Posted on 02/25/2009 12:47:39 PM PST by nickcarraway
Brady Jefcoat grew up the son of sharecroppers. He lost use of his right hand at 16. He pounded Raleigh streets through the worst years of the Great Depression, fighting for work at 25 cents an hour.
But at 93, he knows that you can whip life's worst setbacks and that the world will eventually notice a hard-working boy with something to prove. You can see the evidence in the basement of his southern Wake County ranch house, where he restored, with his left hand, more than 12,000 phonographs, cuckoo clocks, butter churns, jukeboxes, air rifles, pump organs and a sofa used in Gone With the Wind. And you can drive two hours northeast to Murfreesboro and walk through the doors of the Brady C. Jefcoat Museum of Americana. His framed portrait hangs above a Wurlitzer jukebox from the 1940s.
In times where jobs get eliminated overnight, when workers everywhere scratch their heads and wonder what next, Jefcoat stands as a model of resourcefulness -- a man who willed himself to succeed in spite of bad cards.
It is hard to imagine a boy born on a tenant farm outside Orangeburg, S.C., ever having a museum named in his honor. But Jefcoat offers this lesson for a new generation of strugglers: There's treasure inside discarded things. You just have to work a little harder to make it show through.
From Jefcoat's kitchen table, you can see a hand-carved cuckoo clock decorated with deer antlers and an 1890s dustpan he bought for $10 a few weeks back.
When Jefcoat starts his story, he always begins with boyhood in Orangeburg, which he describes as the most depressed spot in the state.
"After all those years of working," Jefcoat said, "my daddy never had nothing but a dog named Special, a horse named Queen and a cow named Rag."
From there the family drifted north to a rough patch of Raleigh known as Smoky Hollow. It stood in a low spot between Peace Street and Boylan Heights, named for the coal smoke that hung over the rooftops.
"It was so tough in that neighborhood," Jefcoat recalled, "the canary birds all sang bass."
He yearned for a college education, and his teachers told him he'd thrive there. But this was 1936. Money for college was an impossible dream.
When he was 16, Jefcoat was riding in a car that flipped and cut him to pieces. His right hand was curled into a permanent fist -- nearly useless.
Work was hard to find even for an able-bodied man. He got turned away by shopkeepers who worried he couldn't work a cash register or soda fountain or ladder.
But he could always build things, even houses as a teen. So he started laying bricks, building cabinets, fixing plumbing and wiring houses. He saved money and bought a little land. He built a house, by himself, and rented it out.
Before long, he was building homes for N.C. State University professors -- about 17 in all, he thinks, painting them one-handed with a brush.
He married a wife he called prettier than a June peach, but cancer took her young. He worked himself ragged to fight the grief, even shaking at times.
It wasn't until he noticed what looked like an old sewing machine inside a house he'd just built that he found the obsession that would save him. It wasn't a sewing machine at all, but an original Edison cylinder phonograph. Go ahead and take it, said the woman of the house. It doesn't work.
Today, that phonograph stands on the third floor of the Jefcoat museum, one of 264 working models on display, its silver horn shining.
"It made him a stronger man," said Colon Ballance, the curator of the Jefcoat museum. "When he was given some of those first pieces to work on it took his mind off grieving so much. It gave him a sense of direction. Then everything blossomed."
Every year, about 2,000 people pass through the Jefcoat museum, a collection of forgotten oddities on display in one of North Carolina's most out-of-the way spots.
It's mentioned on Smithsonian.com and a dozen other travel Web sites, along with the annual Roanoke-Chowan Pork Fest and the Grab-and-Go Fish Fry. With a population of roughly 2,000, the town is rural enough to have residents well-familiar with the cross-cut saws and pig oilers preserved on the museum shelves.
Jefcoat's museum opened in 1997 inside a brick high school, cavernous by modern standards. Every Wednesday for six years, then-curator Brinson Paul would drive to Raleigh with a pickup truck, collecting a load of Jefcoat's stuff.
More than 1,000 irons, the largest collection in the world.
Washboards that date to the 1600s, and a wooden washing machine powered by a dog on a treadmill.
More than 100 Daisy air rifles.
A brass four-poster bed that dates to Tudor England.
Jefcoat assembled it piece by piece over a thousand Saturdays in flea markets, antique shows or just through word of mouth.
Hardly any of it worked when Jefcoat bought it. He tinkered with hundreds of Edison phonographs, one at a time, staying up all night until they'd play wax cylinders and records thick as dinner plates.
"I like music," he explained.
If he couldn't figure it out on his own, he picked it up from people who could.
If you took him a broken Wurlitzer, he could stick an arm into its guts and pull out a broken vacuum tube without even looking.
Clearly, Jefcoat's collection cost a fortune over the years, added together. But he lived frugally and bought nearly everything in poor shape. He made a good living with his left hand.
For all its randomness, there's an order to Jefcoat's collection. It's a monument to people who tinkered, who fiddled with things.
"He collected what he wanted," Paul said, "and if he liked it, he got a lot of it. He cornered the market in postal scales. John Deere bicycles -- you don't see too many of them."
He never sold a piece. He gave everything away, including his land, which has gone for Wake County parks and an orphanage in Oxford.
He turned down overtures from the Smithsonian, which would have hidden many of his items in storage, and from the state History Museum in downtown Raleigh.
Jefcoat suffered a stroke recently, but just before, he said he wishes only for another 25 years to polish up relics that have been banged around.
My Grandparents were not affected to a great degree by the depression. They lived on a somewhat self sufficient farm of over 1000 acres. Times were tough but they were sort of used to living that way.
If it were repeated again, there are very few people who would be in that position. I believe it would be far far worse. Of course for some people the great depression was that bad. They literally starved to death.
I agree with you.
Prepare.
My grand mother in law had a baby that starved to death. I, in my youth and ignorance asked her why couldn’t she just breast feed him. Her simple reply, “I was starving too”.
Of course her breasts were dry. One of the occasions in my life when I felt really stupid.
I still, with a not so great back, pick'em up to feed my piggy bank.
That is tragic. One has to feel for that mother.
I sometimes wish I could have every momment back, when I had done something so stupid, I was ashamed for years.
But if it were the case that I could, I would still be an idiot.
Could you imagine Gen Xers and Gen Yers undergoing a REAL depression? They, along with many of the baby boomers, would literally shrivel up and blow away.
Bump
I’m trying to build a self-sufficient farm on my 5 acres. I can’t even imagine owning 1000.
Yeah now that I think about it, they were probably wealthy in a way. There were 12 children and they all worked hard. My Mother once mentioned that they worked 40 mules and had 10 sharecroppers on the place. My Father worked as a hired hand for a while tho his parents were prominent.
I don’t think the land was particularly fertile, this was the Florida Panhandle, but Grandpa was a good farmer.
Looking back, they did not live ostentatiously. On the other hand, they were better off than most and did have a few luxuries. For instance they had a carbide light system which was just as bright as electric lights. There was no electricity.
Hard to say.
My son is a GenY kind of guy - the Marines thought he did pretty well for himself....most of his buds are Gen X & Y and they have
Won wars,
Kept the peace
Ensured our safety
Kick ass on pertty much all the bad guys that deserved to have their asses kicked.
And in their spare time
drank the bar dry
made a zillion or so parachute drops
swam rivers
and on and on....
Along the way, a few were killed.
So, ya, I think the Gen X and Y ‘kids’ will do just fine!
Gramps had it going on back in the day.
My husband’s grandfather was not affected at all by the depression. As a matter of fact business probably picked up for him. His business was selling candles, and he had only one client, the Catholic Church, the whole diocese of Philadelphia.
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