Turkeys and Missing Fingers

Because of its proximity to the railroads, the fortunes of Jackson's Midtown always rose and fell with light manufacturing. Not so much now, but there was a time when there were at least a dozen small or mid-sized factories and shops going at Midtown.

After Pearl Harbor and America entered the war, my Uncle Boyd wrote a letter to the newly installed Jim Eastland to ask what Mississippi School Supply could do to support the war effort. Eastland wrote back with a mimeographed list of things the War Department needed, with orders to pick an item on the list and get to work.

One item on the list interested my Uncle Boyd, and one item interested his brother, my Grandfather.  Boyd saw where the airforce needed a specific size of ammo box to be manufactured by shaping sheet metal.  Boyd had never been a machinist, but his father was, even though he had only one hand.  The loss of the other hand was related to an infection from a childhood injury, not being a sloppy machinist.   

Boyd procured a warehouse in Midtwon with access to a railroad spur and began setting up shop, purchasing most of his equipment from companies that made metal roofs.  The depression was still pretty strong in Mississippi, so buying used equipment at a good price was not very difficult.  Soon Daddy and several of his high school buddies were employed to work under the legendary Jim Woodson to unload the sheet metal for the new Ammo Box Shop.  

Finding experienced machinists who weren't in danger of getting drafted meant that the Ammo Box Factory was primarily run by old men.  Daddy said nearly all of them were missing all or parts of their fingers from their many years of operating metal presses.  Meeting airforce officers come to inspect the work convinced Daddy to switch his aspirations from Army to Airforce.  He and most of his friends were convinced they'd end up in the war, but most of them ended up in Korea instead. 

My grandfather, on the other hand, was attracted to another item on the list:  Boil and Can Turkey meat.  Although he'd been Jackson twenty years by that point, grandaddy still missed the agricultural life.  Of all the Campbell children, he was considered the best with animals.  He rented a couple of empty lots on Monroe Street, where he and Jim Woodson set up chicken wire fences and commenced to raise turkeys.  Somewhere in my sister's house is a picture of Granddaddy squatting down amidst about a hundred turkeys.  Once grown, he had a place in midtown where they would slaughter, clean, boil, and can the turkeys and ship them off to feed our boys overseas. 

Neither of these ventures survived World War II.  By the end of the war, nearly all government military contracts were taken up by larger industrial concerns, pushing the smaller shops out of business.  Instead of Ammo boxes, Missco shifted its manufacturing focus to the laboratory future needed in all the new schools required by the baby boom and acquired General Equipment Manufacturing, and set up a factory in Crystal Springs.  

Millsaps has a pretty dedicated effort to reignite economic activity in Jackson's Midtown.  So far, they're having pretty good luck, even without a mimeographed list from JO Eastland.