Three for a Dollar, Really?

Early in my career, 1969, with the local Ma Bell telephone company in Memphis, I worked in the Outside Plant Department as a Cable Repairman. It was the middle of December and quite warm for the season. I was working on the telephone cable in the backyard of a local homeowner and using a torch on what was known as "jute cable". This was actually a lead cable sheathed in tar paper and the jute was an outer protective cover.

Using a torch to burn away the jute, paper, and the tar substance on the cable, I saw a small piece of the burning tar paper float downward and across into the next yard where someone had hung their morning wash to dry on a clothes line. As my luck would have it, the small piece of flaming paper landed on a pair of nylon panties which immediately burst into flames. The panties were burning as brightly as a marshmallow held too close to a campfire. Also, a bed sheet that had been folded across another line was dry and gently blowing in a soft breeze. The bed sheet came too close to the burning underwear and before I could get down from the ladder, hurdle a four foot chain link fence, and beat the fire out with my hands in my work gloves, two holes had burned through the bed sheet. The smoking elastic waistband was all that remained of the panties still held in place with two clothes pins.

I went to the backdoor of the homeowner and knocked so I could tell them what had happened. I knocked several times and was about to leave when the door was finally opened by a young woman wearing a bathrobe and a towel wrapped around her head. She had been in the shower when she heard my knocking at her door.

Excuse me ma’am, I work for the telephone company and I was working in your neighbor’s yard when a piece of burning tar paper blew down on your clothes line. I just burnt up a pair of panties and two holes through your bed sheet.

Wh-wh-what?, she said.

I’m real sorry, I’ll call my supervisor who will want to make restitution for the damages. The shock and surprise on her face was probably like the shock and surprise I had felt only moments earlier. She assured me she would be home for the remainder of the afternoon to wait for my supervisor.

My supervisor had a very nice name, Morgan Lofton, but he had the unusual nickname of "Pig". He lived in Olive Branch, Mississippi which was a very small community at the time, and situated on the south side of State Line Road, the state line between Memphis, Tennessee and the state of Mississippi.

When Pig drove up to the front of the house in his pickup truck I got in to explain what had happened. A little to my surprise he didn’t seem upset at all. He got out of his truck and walked to the front door and knocked. From my vantage point in the truck I could see, but couldn’t hear the discussion between Pig and the woman.

When Pig returned to the truck, he was H-O-T! I mean absolutely livid. Every time you tell someone you’re with the telephone company, he began; they get dollar signs in their eyes when they think they can collect on some damages.

Well-Well, what’d she say, I asked?

She wants four dollars for those panties and that sheet, he said!

Four dollars? Sure, this was 1969, but, in my mind four dollars amounted to almost nothing. I was relieved that it wasn’t more.

Listen Pig, I reminded him; if that lady had asked for forty dollars the company would still have had to pay it. We’re lucky that she didn’t ask for more.

You know what she’s gonna do with that four dollars, Pig asked?

What, I replied?

She’s gonna throw them panties away, patch that bed sheet, and spend that four dollars for a fifth of whiskey for Christmas. I can understand three dollars for a bed sheet, said Pig, but, a dollar for a pair of panties? Hell, he said, my wife can buy her panties three pair for a dollar all day long in Olive Branch!

That was a long time ago, but I still remember thinking that Pig’s wife probably wouldn’t appreciate him telling someone she wore cheap underwear.