture of Hazel inspecting foils in our "state of the art" lab!  Listen to me tell this story.

1976 was one year that Hazel will never forget. At the beginning of the year, Hazel was looking forward on having a normal summer with Mike graduating from West Mecklenburg High School and Glenn Jr. graduating from the University of NC - Charlotte. I was having a terrible time with my back and I sure was not any help around the house. As things sometime happen, there were some changes that came, Glenn and Robin set their wedding date to be shortly after they graduated from college. Later, Joe Greene and Pam started dating and decided to get married before Robin and Glenn and we became grandparents to Joe Jr. on their wedding day. Hazel's brother Larry Gentle had leukemia and God call him home during this eventful year. So with all of the graduations, marriages, and Larry's death all rolled into just a couple months Hazel almost could not handle all of that at one time. We took the events, one at a time and made it through that summer and everything turned out just fine. At the end of the summer, we had one son that was getting ready to go to college, new daughter and son in-laws, and our first grandchild who has brought much joy into our lives.