Eugene Farrar - Cement (clip)

Eugene Farrar (EF): My daddy was a self-made cement finisher who did it for over 50 years.

George Barrett (GB): What was your dad’s name?

EF: Toy Farrar, Sr. And he worked in Virginia because there wasn’t any work in Chapel Hill, and he worked for the university when they were building the hospital. He had a little bit of work down there, but it wasn’t enough to sustain 9 kids.

Kathy Atwater (KA): So when they were building North Carolina Memorial [Hospital]?

EF: Yeah, so he did the cement work down there. And of course, he did a lot of driveways around here. I look at some of the driveways now, down Estes [Dr]. I used to walk down through there and take him lunch or a biscuit when I got out of school. And back then, when you poured cement, cement didn’t set up like it sets up now. They have chemicals – but you had it sit and watch it almost all night long. And he used to be sitting down there in the woods when they were building those houses on Estes, practically all night, waiting for the cement to set up so it could be troweled, flowed, and – you flow it first, and then you trowel it, and of course you brush it to put the little rough edge on it. But they did all of that work – they were better than me. I just wasn’t cut out for that kind of work. And as far as the rocks and the cement, my daddy – he was one of the best in Chapel Hill. Everybody who wanted some cement work done, they came and got him. And Mr. Bynum used to live down here. Earl Bynum’s father was a rock layer and finished cement.

EF: But those guys did that work, and that was pretty much all the work in Chapel Hill except for washing dishes and working at the University. There wasn’t landscaping back then. They didn’t call it landscaping – you just cut grass. But the University always [was] one of – still one of the biggest employers in Chapel Hill.