Grimes Mill stories should be saved
My dad, John Veach, is an 87-year-old World War II veteran. He recently told our family this story after Grimes Mill was destroyed by fire.
He said that back in the ‘30s when he was a little boy, he used to go to Grimes Mill with his daddy, Sid Veach. They would take a big container of wheat they had raised to be ground into flour. He said he and his Dad would dump the wheat onto the floor near a big hole in the floor. Then the workers would shovel it down into the hole and into the grinder.
After it was processed, the workers bagged it into burlap sacks for them to carry it home.
Years later the mill workers put the ground wheat (flour) into pretty cotton print sacks, and my Grandma Mary would use the printed sacks to make dresses.
This has been a huge loss to the Salisbury community. I am sure there are many other memories to be told about this landmark. I hope that someone may collect these stories and publish them for all to enjoy and remember.
— Connie Veach Fox
Salisbury
Honoring Dr. King
Monday our country honored a great leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who stood against social injustice. I’m proud of the part our union played to help create this history. UAW President Walter Reuther marched alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he sought to make America a more just nation. Dr. King’s group headquartered at UAW Solidarity House in Detroit. It was there where the Nobel Prize winner penned his “I Have a Dream” speech that remains firmly etched into our collective social consciousness a half century later.
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ ”
Joined by Reuther and others, King spoke these words at Detroit’s Walk to Freedom, two months before he gave his famous speech on Washington’s Mall.
Today the UAW honors Dr. King’s efforts to ensure that all workers are treated fairly as civil human beings and push for stronger laws. The UAW marched with King because it was the right thing to do. We support pay equity measures like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act because it’s the right thing to do. The connection between the labor and civil rights movements is natural. King was supporting sanitation workers in Memphis, because it was the right thing to do, when he was assassinated.
“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as ‘right-to-work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works,’ ” King said in 1961. We must honor Dr. King by standing strong for our rights because it’s the right thing to do!
— Corey Hill
Cleveland
Hill is president of UAW Local 3520.