Sloane A. J. Freeman:
CLASS OF 1974
St. Augustine High SchoolClass of 1974
St. augustine, FL
Henderson High SchoolClass of 1975
West chester, PA
Ketterlinus Junior High SchoolClass of 1971
St. augustine, FL
Fullerwood Elementary SchoolClass of 1968
St. augustine, FL
Sloane A. J.'s Story
My Dear Friends,
Time for an update. Looking forward to the reunion but loathe to learn of classmates we have lost. Have somehow put on weight this past year I will probably still have in August. Still struggling to make sense out of the guitar, I must not be holding my tongue right or something. I have been forced into a sort of semi-retirement these last four years partly because of China's greed for power and American business's greed for money. For years I have specialised in CNC and computer controlled wood working machinery, automated process and environmental control, networked computer systems and the repair of precision cutting and splicing machinery for veneer, high frequency RF gluing and plywood bonding machinery....the equipment you find in a furniture factory. For those of you who watched game shows growing up and saw the furniture that was given away, most of it came from Hickory, NC and towns around it. An area once know just a few years ago as the furniture capital of the US. Broyhill, Henredon, Bassett, Drexel, Kincaid, Bernhardt, Lexington, just to name a few, are all located here. The Company I worked for, Century Furniture had nine plants working three shifts when I first contracted with them. They brought in raw lumber, ran it through a planer mill then through a hacker, then into steam heated dry kilns to dry and stabilise for several weeks. The lumber was then sent to a stacker where it was unhacked (strips of wood that kept the boards spaced for air circulation were removed) and stacked into packs and moved into the rough mill where it went to an automated board handling system that fed the boards into a computer controlled saw optimizer that cut the wide boards into narrower strips based on the width of the board and what was required by the cut bill. The strips then went...Expand for more
to three automated chop saws where operators marked flaws such as knotholes and fed them into the saws where a camera read the markings and calculated how much clear lumber could be cut to fill the needs of the programmed cut bill. There were three more manual chop saws turning waste into usable wood. From there the pieces went to the various areas to be turned into furniture, Twenty-four hours a day, six days a week. Then the Chinese started buying up the raw trees at outrageously high prices, paid kickbacks and bribes to get as much of the top quality lumber as they could load on ships where it was processed and off loaded in China ready to be made into cheap furniture. Between this action and their lobbying our politicians to pass stricter laws on American manufacturers, especially through OSHA and the EPA, it dealt a crippling blow to the industry. Century has consolidated nine plants into two. From twelve hundred employees there are now barely one hundred or so. They work a four day week for the most part. They no longer process green lumber but pay a premium for ready to use wood. Much of the furniture Century sells is made in foreign countries, shipped to the plant, removed from the box, inspected, repaired, sent to the finishing room, rubbed down and repacked for sale. It has not been pleasant to watch this industry die, however I did not die with it.
I miss all you guys and girls very much and think of all the time I wasted getting high in the woods behind the High school when I should have been in class behaving myself. If I could have but a handful of those days to live again......I would probably be just as bored with the curriculum as I was then, but to be with you all as it was....with only the monumental problems of being a teenager to deal with, would truly be a slice of Heaven!
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