Jody Harper and Will Haas

[00:03] JODY KAMENS HARPER: This is Jody I'm Jody Kamens Harper and I'm 59. Today's date is November 17 of 2023, not 1923. And we're in Mobile, Alabama, and I'm here to talk with Will Hayes.

[00:19] WILL HAYES: And so, okay, my name is Will Hayes. I'm 91, and today's date is November 17, 1987.

[00:28] JODY KAMENS HARPER: I did it.

[00:29] WILL HAYES: 2023. 2023. Mobile, Alabama.

[00:35] JODY KAMENS HARPER: All right. Okay. So Will you were telling me when we got here that your aunt Bessie's house, right. Was right here across the street from.

[00:43] WILL HAYES: The church, from Christ church.

[00:45] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Christ church.

[00:46] WILL HAYES: I used to play on that bell when I was little.

[00:48] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So did. Okay, so tell me who your friends were that you hung out with when you were that age. Like, who was there?

[00:56] WILL HAYES: That's. I can't remember anybody a long time ago.

[00:59] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Well, now, were you an only child?

[01:01] WILL HAYES: No.

[01:02] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay.

[01:02] WILL HAYES: I was the 11th of eleven children.

[01:06] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Wow, really?

[01:07] WILL HAYES: Yeah. The last one.

[01:08] JODY KAMENS HARPER: I did not know that. So you were the baby?

[01:10] WILL HAYES: I was a baby of a bunch of children. Mm hmm.

[01:13] JODY KAMENS HARPER: That means you were the most charming.

[01:14] WILL HAYES: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[01:16] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Well, first of all, tell me. Okay. Tell me your mom and your dad's your parents names.

[01:20] WILL HAYES: My mother was Trixie Venerini, and she was married to William Hayes, William Oliver Hayes. And they, she was killed in an automobile accident in Katherine, Alabama, when I was 18 months old.

[01:34] JODY KAMENS HARPER: I did not know that. Wow.

[01:36] WILL HAYES: And she had three children. I was the youngest of the three children she had. Papa had two sets of children, eight by the first wife and then three by the second wife. And I was one of the three by the second wife.

[01:46] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Wow. Okay. Who went and who was his first wife? Who were some of your siblings by the first wife?

[01:54] WILL HAYES: Well, my siblings were William Melvin Hayes, Oliver Hayes, Harry Hayes, George Hayes, George Madison Hayes, and Lucille was one of my sisters, half sisters, and Marguerite and Betty. Marguerite was married to Andy Eddington, who, when was later an educator.

[02:23] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay. I know Pat Eddington. Sherrod Eddington was my age. Okay. So I think, I'm sure that must have been his grandfather. His grandfather. Anyway, anyway, we were the presbyterian end of things.

[02:37] WILL HAYES: Right. He was a big Presbyterian.

[02:39] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yes.

[02:39] WILL HAYES: And he was, yes.

[02:41] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay. And so, and I don't know, did you grow up episcopalian or presbyterian?

[02:45] WILL HAYES: I grew up actually as episcopalian because my mother had been an Episcopalian. She had belonged to St. John's Episcopal Church when it was down in south Mobile county. And then they tore it down years later and built a new one out on Government Street. I never went to the new one, but the old one had a big window up in the side of the church that papa had donated to the church when Mama was killed.

[03:07] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, wow.

[03:08] WILL HAYES: And I guess it's in the new church. I hadn't been in the new church, but I used to go to church, and I'd sit and look at the window it was dedicated to.

[03:16] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, okay. And this was which church?

[03:18] WILL HAYES: St. John's Episcopal church, which was down on Durbin street in south Mobile.

[03:23] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay, so, dear, burn down, which is down here.

[03:25] WILL HAYES: Down.

[03:26] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Down.

[03:26] WILL HAYES: Yeah, down here. Yeah, right down here.

[03:28] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Like at the loop.

[03:29] WILL HAYES: No, no, it was, uh. I can tell you where it was. It was. It was.

[03:36] JODY KAMENS HARPER: I know I should.

[03:37] WILL HAYES: It was in the middle of nowhere.

[03:38] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Dearborn Avenue.

[03:39] WILL HAYES: Dearborn street.

[03:40] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Mm hmm. Well, so. Okay, so you don't have memories of your mama? I guess. What did your dad tell you about her? Nothing, really.

