We're a bunch of live ones,
Not a single dead one;
Hail, hail, the gang's all here,
Sure I'm glad that I'm here, too!"
We were primed. We were ready. We worked our arses off to "get er done", but we played hard too. What more could a person ask? We were making a beautiful, handcrafted, well designed piece of art that just happened to also tell time. And, we did it with our closest friends -- people we respected for their intelligence and ability to see a task through to the end. This same group of people seemed to be together all day every day. We all worked together; we all socialized with each other. It just couldn't get any better than this! But as they say, "no good deed goes unpunished" and "all good things must come to an end".
Unfortunately, we started Sovereign, Ltd. at the same time the U.S. economy decided to take a nosedive into a recession. We struggled, but the harder we worked, the harder it became to keep it all together. The first nail in the coffin was when the investors became unhappy with Frank. Frank, being the president, made a judgment call we all saw as building morale, but the investors saw as poor fiscal management. We had a Sovereign, Ltd. co-ed softball team. Many of the management, office staff, supervisors and workers were members of our team. I played catcher. Bud told me to choose another position because I was gonna get hurt, but I persisted. If Bud had been on an opposing team, I might have reconsidered, because he would have run me over without a second thought. He's very competitive. But most guys on the other teams were reluctant to run head-on into a woman, even if she was the catcher. There weren't very many plays to homeplate, but I was prepared to take the hit if it came. There was one guy who couldn't even pitch to me because he was trying so hard to not hit me in the chest with the ball (I'm fairly busty). Anyway, Frank had some t-shirts with the Sovereign logo on them made for the team. The cost of the shirts was minimal. That wasn't really the issue. The viewpoint of the investors was we were on a really tight budget, and Frank should have never spent the money on something so frivolous. He was not immediately terminated, but after that the investors were nitpicking about every little thing. One day it just all blew up and Frank was gone. It was a cruel blow. Frank and Sue stayed in Greensboro while Frank looked for another position, and we included them in all our recreational and social activities, but it wasn't the same. When Frank found a position in Moultrie, Georgia they moved away. Bud and I went to visit them on several occasions and they returned for our wedding (a blog unto itself), but it still felt as if we had all gone through an amputation.
The man they brought in to replace Frank was nice enough, but he just wasn't gonna be part of our gang. We all liked him well enough. But, well, just but. Yet, we trudged ahead, beating our heads against the economy every step of the way. I had, of course, come to Sovereign as the office manager/adminstrative whatever. No one in the company had much experience in purchasing. Frank had done the purchasing at Daneker until a Vice President of Production was hired and Frank could pass the job off to him. At Sovereign, LB as Plant Manager got stuck with the job, but he quickly passed it off to me. I'd never done purchasing, other than office supplies, but I was willing to learn anything. What a headache! Suppliers are liars, quality control is sometimes nonexistent, freight companies are unreliable. It was so much fun. I loved almost every bit of it. I eventually convinced our suppliers I really didn't want them to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear, I wanted them to tell me what was reality. I could arrange my production schedule accordingly if I could be sure they would produce as promised. That was the biggest issue. I didn't want unrealistic blue sky estimated shipping dates. I wanted something I could build a production schedule around. I got to be known as a bit of hardass, but eventually they got a clue. Thank God we had Rhonda "Bubbles" Biddix to answer the phone. I woulda scared everyone off. Once when we were getting ready to do a physical plantwide inventory, I took the box of inventory tags and put them on the shelf behind my desk with a huge note written in red marker attached: "You toucha dis box, I breaka you arm." The only time Bud and I butted heads was when the perpetual inventory and the physical inventory were so far off it was pathetic. Even the people in the factory were a little afraid of that witchy (or does that word start with a "b") woman in the office.
One cute little story -- I had begun calling Bud "Spanky" as an affectionate nickname because he reminded me some of Spanky from Our Gang. I guess I referred to him as Spanky when we were around Tim and Frank and LB, but I was fairly careful where I used the nickname. However, Tim in particular picked up on it and started using the nickname also (and still does). One afternoon at work, Tim could not reach Bud on his extension and wanted to talk with him immediately. So Tim came over the paging microphone, picked it up, pressed the speaker button, and broadcast throughout the entire plant, "Spanky, please call Tim immediately." He didn't even realize what he had said until a few seconds later we heard the entire factory start laughing. It took them only a second to figure out who Spanky was. At first Bud was embarrassed, but he took it goodheartedly, and he may have even gained a little respect from some of the people in the plant.
In the beginning of 1982, Bud and I decided we wanted to buy a house. We went to a realty agent and started working with her to find something both of us liked and we could afford. Neither Bud nor I really knew much about house-hunting, or for that matter had given too much thought to what we wanted in a home. I knew I wanted a fireplace. Bud did too because for a long time he thought he was Paul Bunyon. Bud wanted a basement, which is not something normal in this part of the country. We knew we wanted three bedrooms and two baths -- our bedroom and master bath, a guest room and general household bath and a room for an office. Beyond that we were clueless. We looked at a number of properties. The recession was in full swing by now and sellers were desperate. Unfortunately, home mortgage rates were up around 18%, so buyers were few. We finally found a brand new home that had been built a year before but had remained unoccupied and so far had not had many people interested. It was on an acre of mostly wooded land, adjacent to a farmer's field. Though it was pretty far out in the country, it was only a 15 to 20 minute drive to work. And, the biggest plus of all was the seller would finance it himself at 12% interest. We made an offer.
That night we were so anxious we couldn't sleep. Finally, at 11:30 PM, the realtor called to say our offer had been accepted. Holy moly! We were gonna be homeowners!
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