This transcript has been slightly edited for clarity. 

We have a lot of things here in McDowell County that were built by the WPA [Works Progress Administration]: the Mountain Gateway Museum structure, the Old Fort Gymnasium, Old Fort Elementary School, the Pleasant Gardens Gymnasium, and the community center in Marion. The WPA was one of [Franklin] Roosevelt’s programs in the New Deal. They were called alphabet programs because they eventually just started using the initials. A lot of local people said it stood for “we piddle around.” Basically what all those programs did was to take federal money and hire local workers. That way it kind of generated a cash flow again. Our cash flow had come to a screeching halt in the United States. The merchants couldn’t restock the stores because nobody was buying anything. Nobody could buy anything because they didn’t have any ready cash. So it was a great help. With the construction of Mountain Gateway Museum in Old Fort, one of my friends worked on that project as a stonemason assistant. He said they worked 55 hours a week and they were paid $20.50 a month. That’s what he made as a stonemason’s assistant and when they got through with the stonework, they hired him to do the carpenter work–the finished trim work on it–and his pay jumped to $42.00 a month.