[03:50] WILL HAYES: They didn't talk about her.

[03:52] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Did anybody kind of step in to be your mom?

[03:55] WILL HAYES: My sister, Marguerite.

[03:56] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh.

[03:57] WILL HAYES: Raised me. She raised me. She and Valley, the cook.

[04:03] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay.

[04:04] WILL HAYES: Yeah.

[04:04] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So valley. Okay, so did valley live with y'all or. Valley came in.

[04:07] WILL HAYES: She just came every day, 07:00 stayed until 07:00 at night.

[04:12] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yeah.

[04:12] WILL HAYES: Yeah.

[04:12] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Wow. Yeah, we did. We had. We had a lady that worked for us named Anno, and I loved Anno.

[04:18] WILL HAYES: Yeah.

[04:19] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And before her, she was one.

[04:21] WILL HAYES: She was wonderful. Yeah.

[04:22] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yeah. I remember seeing. Watching them iron. Mandy, my grandmother. That's one thing I never saw my grandmother do. She didn't iron clothes. I think Anna. I mean, at that time, Anna would do the ironing and take care of me and my grandmother. But my grandmother always cooked everything. She was the food pusher.

[04:41] WILL HAYES: One of the nice things about being born on Spring Hill Avenue was riding the streetcar automobile. We'd ride the streetcar to town. Valley would take me on the streetcar. We'd ride downtown.

[04:51] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So. Okay. And your daddy had the meat business, so it was right here at the market.

[04:56] WILL HAYES: Hayes. No, Hayes Davis packing company was out in Pritchett.

[04:59] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, okay.

[05:00] WILL HAYES: And they started out as Hayes brothers in the marketplace in 1865 because they used to have on the. On the label. They always had on it since 1865. Hayes Davis. Of course, it went out of business in 1965.

[05:14] JODY KAMENS HARPER: A hundred years.

[05:17] WILL HAYES: Made it 100 years. But.

[05:19] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And that's what Alan told me when we were here. Alan said we were butchers. And I thought, well, Alan, you weren't a butcher, but. But definitely your.

[05:27] WILL HAYES: In the old days, they were all butchers.

[05:29] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yeah, but it was your. It would have been your great great great grandfather who came.

[05:34] WILL HAYES: My grandfather. Your grandfather came over here from Germany.

[05:38] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay. And they came over to Demopolis.

[05:41] WILL HAYES: To Demopolis, and then came down the river from Demopolis on a riverboat.

[05:45] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay. And at that time, Crichton was called Napoleon.

[05:48] WILL HAYES: Napoleonville. That's right.

[05:49] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay, so tell me about. Now. This is what Alan. He talked to Russell Hayes, and part of what he got really emotional about was that the family came down from Timopolis, but it was a husband and wife, and Augustus Hayes was the father.

[06:07] WILL HAYES: George Augustus was the.

[06:09] JODY KAMENS HARPER: George Augustus. And then he and his wife came down and they had a daughter and. And a man named. Let me think what it was. George Augustus. Oh, hi. There was a family with the last name of high.

[06:23] WILL HAYES: Yeah, they lived next door.

[06:25] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yes. And they were German. And they. And George Hayes came to help them move and put everything on a barge and move the whole family down the river. So they brought their house with them.

[06:38] WILL HAYES: On a flat boat. They brought it down and then took it apart and rebuilt it out at Crichton.

[06:41] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right.

[06:42] WILL HAYES: When I was little, I used to go out there and see the house.

[06:44] JODY KAMENS HARPER: I said, what did it look like?

[06:46] WILL HAYES: It was just a nice house. It was a cottage. But you could see the pigs and the wooden pigs. They put it together with wooden pigs.

[06:52] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, wow.

[06:53] WILL HAYES: Yeah.

[06:54] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And so what he got emotional about was, and this is before we got in to do our story time, but he got very emotional about the fact that the high family and George Hayes, he married their daughter. They came down and George and his wife had children, very young children, like a two year old and a three year old, maybe they were very young. And in 1844, the highs. So the husband and wife and George Augustus Hayes died of yellow fever.

[07:29] WILL HAYES: Yellow fever. That's when the big epidemic hit mobile.

[07:34] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right. And so that one. And what Alan got so emotional about was that he said that one woman is the reason our family survived. That that one, she was left without her parents, without her husband, with these very small children, and yet she survived. And then I think she merged with another. Like she married another man. I can't remember who she married, but. But the haze name came down and so that would have been your. That child, one of the surviving children.

