Vernelle Brooks Jones and Charles Brooks - Giving Back (clip)

Charles Brooks: My father and grandfather, their pricing would always be a lot lower than if they had gone to a larger contractor. So, a lot of people we did work for, we, my grandfather and my father, saved them a lot of money.

Vernelle Brooks Jones: So, I will just add to that, that unfortunately a lot of people still owe a lot of money to them. But we never bothered to collect it, but a lot of people did. And that was their way of giving back to the community, like a humanitarian you know? People weren’t making a lot of money back then. Some families only had one person in the household working, so they were, they went through some hard times. But they were well respected. Everybody knew them and respected the family, and it helped us as we grew up, when people said, “You are Charlie Brooks daughter,” or “You are Charlie Brooks granddaughter.” They knew the history about our family and that just gave us a lot of comfort to know they were well known like that.