The clipping just rose to the surface, as though it wanted to be seen.
Our librarian was putting the recent death of Mary Louise Wyrick in the file, and her hand hit another story about Mary Louise’s father.
Just an accident.
But the story — considering the recent layoffs hereabouts and Rowan’s current higher unemployment rate — hit the heart.
It was dated Dec. 2, 1938, and headlined “Local jobless are registering.” In smaller type was another headline: “Compensation file opened here this morning.”
“The first person in line to file locally for unemployment compensation under the state’s new program when the local branch of the state employment service opened here this morning,” the story said, “was a typical unemployed North Carolinian.”
Cletus O. Wyrick, a 42-year-old textile worker who made about $20 a week, on those weeks during the ’30s when he got to work, was at the head of that line.
Close behind him were probably a hundred men and women, white and black. They were pressed into a line that extended from the new employment service quarters on the second floor of the Wallace building, which is now The Plaza, all the way down the hall to the stairway.
“The unemployed,” the story said, “were losing no time getting in their claims.”
But it’s obvious Cletus Wyrick got there early.
He was No. 1.
And by the time the office opened at 8:30, enough people were in line to keep three interviewers busy all morning.
By early afternoon, 49 claims had been filed.
The interviewers had talked to 168 people, many of whom made appointments to come back later. They figured 80 would file before the office closed.
The goal of the office was to register the unemployed workers in “covered industries,” fill out claims for those who wanted to file them and then find out if any jobs were suitable — and available.
First though, the people applying had to have separation slips from the last place they worked.
But that wasn’t easy. A lot of them, the Post story reported, didn’t have them because they had not yet been made available to the businesses. And not because they were “rinky-dink” businesses with just one or two employees. Only those with eight or more people could be part of the program.
Of course, none left with any money that day. Even if they had no groceries at home. And none left with hope for work. The unending search for jobs during those bad Depression years turned up no jobs.
But money would come, they were promised.
“Compensation, in accordance with prior pay and so on, will come later when and if the service determines that no suitable employment is immediately available for those who register.
North Carolina was one of 20 states who launched the program that month. Up to then, only Wisconsin had an unemployment compensation program all its own.
And finally the reporter went back to Cletus Wyrick, who was No. 1, first in line.
¾e lived on Route 3, the story said, and had spent a good part of his working years at the textile trade. He worked last for the Klumac cotton mill and before that at Cannon in Kannapolis.
He was a weaver and got paid on a piece-work basis, which netted him an average of $20 a week when he worked, he told the reporter.
And that was that.
The file envelope held no other clippings. No story telling whether or not the government ever helped the first man who had to swallow his pride and get in an unemployment line and ask for help. No story about how he made it, about what life dealt him, how long he lived.
No story revealing that his wife died when Mary Louise, his oldest daughter, was barely out of Boyden High School, and that she knew immediately she’d have to stay home and help her daddy raise the four younger children.
Even after she went to work at the VA, where she stayed for more than a quarter of a century, and the other children were grown, too, she managed the house and was there for the nieces and nephews. And she always took her dad, who never learned to drive, to the American Legion baseball games.
No story in that folder about any of that.
But the family remembers.
“He was a good man and a hard worker,” says his daughter, Robbie Basinger, who also worked in the mill but in a different time. She made 50 years without missing a day.
But her dad, she says, “worked even when there weren’t no work. He went on WPA, whatever that was, and helped set out shrubbery and do things like that.”
“And we loved to go to his house,” says his granddaughter, Mary Page, whose home was family headquarters after Mary Louise died.
By that time, he didn’t need unemployment compensation, “and he spoiled us. He give us candy and treats. He was always a good man.”
And Mary Louise was a good woman.
“We called her Aunt Ease,” she says. “And it was always Aunt Ease and Grandpaw.”
Aunt Ease died one day before the 62nd anniversary of that day her father stood in line in the Wallace Building and made history. And dropped out of public view. He never made the paper again.
But that didn’t matter.
He made a life.
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