[08:08] WILL HAYES: You know where the old house was, your grandfather, do you know where the old house was? If you go out to Crichton, where Crichton school is, that whole Creighton school area was a pasture. That was a Hays pasture. And they used to have. It had cattle in there and horses and mules.

[08:27] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So do you remember your dad actively, you said y'all had. I mean, you would go with him down to the market downtown?

[08:36] WILL HAYES: No, no, the market was gone. They had already. He bought Arthur Davis out in 1865.

[08:43] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay.

[08:44] WILL HAYES: And they moved out to Pritchett, to the packing house out in Pritchard, where the Hayes Davis packing company was. It's gone now, but that's where it was.

[08:52] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But would you ever go with, you said you were there.

[08:55] WILL HAYES: Oh, I used to go out there and play in it all the time in the old days.

[08:58] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And you said they killed hogs on certain days and cattle on other days.

[09:02] WILL HAYES: They killed cattle on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and killed hogs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you could always tell when they were killing hogs. Cause you could hear them for a mile away.

[09:10] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh.

[09:11] WILL HAYES: Squealing. Yeah.

[09:13] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay. And you said the upstairs was where.

[09:16] WILL HAYES: The killing floor was. Upstairs on the top floor.

[09:18] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Mm hmm.

[09:18] WILL HAYES: And it was a three floor building. The top floor was the killing floor. And the second floor was the sausage room and the smoke houses and all that. And then the bottom floor was where they had the. The big.

[09:29] JODY KAMENS HARPER: The vats with the hams.

[09:30] WILL HAYES: Big cask full of hams and salted the hams and bacon. And they put them in these big oak barrels and fill it with salt water brine, and then put a wooden grate on top and weight it down with bricks to hold them down. And they'd leave them in there for, I don't know, a month or two in the salt water. And they'd take them out and take them up and put them in the smoke house and smoke them with hickory logs. Mm hmm.

[09:56] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So, okay. And you, what was I going to ask you? Something else about the. So. Oh, but when you took. Brought. When y'all would get on the streetcar, you were coming to downtown mobile.

[10:09] WILL HAYES: Mm hmm. Valley would take me downtown on the street car. When I was about five or six years old. We'd ride the street car down and get off and go to the Albright and wood on. Across square right there on the corner. And the first time I went in there, I'd never been in an air conditioned building before. And I walked in, and it was. It smelled terrible because at that time, they didn't, I don't know what they used for refrigerant, but it was. It had a horrible odor to it. And I screamed and hollered and I wouldn't go in. And she had to, she couldn't get.

[10:37] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Me to go in the air conditioned building.

[10:39] WILL HAYES: I had to sit outside.

[10:40] JODY KAMENS HARPER: What. In what building was it?

[10:42] WILL HAYES: Albright Wood on the corner.

[10:44] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So it was like a convenient. I mean, a drug store.

[10:47] WILL HAYES: A drugstore on the corner of the square. On the.

[10:50] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, on Bienville Square. Yeah.

[10:52] WILL HAYES: On this, see, would have been the. On Dolphin street, it would have been the. On the left hand side. As you get to the square right down the corner.

[11:00] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right, right. Okay, I think I know where.

[11:04] WILL HAYES: I don't know what's in there. Now.

[11:05] JODY KAMENS HARPER: I know Merrill lynch was on that side when my mother worked down there.

[11:08] WILL HAYES: Okay.

[11:08] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But. Yeah. And gayfers, or, I think Gaffer's was on the other side.

[11:12] WILL HAYES: Well, Hamill's used to be over there, too. On the right hand side.

[11:14] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yeah, yeah.

[11:15] WILL HAYES: Hamilton, I think, is gone now, isn't it?

[11:17] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yes. Hamills has been gone a long time, but.

[11:20] WILL HAYES: Yeah, that was a big store.

[11:22] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yeah, that's right.

[11:24] WILL HAYES: Hayes Davis had a branch at the foot of Dolphin street on the left hand side of dolphin, and commerce on that corner. Hayes Davis had what they call the branch for city, for the restaurants and things to pick up meat and things for the.

[11:38] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, neat, they call it. So they really provided all the meat that people ate in that meal, every bit, probably all the sausage, all the beef. And then you said the cattlemen would bring their cattle in to be butchered.

