May 4, 2009
Dalton. The Carpet Capital of the World. Every friend and classmate I ever knew while growing up was raised on the carpet industry in one way or another. From the plant worker to the business owner, we all shared the culture. The town even had an entire vernacular all its own. We were saying words like jute, cut loop, tuftin’, finishin’, hyster, before we could even say the alphabet. As for myself, I can still smell the chemical scent of new carpet.
Dad and his business partner owned Alpha Carpets for as long as I can possibly remember. I remember his light-blue Chevrolet pickup, with “Alpha Carpets” printed on the side. I remember rolls of carpet stored in the basement – my siblings and I were playing on them once and boy, did we get a whipping. With Daddy’s belt – more dreaded than Momma’s flyswat or hickory stick.
And I remember going to work with Daddy one January morning when Mom was in the hospital having my youngest sister, Melissa. It was COLD. I remember the four of us – Dad, his business partner Joe, my sister Sabrina, and myself -- standing in the office around a space heater. That must have been his first building, off Chatsworth Highway near Welcome Hill church, behind Pye Nissan.
My dad grew up in the small rural town of Murphy, NC, in the southeast corner of the state near the Georgia state line. My mom grew up in the small rural town of Titusville, PA, in the northwest corner of the state near Lake Erie and the border of Ohio. They met at a skating rink in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1950s. Their two sons were born in Titusville; their first daughter was born in Murphy. Finally the family settled in the small rural town of Rocky Face, GA, and raised three more daughters.
So how did my parents get from Murphy to Dalton? How did my Dad come to own his own business? Well, like everything, there’s a story behind it.
Daddy learned the carpet business from the ground up, much like I learned the accounting industry. There was no work in Murphy, a town of less than 2,000 even today. The tufted textile industry was sprouting in Dalton in the 1950s, having branched off from the chenille bedspread industry (the history of which is a whole other story in itself). Dalton was less than 90 miles from Murphy, within a 2-hour jaunt west on US-64 and south on GA-71. And this bourgeoning industry needed workers. Lots of ‘em.
So Dad took his first job in the carpet industry, cutting rugs at Lawtex Finishing. After mastering the task of cutting rugs, he moved to the foam machine, or the coater. The year was 1961.
Dad stayed in Dalton during the work week; Mom and the kids stayed in Murphy at the home of a family-friend, waiting for Dad to come home on weekends. He rented a room at the Cavender House near Glenwood and Murray Avenues for $7/week. The Cavender House must have been a boarding house for men; Dad said five other guys lived there, sharing a kitchen and two bathrooms. He stayed there for nearly a year.
Finally he had enough money saved up to move the family to Dalton. They rented a new-but-unfinished house on Cavender Road, on the southside of Dalton (now off the South Bypass). Dad worked at Lawtex for 3 years.
Now, I always knew that we were living at what my folks called “the old house” when I was born, and I remember mom talking about “Mrs. Harlan,” an elderly lady who lived alone off Houston Valley Road, just a few miles from our house in Rocky Face. What I didn’t know was, how my parents got from the house in south Dalton on Cavender Road, to “the old house,” 15 miles west on the other side of Rocky Face Mountain, and what the Harlans had to do with any of it. Well, now I know.
Dad was working the day shift at Lawtex, when his boss had him switch with a night-shift guy. On the night shift he met a fellow named Vince Harlan, whose mother had a house for rent in Rocky Face. Dad said they rented the house “for free” – apparently the Harlans never charged them rent. Vince Harlan’s mother was Mrs. Clara Harlan, the lady whom all my life I knew only as “Mrs. Harlan.”
After three years’ employment at Lawtex, Dad went to work at Dalton Carpet Industries. His boss was Kurt Rosenbaum, whose son was Frank. Frank Rosenbaum started Southland Carpets in 1966, offering Dad the job of Plant Supervisor. After a time, Frank, Dad, and two other fellows from Southland, started Caprice Carpets. Dad and one of those men, Joe Kinsey, incorporated Alpha Carpets in June 1971.
Although I was too young to remember much about their first building (the cold one where we stood around the space heater), I can see the Grace Street building clear as day in my head. It was a white metal warehouse-type building with dark green vertical stripes, just south of South Thornton Avenue. The business expanded and in 1976 Alpha Carpets moved to a larger building on Chatsworth Highway. Daddy would take us kids with him sometimes when he had to do some extra work in the evening after dinner. I even remember the phone number; how could I ever forget? I must have called it a thousand times at Mom’s mandate, asking him to bring home an extra gallon of milk or something from the grocery store.
And that’s how my dad built his business from the ground up. Alpha Carpets enjoyed astonishing success throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Dad retired sometime in the 1990s. A handful of large carpet mills – the largest in the world, in fact – eventually ate up the little guys, and Alpha Carpets just couldn’t survive. What’s more, the Crash of 2008 and ensuing recession hit the carpet industry pretty hard, causing rampant unemployment.
My parents moved out of “the old house” in 1968, into a new brick home in a new neighborhood in Rocky Face. We kids have long since moved out and are raising families of our own, but Mom and Dad still live there. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last September.
