It was apparent when I interviewed Mr. Owens that he had prepared for it by assembling some materials from his family archives.

JM: Were you surprised by this photograph of your grandfather?

RO: Yeah. My daughter was just talking to me about it.

JM: Did you know that your grandfather worked in the mill?

RO: I know he worked and did a lot of different things as a child, but I didn't know he worked in the mill.

JM: How did you react when you saw the photograph of him when he was only 12 years old?

RO: Well, it reminded me of him.

JM: What did you think of the caption? It says he had been working in the mill since he was eight years old. Did you know that kids worked in the mills at that young age?

RO: I studied some of that in school. I never thought that one of them was my grandfather.

JM: How old are you?

RO: I'm 56.

JM: So you knew your grandfather quite a long time. What did he do for a living?

RO: Well, he retired from Charleston Naval Shipyard. He was a machinist, and he worked in the pipe shop, too. He did a lot of different things. I remember him telling me that he helped make some of the first radars ever made. He told me a lot about them. And he was in World War I. I was looking through some of his old papers. One of them says he enlisted in the Navy on June 9, 1917.

JM: Did he go over to Europe?

RO: He went to Africa and got shot in the back by a German. In fact, I believe that's why he got out early. He told me that the bullet hit his spine, and at that time, they were afraid to take it out. He was discharged on January, 4, 1918.

JM: Did he have any kind of physical problems later?

RO: These papers say that he had a 10% disability.

JM: Did he appear to have any disability or some kind of physical problem that he complained about?

RO: I know that he had retired from the shipyard under disability because he had an accident that had crushed part of his skull.

JM: What was your relationship with him?

RO: I was pretty close to him. He lived in Charleston for a good while, and then he moved here where I am in Summerville, after he retired. I lived right beside him. He had a mobile home right in my father's yard.

JM: Did he move there because your father wanted to take care of him?

RO: Yeah.

JM: So you were seeing him every day?

RO: Yeah, I'd see him every day.

JM: Do you have any brothers and sisters?

RO: I have one brother and three sisters. I was the youngest boy.

JM: Was your relationship with your grandfather closer than theirs?

RO: Oh, yeah. It sure was.

JM: What was your father's name?

RO: It was William Furman Owens. My father had a younger brother who was a junior.

JM: But your father was named after him, too, because he had Furman as a middle name.

RO: Right.

JM: What was your grandfather like?

RO: Well, he kind of stayed to himself. He always told me he was of Scotch-Irish descent. He always reminded me of that on St. Patrick's Day. And he liked to drink a little bit.

JM: Did he have any things he loved to do when he wasn't working?

RO: There was one thing he did when he worked at the shipyard. I got some bills here I'm looking at. He had a garage at the foot of the Grace Memorial Bridge, back in the forties. He had people working for him at his shop while he was working at the shipyard. When he got off work, he worked at the shop. He had one of the first body shops in Charleston. And he had one of the first telephones in Charleston. He said he used to get a lot of business from the people coming from the north to go to Florida. They would break down on the bridge. He had an old wrecker, and he'd go pull them in and repair the cars and stuff like that. His telephone number was 655. That was in 1934, according to this bill I'm looking at now. Here's a bill in 1942. It looks like he overhauled a car and put new pistons and all in it, new rings, all kinds of stuff, and it cost $86.

JM: How do you think he learned all that stuff?

RO: He told me that when he was a kid, he had a bicycle shop, and that he would get old, tore-up bicycles and fix them. He would rent bicycles for a weekend. He didn't get much, but it was one way to make money then.

JM: Was he just supporting himself then, or did he have a family already?

RO: He was still living with his father. He told me that he bought one of the first cars ever bought in Barnwell, when he was a teenager. He said he could afford it, but his father couldn't. A man came around selling them - he was with the Ford Company - and my grandfather said he paid him with all 50-cent pieces that he'd made off his bicycle rentals. And the reason he told me he bought the car was that he could make money taking people back and forth from Augusta, and from Aiken to Barnwell.

JM: So he was kind of running a livery service.

RO: Like a taxi service.

JM: He sounds like he was a pretty resourceful guy.

RO: Yeah, and he was pretty smart. He had to be smart enough to become a machinist for the Navy, you know.

JM: I assume that he eventually learned how to read and write.

RO: Yeah, ‘cause I've got papers here that he wrote.

JM: Was there anything he liked to do, you know, just recreationally?

RO: Mostly he just worked on stuff.

JM: So he was always working?

RO: Yep. I'll tell you another little story that he told me, too, about when he was in the Navy. He was on a ship called the Cyclops. They came into Norfolk, and he couldn't go back out to sea with it because he had either the measles or the chicken pox. And the ship left out of Norfolk and was never seen again. In other words, the only reason he survived was because he wasn't on it.