[11:53] WILL HAYES: Bring them into the stockyard in the back. There was a big stockyard in the back. They'd unload the cattle and hogs. And they had a thing where they'd go in and walk in and had a scale. They'd weigh them and they'd pay them in the.

[12:07] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay, and tell me, too, again, we talked about this. There was a zoo on the bay at Dog river. What was the park called again?

[12:20] WILL HAYES: The Grandview Park.

[12:22] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Grandview park. And so it was on the south.

[12:25] WILL HAYES: Side of Dog river. On the bay. On the bay. And cornered on Dog river and in the bay. And it had all kind of animals in there. And they had. When the war came, they couldn't feed the lions, so they decided to kill them. And across the street from us, on Oak on Park Avenue, Mister Roth lived across the street, and he was a famous taxidermist.

[12:49] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And so they went, oh, that's why he was involved.

[12:51] WILL HAYES: And he went down and Papa sent a couple of skinners from the plant down there. And they went down. We went down early one morning for daylight.

[12:58] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And were you the only child that got to go watch?

[13:00] WILL HAYES: Frank went with me. My brother Frank, he and I went down and watched them. And they shot the two, the two lines, the two, a male and a female, and they shot the cub and they hung them up in trees and skinned them and they took them back, and Mister Roth stuffed the two heads and made rugs out of the adult lines.

[13:22] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So that's why I didn't understand. So Mister Roth didn't own the zoo. He was not the one determining that they had to do that.

[13:28] WILL HAYES: He was just a taxidermist.

[13:29] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But it was 1942.

[13:32] WILL HAYES: Well, it was right after the war started. So I figured it was in 42, because the war didn't start till December 41.

[13:38] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Explain that. They could not feed the lions because there was no food to feed them.

[13:42] WILL HAYES: Well, meat had gotten rationed. They had rationed meat, you know.

[13:46] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right.

[13:46] WILL HAYES: You had to have a cord to get. You could only get so much meat a week or something. So the rationing was going on. So meat became real scarce, and they decided that they couldn't feed them, didn't want to feed them meat.

[13:59] JODY KAMENS HARPER: It just sounds so amazing, because, first of all, I didn't know there was a zoo in mobile. And then to hear, you know, that they had to do that. But as a boy, you probably had a whole different frame of reference. You go down there and watch. What were you thinking about as a kid? Do you remember what it was like to.

[14:21] WILL HAYES: I mean, well, you know, it's exciting to see the lines, you know, and, of course, watch them skin them. That was interesting, you know, so they hung them up between two trees and skinned them.

[14:33] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And that was down at Dog river.

[14:36] WILL HAYES: Right on the corner.

[14:37] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay.

[14:38] WILL HAYES: Grandview park.

[14:39] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So, like, down where the marina is now, I guess.

[14:42] WILL HAYES: I haven't been down in 25, 30 years. I don't know what's down in there.

[14:46] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But it was like, on the back.

[14:48] WILL HAYES: If you're going down, you crossed Auger Bridge. It would have been on the left hand side. That whole area out there was a big park, Grandview park. And had a big pier and a big pier house and all swimming places.

[15:00] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And y'all go swimming out there?

[15:01] WILL HAYES: People go down, they go swimming and go to the zoo and all. It was a real famous, you know, popular place to go.

[15:07] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay, so now tell me, how did you. Tell me a little bit about your lawyering and then how you shifted into doing salvage business or the rigging business?

[15:16] WILL HAYES: Okay. I graduated from law school in 1958, and I practiced in mobile for two years. And I realized I wasn't very good and very smart. I. And I met this girl, and she had a business, and I got married, and she was in the surplus business.

[15:34] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And who is that? Who did you marry?

[15:36] WILL HAYES: Ann? Her name was Anne hall.

[15:38] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay.

[15:39] WILL HAYES: And she. She and her husband, Horace hall, had been involved in the surplus at that time, they were wrecking a lot of the ships from world War two, and they were bringing them down and taking them to Panama City and breaking them all the ships. And so there was a lot of stuff and they were building a lot of shrimp boats. At that time, the shrimp boat business was really beginning to expand and there was a lot of, and of course, the merchant ships at that time used a lot of rigging because Malcolm hadn't come down here yet and fooled and messed the ships up.

[16:09] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, so he hadn't invented.

[16:11] WILL HAYES: Well, he came down with a damn container thing.

