| Summary: | (6:59) Mr. Stanley tells about his business ventures in Colbert County, Alabama. This interview is part of an oral history project funded by a grant from the Alabama Historical Records Board, managed by the Alabama Department of Archives and History staff, using funds provided by the National Historical Preservation and Records Commission.Florence- Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Oscar Woodrow “ Woody” Stanley April 22, 2009 Florence, Alabama Conducted by Rhonda Haygood and Patti Hannah
( Also present: Lou Letson, Mac Letson)
Clip 2 of 7
Oscar Stanley: Later on, my dad never did care about owning property, he would rent a place and rent a place and rent a place and he’d, I guess he thought that you only needed while you lived there, that was good enough, you know. But, somehow or another he got a hold of a little old strip of land that was about, ah, two hundred feet on the County Line Road out at Old Bethel, south of Leighton, eight miles south of Leighton, and about fifty feet on the road and it went back about three hundred feet. And, ah, and while the WPA was going, ah, I thought that’d be a good place for a little country store. And I talked to him about it, even though he owned the land, you know, he said, “ Yeah, you can— you wanna try it, go ahead.” So I went to Davis Bullington, in Leighton, ah, in Littleville; Davis was in the lumber business, Bullington Lumber Company, and bought about three hundred dollars worth of lumber from Davis Bullington and paid him about twenty dollars down. And I ordered my tin roof from Sears and Roebuck for five dollars a month and built a little ol’ store. Wasn’t as big as this room. We stayed there seven years and Lou, there, my daughter, was born. And I, I built on that store seven times in seven years and I built four- room living quarters in the back and she was born in that, those living quarters. And, ah, sold it and got in, I got in the bus business when Reynolds was going big. The men come in and they wanted me to help them have transportation to Reynolds. Went to Birmingham and bought a used bus and I started it through, through Leighton to Reynolds, called it Stanley Stages and it was a twenty- seven passenger Dodge bus and, ah, it wasn’t too long till it wasn’t big enough. So I started that bus down through Spring Valley on another route and bought a new forty passenger bus to go through Leighton. And, ah, run it for ten years, the bus line for ten years. And had a lot of experiences on that bus line. We had black and white trouble in Leighton before Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. The blacks out there at Leighton, south of Leighton, though, was the, um, the savior of the bus line because there was more blacks that there were whites and they paid their fare and so, we kept it going for ten years, till Reynolds started going down. And, ah, then, after, while I was running that bus line, got to looking at a little ol’ corner over here on Second Street. We finally extended the bus on into Sheffield for people who wanted to go to town, we’d just go on into Sheffield and come back and pick up the shift that was coming off at Reynolds then. And got to looking at a little ol’ corner over there on Second Street and Jackson Highway. It was grown up with bushes and a few trees and I thought, boy that would be a good corner for a drive- in restaurant. So, got to inquiring around and found out who owned it and it was a Mr. and Mrs. Copham, they had bought it during the, the big boon, Henry Ford was gonna to come to the area, you know, with a new automobile plant [ inaudible] they bought it, so, ah, somebody told me that they owned it and they said, I said, “ Well reckon they, they’d sell it?” and they said, “ Well, I don’t know,” said, “ they got a phone, they lived in Sheffield.” So I called and Mrs. Copham answered and she said, “ Well,” said, “ We bought it during the— we thought we was gonna get rich in the boon and everything, but,” said, “ let me talk to Mr. Copham,” said, “ call me back in about a week.” So, I called her back in about a week and she said they would sell theirs, the front lot, for twenty- five hundred dollars. The Lagomarsino estate at Sheffield owned the back lot and I needed both of them. And I went down there, to, to their, their office and there was two girls, the Lagomarsino girls they called them, that run all their rentals, you know, so they said, “ Well,” said, “ Daddy didn’t much wanna sell off much stuff.” Said, “ We’ll talk about it.” Said, “ Come back in about a week.” So I come back in about, went back in about a week and they said, “ Well, we, we, we, guess we’d sell it to you.” And I said, “ Well, what do you want for it?” And they said, “ Fifteen hundred dollars.” And so I’d already put earnest money down on the front lot and so I told them, I said, “ Well, I, I’m gonna take it.” And I built the Woody Mac Drive- In Restaurant on that corner and it was the hot spot of the Tri- Cities after the war. If you, if you hadn’t been to the Woody Mac, you hadn’t been nowhere. My brother Malcom was in the army in Italy and when he got back I asked him if he wanted to come in with me on the drive- in restaurant and he said he did. We opened it up in June, 1947 and then we built the, ah, we called it the Woody Mac Drive- In over near the hospital, where the Mexican place is at now. We opened it up in 1950 and we, then we built the Corral, over here in front of the Lincoln Mercury place. It had twenty- two stalls. It had the building, the kitchen with a upstairs, and it had a basement in it and had eleven stalls on the south end and eleven stalls on the north end. And, of course it was, nobody had seen anything like it around here, you know, you’d pull up in the stall, pick up the phone, and order your food and the girls would bring a tray of food out, you know. And it was the hot spot for a long time. After, when Sheffield and Florence would have a ballgame, they would circle that block for three of four hours trying to get a stall to get in there. So, then, ah, finally got out of the restaurant business and got to selling restaurant equipment, sold restaurant equipment for about 10 years over North Alabama. Then in 1980, we opened up our own restaurant equipment business in Sheffield, called it Commercial Equipment and Supply, which we operated till about, about a year ago when it began dwindling down. In a word, in other words, ah, in my letter to the editor, two- aught- aught- eight was the toughest time since the Great Depression of 1930 and if it hadn’t been for the Social Security checks, it probably would have been as bad as 1930. The Social, Social Security checks, in my opinions, is what keeps our economy going. I know, I, I’m extremely proud, that’s the reason I keep talking about Franklin D. Roosevelt. I draw twenty- one hundred dollars a month now and I mean, you know, with, that, that pays for the house payment, and utilities and just about everything else and, and it was just unheard of, when I was growing, a kid growing up and eighteen, twenty years old, if somebody said and you’d get on government thing one of these times, you’d get two or three, two thousand dollars a month, I’d say, “ Nah, no way. That’s, not that kind of money.”
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