Jefferson Island Salt

In 1957 I visited my cousins in Pinckard, Alabama.  It was a typical small southern town with nothing much to do , but walk around and try to stay in the shade.  As I rounded the front of the store, I saw a sight that was completely alien to me.  There was a man painting a sign on the side of the building.  I did not know that anything could be done like that.  I thought all work had to be done in the fields.  These men traveled the countryside and painted advertisements wherever they could.  They were called walldogs.  I knew that I wanted to do something like that for a living and lo and behold that is what I did.  I was lucky enough that I lived near a large enough town that I made a pretty good living at it.

Guy Walton Carlile

My grandfather worked hard all of his life, mostly in the row crop business.  He had always had a few cows in the pasture at the bottom of his property.  Later in life he relaxed on the row crops and took  a bigger interest in the cattle.  Just beside his house he fenced in three or four acres and put in thirty or forty yearlings.  To fatten cattle up you have to feed them a lot of protein.  All that feed has to be processed.  My brother Wayne came home from Birmingham to visit and brought his friend, Gregg.  Being a city boy, Gregg had smelled some pretty bad stuff, but he had never smelled that much manure in one spot before.  "Mr. Carlile,  how can you stand to smell all that cow shit?" he asked.  Grandpa just gave that grin and said, "It smells like money to me, boy."  He called all young people boy or girl, depending.