[16:13] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right.

[16:13] WILL HAYES: He bought water.

[16:15] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So this is before the container ship?

[16:17] WILL HAYES: Well, yeah, he bought water in the steamship and changed them all from regular ships to contain the ships. Well, before he fooled with them, they had rigging all over them. They had ropes and blocks and shackles and turnbuckles. And so we went, and that's what we were selling was all that, all that stuff and.

[16:31] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But the ropes and all that tackle was to bring merchandise onto the ships and.

[16:36] WILL HAYES: Right. Take, unloading the ships, loading.

[16:39] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So what were the longshoremen like?

[16:40] WILL HAYES: They were the ones who did it.

[16:42] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay, because my grandfather was a marine surveyor and a sea captain, but, and then my great grandfather was, they weren't doing the longshoremen.

[16:51] WILL HAYES: You had what they called stevedores and you had longshoremen. Well, a stevedore was the guy who told them where to put the stuff, but the longshoremen was the guy who carried the sacks.

[16:59] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh.

[16:59] WILL HAYES: And then what they would do, they would have a, they come up to the, alongside the ship and they'd put a pallet down and the pallet would be loaded with sacks.

[17:06] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right.

[17:07] WILL HAYES: And a crane would come off the ship because the ships had all these big cranes on them, and they would lower it down and pick up the sack, a pallete loaded with sacks, and put it on the ship, and the longshoremen would take it down below and the stevedore would tell them where to store it in the ship because you had to be careful when you stowed a ship where it wouldn't turn over, sink, you know?

[17:26] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right, exactly.

[17:29] WILL HAYES: And so he was, he would make a plan. He would draw a plan of the, of where to put the cargo. So there was a lot of rigging on the ships. And then Malcolm came down and bought Waterman and messed all that up.

[17:45] JODY KAMENS HARPER: He ruined your business.

[17:46] WILL HAYES: He ruined the rigging business for that thing. But at the same time, they discovered the brown shrimp in the gulf right off of, off of Galveston and down in south Texas. And so when they discovered the gulf shrimp, they started building shrimp boats, right? Because until that time, all the shrimp had been caught in Mobile Bay. You didn't shrimp in the gulf at all up until they found.

[18:10] JODY KAMENS HARPER: What year would this. When would this have been?

[18:12] WILL HAYES: I'm trying to think.

[18:14] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Was it in the 60?

[18:15] WILL HAYES: Oh, no, this would have been forties, late forties. I can't remember the years that it would have been in. But when I was little, all the shrimp in Mobile were caught in Mobile Bay.

[18:26] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right.

[18:27] WILL HAYES: Nobody went in the gulf, and all the shrimp was they shrimp with nets on one side of the boat, bring it up alongside the boat and put it on the, on the back end. And it was local shrimp was in some time in the, must have been in the fifties or sixties. Somebody in Texas, off of a rancher's pass, found a brown shrimp in the gulf. They didn't know they went to shrimp out in the gulf, because the gulf shrimp don't come out of the sand until daylight. They stay buried all daylight, and at night they come up. So if you're gonna catch them, you have to trawl them and have to fish farm at night. Well, nobody ever went at night, so they didn't know there was any shrimp in the go. But somebody, when they had their rigs out there and they were doing the oil, right, somebody at night, some of the boats got involved somehow, and they found shrimp at night and said, oh, my lord, look at this. So and so the brown shrimp just exploded. And Aransas Pass was the real hot spot.

[19:23] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay.

[19:23] WILL HAYES: So we started selling a lot of stuff in Aransas Pass to the ship.

[19:28] JODY KAMENS HARPER: You were selling the rigging, all the.

[19:29] WILL HAYES: Rigging they used on the shrimp. On the shrimp boats, right?

[19:32] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, neat. Okay, but tell me, when you were in, how old were you when the Liberty ships were being built and you would go down on Saturdays and watch them?

[19:39] WILL HAYES: Well, that would have been in 42. So I was ten. And every Saturday they would launch Liberty ships. Every Saturday they launched one.

[19:47] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And where were the ships when they launched them? Where did they launch from?

[19:50] WILL HAYES: From Asco, Alabama, Dradock, which was right across. And we'd go to the foot of the Slava street and sit on the end of the pier street and watch them, and they'd launch the ships from over on the other side and then launched them sideways.

