On the last post I mentioned buying a house a couple of doors from Kathleen's parents. We settled in there and started to fix the little house up as well as we could afford. I fenced in the back of our lot and started raising chickens. At this time in the early 50's this was about the same as living in the country even though this was a post war housing developement of what was called crackerbox houses. When we first moved here in 1949, there were 8 or 9 families that started having church services in homes. We became a part of what would be the beginning of the Sylvan Hills church of Christ. Sylvan Hills was a part of Pulaski County and Sherwood would become incorporated. The first mayor of Sherwood was Dennis Duran who worked at the plant where I worked. We have been a part of the church in Sylvan Hills ever since it began in 1949.
After starting to work at Visking, i purchased a 1941 Ford Coupe. It had two small fold down seats behind the front seat. Boy, i was proud of that car. Incidently, Visking Corp, may be a company that many don't know anything about. Visking made sausage casings and a series of products used in the meat industry. Visking developed the skinless weiner process using a celulose casing that was peeled off before packaging. Their venture into manufacturing non woven fabrics in North Little Rock was an off shoot of their knowledge in the making of Viscose that could be used in the bonding of fiber together instead of weaving. The non woven fabric industry would soon become a major industry for several different fields.
I started to work at Visking in 1950 at 93 cents an hour. I was there a week when everyone got a 6 cent raise. My job was the middle man on a production line. A cardman would run the cards that made the rayon or cotton fiber into a web. I would take the web through the bonding process over dry cans and then through a acid then water process and dried again. The acid and water dips removed the viscose from the material and left it bonded together like fabric. I know you don't want to read all of this but i threw it in at no extra cost. Oh the third man would take the rolls of material and slit it to various widths and yards per roll for various customers. We mainly sold to other manufacturers.
Life was good and everything was set for the starting of our family.