[20:07] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So then when you were in salvage business, you were actually taking some. You were able to go to Panama City and buy some of them coming off that.

[20:17] WILL HAYES: They started breaking those ships up in the sixties. That's right. They sure did. And that's when we started going in there. I went down there one day, and this guy was in the yard, was. Had all this. They were breaking these ships and had stuff piled up everywhere.

[20:30] JODY KAMENS HARPER: I.

[20:30] WILL HAYES: And I said, what are you doing with this stuff? He said, well, you sell it for scrap. And I said, okay. So I started buying stuff. And every time I go, I'd take a bottle of whiskey. So I take him bottle of old crow. So every time I drive up, he'd start calling. The old crow. Got him. So I started buying.

[20:49] JODY KAMENS HARPER: That was your tool?

[20:51] WILL HAYES: That was my deal. Was old Crow? Yeah.

[20:54] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Who was the guy?

[20:56] WILL HAYES: Gosh, I don't remember his name. Gosh. That was.

[20:58] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But it was somebody that was in charge.

[20:59] WILL HAYES: He was a guy. He was a superintendent on the yard. And one day we were riding around, and there was a pile of. All those ships in those days had hatches and hatchboards. And the hatches were made out of wood, but they had a steel band around them. So we were riding around one day, and they had this huge pile of hatchboards piled up. I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm trying to sell them. He said, why don't you buy them? I said, what do you want from him? He said, well, if you burn them, the straps worth $0.50. He said, give me $0.50 piece for them. So I said, okay. So I went and rented a truck and bought a truckload of hatchboard. I think I got 550 of them on the truck.

[21:34] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Wow.

[21:34] WILL HAYES: Loaded them on the truck and brought them back. So I started selling hatchboards for making. I built a table and put it out front. A coffee table, people. Looks cool.

[21:44] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay. What year was that? Because my grandfather built a hatchboard table.

[21:47] WILL HAYES: Okay.

[21:48] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And he might have bought his hatchboard table.

[21:49] WILL HAYES: He bought it from me. He bought it from me.

[21:50] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But he even knew, like, what ship it came from. Cause it said the name of the ship.

[21:53] WILL HAYES: Yeah. Some of them had it on. Now let's see what year that would have been. 62.

[22:01] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Wow. Well, he. And he didn't make that thing, I'm sure, till in the early seventies. Because I was a little girl, and I remember it was a big deal.

[22:08] WILL HAYES: Yeah. You know, I started selling for $5 a piece.

[22:12] JODY KAMENS HARPER: That's why.

[22:13] WILL HAYES: Yeah, I had a couple of truckloads of them. But that. There was other stuff on there.

[22:17] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Well, that's, like one of my treasures in my house. Is that hatchboard table.

[22:20] WILL HAYES: You still got it?

[22:21] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, yes.

[22:21] WILL HAYES: Okay.

[22:22] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yes, it's my coffee. It's a coffee table. But my grandfather, I was so proud of having that, and he was so proud of it because it was from a ship, and his whole life was about shipping.

[22:31] WILL HAYES: Yeah, sure.

[22:32] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So, you know, and, well, it was.

[22:35] WILL HAYES: Fun riding through the yard because this guy, you know, they would. They were. All they were trying to do was get stuff that they could sell. And most of it was scrap iron, you know, so if it's steel, they could. They could melt it and sell it for scrap. So much. A ton. So anything that he had, he'd say, what about that can you use? So I was. I just got through there and pick up, and I bought a bunch of running lights. I bought a whole bunch of running lights, about 50 or 60 of those.

[23:00] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And I sold those that came off of the ships.

[23:01] WILL HAYES: Off the ships. The red and green running lights.

[23:03] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yeah.

[23:04] WILL HAYES: Yeah, I had a lot of those. I sold a lot of those.

[23:06] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So when my grandfather great. I mean, my great grandfather, he'd been in sailing ship business, and they'd had Whitney and Biden Shipping company, and they shipped lumber to South America on the. On the lumber on the schooners.

[23:20] WILL HAYES: That's right.

[23:21] JODY KAMENS HARPER: I. Okay. But then he. And then basically they went out of business because there just wasn't business for sailing ships anymore. And the ships would founder and burn and all these things.

[23:31] WILL HAYES: 1917 was a big. 18 was a big.

[23:33] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Yes. In 17 and 18, they were big. They were millionaires. And then by the thirties, they were done.

[23:39] WILL HAYES: That's exactly right.

[23:40] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So then he went to see for Waterman Steamship Company, and he was a captain for them. And. And he said. He said they were taking scrap metal to Japan. Like, he came back with japanese beautiful china. Like the china set I have. That was my great grandmother's. He brought home beautiful, like, twelve pieces of everything China set. But he said, you know, we're shipping the scrap iron over to them so they can shoot it back at us. So he knew before World War Two what they were. We were, as a country stupid for sending that over to him. But, I mean, it was merchant shipping.

[24:21] WILL HAYES: So mobiles had an interesting history being on the water with all the shipping and everything. The watermen, I can remember watermelon when they were running full blast, they had about 25 or 30 ships. And the Caribbean was their big. Puerto Rico. And now that was their big market. Cuban Puerto Rico. That's where most of them went from here, Ponce, that was a big deal. Mobile to Ponzi.

[24:43] JODY KAMENS HARPER: To where?

[24:44] WILL HAYES: Ponzi, Puerto Rico.

[24:46] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, okay.

[24:47] WILL HAYES: Yeah. And they. That was a big. The big market for the. For the ships. Then Malcolm, when he came down here and bought watermen, he took him out to Chickasaw. That chickasaw was where they'd been building ships during the war. The shipyard out there.

[25:01] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Right.

[25:02] WILL HAYES: He rented. He leased that shipyard for a number of years, and he would bring those ships in, those watermelon ships, and take them out to Chickasaw, and that's where he would convert them over to container ships.

[25:12] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Oh, okay.

[25:14] WILL HAYES: He didn't realize what he was doing. He was ruining the Reagan market.

[25:18] JODY KAMENS HARPER: He was ruining the Reagan market. That's so funny. Well, and the other thing I was thinking about, we were talking about shipping is. So my great grandfather, after he retired, and he retired after taking the Sam Houston, he was on the Sam Houston, that ship for Waterman, and he said it was hotboxing. So basically, there was a problem with the engine. And my great uncle, the way he told the story, he laughed and said, yeah, big daddy didn't. Couldn't swim. And so he kept the ship.

[25:54] WILL HAYES: People in those days couldn't swim right well.

[25:56] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So he kept the ship really close to shore. He got it back to Mobile, and my uncle Charlie said. Great uncle Charlie said, he said, I came down by van Antwerp building one day, and biggie. Daddy. He said, daddy came out of the. Out of the building, and he was so angry, spit was flying out of his mouth. And he said he was mad at those little shirt tail lieutenants in the coast guard because they had chewed him out about driving the ship too close to shore. Well, so he said that. He said, I quit. I'm done. And that was the last day he shipped out as the captain. And the next, very next trip out was when the Sam Houston came, went out, and the Germans attacked and sank it and burned everybody alive. Very next little jaunt.

[26:45] WILL HAYES: Wow, that was cool.

[26:46] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Out of mobile.

[26:47] WILL HAYES: Wow.

[26:47] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So that's. But then when the war was over, they called on my great grandfather to be the captain, to take those to mothball the ships and to take them up river. So the ghost fleet that was up in the river, he took him up there. He was the person taking him up there, but he lost his leg. He had health problems, and they. He literally was like Captain Ahab. They had to amputate his one leg. And so in his older years, he was always hungry, and my great grandmother was always having to hurry and get some food to the table for him. But he was a character. Diabetic, probably. He. Everyone in my family died of colon cancer.

[27:29] WILL HAYES: Wow.

[27:29] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So he had. He was the first I think person that they realized had colon issues. But I think it's super hereditary because I had a cousin that died at 53 after having carcinoid cancer, which is also related to intestinal or that colon issue. So yes, one of those things I don't enjoy, but, you know. But okay, tell me one thing. Tell me about Valley. What was she like?

[28:01] WILL HAYES: Valley was wonderful. I was, like I said, I was only two years old when my mother was killed. Yeah, I was actually 18 months old. They said I didn't remember, of course, but Valley worked for us for about twelve years, raised me, and she'd come every day, it's like 06:00 630 and fix breakfast and take care of me, get me ready for school. And I started, I went to school at Old Shell Road. School for four years. Yes, I did my grandmother, I went to kindergarten there. And then I went, I went four years there, five years there. And then I went to, from there I went to, from Oldshell Road to. Papa had remarried and the woman he married wasn't too keen on having me go so far. So she sent me to Crichton school.

[28:46] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Okay.

[28:47] WILL HAYES: Which was a sort of what's closer?

[28:49] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Cause y'all were on Spring Hill Avenue.

[28:50] WILL HAYES: We lived on Spring Hill Avenue about.

[28:52] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And next to Eb Sledge. And tell me just a little bit about EB Sledge.

[28:55] WILL HAYES: Yeah. Jean. Yeah. Gene Sledge lived next door. He was an interesting guy. I was telling Jody that he was so interested when I was growing up because he was a good bit older than I was. He was about 17 or 18 when I was about ten. So I used to go in and play in his yard. And he had all kind of great stuff. He had dogs and he had goats and he had a goat wagon which Frank and I love that he had bought, which was a factory made goat wagon, which was really fancy. It had all kind of fancy filigree on the side of it and everything. It was a two goat wagon. Frank and I built a single goat wagon.

[29:32] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But he taught you all how to build the goat wagon?

[29:34] WILL HAYES: He taught us how to build a goat wagon.

[29:36] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And where did y'all ride it? Around. I mean, like, where did you go in the goat wagon?

[29:39] WILL HAYES: Oh, his, his property was like 50 acres. They went all the way from Springfield Avenue to Three Mile Creek. And of course, we played in all his, all his property. He had mules and goats and horses. And they farmed, they had a cornfield in the backyard.

[29:55] JODY KAMENS HARPER: So the sledges did, you know, back.

[29:57] WILL HAYES: Behind, back behind the house, they had people that come and do it, you know, plant corn and feed the cows and goats. He had all kind of stuff now.

[30:05] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And so he was. So any other, just one last little short story about him, anything about Gene?

[30:12] WILL HAYES: He taught me. He introduced me to National Geographic magazines, which is a wonderful thing because I didn't know anything about it. I was just a kid, and he had a whole room full of national Geographics. And he went in, he showed me, he was showing me an article about the Gobi desert. I can remember him sitting there telling me about it, that he read it to me about the Gobi desert on the National Geographic. He was interested in all that kind of stuff.

[30:33] JODY KAMENS HARPER: And one of the last thing I'll say is, I know I've been to your home. You have the most beautiful home in Fairhope, as far as I'm concerned. And one of the really interesting, wonderful things is that you have what you're. You have gone to Africa and hunted a couple of times, and you have some beautiful taxidermied animals. And I think back and I go, wow, that must have really made an impression on you when you saw that they had to kill those lions. But it might have. You might have.

[31:04] WILL HAYES: Well, growing up, growing up, Mister Roth, who lived behind, across the street from us on Park Avenue, he was the biggest taxidermist in the area. So people would bring animals from Africa and all over the world to him to mount. So as a child, I stayed over there watching him all the time. I was enthralled with all these worldwide animals. He had elephant tusks and hippos and things and all kind of animals, lions and things that he would mount for people from all over the world. So it was real interesting to live next door to somebody like that.

[31:36] JODY KAMENS HARPER: But you've had some wonderful. I guess you've been to Africa a couple of times.

[31:39] WILL HAYES: Twice.

[31:40] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Twice. So was it worth it? Was it what you expected?

[31:44] WILL HAYES: More so, yeah, Africa's fabulous. Yeah, it's unbelievable. The first time I went to, I went to Zimbabwe, and the second time I went to Zimbabwe and also to Zambia. Hunted in the swamp in Zambia. Yeah. And I took my wife. Years later, I took my wife to Botswana. Not to hunt, just as a tourist, which was really interesting to see the, the Okavango delta and all that. We went down the river on a dugout canoe, which was fabulous. The water was crystal clear. You could drink the water. I didn't believe it. It flows out into the Sahara desert. The Okavango.

[32:20] JODY KAMENS HARPER: Wow.

[32:21] WILL HAYES: Yeah.

[32:21] JODY KAMENS HARPER: That's beautiful. All the way from mobile, Alabama.

[32:24] WILL HAYES: Yeah. To the Okavango.

[32:27] JODY KAMENS HARPER: That's neat. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for talking to me.

[32:31] WILL HAYES: Thank you.

[32:31] JODY KAMENS HARPER: This has just been a really huge treat for me.

[32:35] WILL HAYES: Wonderful. Thank you so much.

[32:36] JODY KAMENS HARPER: It's.