>> [MUSIC] We needed to integrate. We wanted
to do it before we were forced to do it.
And so he said,
we got to wait for somebody else to go,
someone else to go first.
And Mike Orleans which was a national chain or
at least a regional chain did integrate
and like the week they said it and they did it.
I don't know how long what the time span was.
But we started getting ready to go
ahead and integrate our chats and we lost some business.
We lost some charge accounts.
We lost we lost a lot of regulars.
But 1964, we had H stores.
H stores. And we integrated all our Lunch Nets
including the one at
Dalton that was another scene too,
but I visited every employee behind
every Lunch Net and
talked to every one of them individually.
I don't know how long it took me
to make it around because you
had Lunch Nets were open 14 hours a day,
so I had to both shifts.
And I talked to each one of them and
told them on such a date, we will be integrated.
We we didn't make an announcement for anything.
We're just going to do it.
And there was no public announcement, I said.
But if you're not going to do it, quit
now because you will get let go.
I never used the word fired,
but I said you will be let go if
you refused service and just quit now.
And I'm sure some people quit.
I don't remember specifically how many.
I did have a lot of grumbling.
And we were very worried about, our records.
My father always had
a record and I know this was
different from a lot of retail stores.
He always insist that people waited on as they
came in the door in the order in which they came.
A lot of stories of black person
was in a store standing in front of
the count a white person came
in behind them and they got waited on first.
My father was very insistent
that the sun sound like much in the days,
but it was big time back then.
Every now and then people would fuss at us.
But even where they
couldn't sit down at the soda fountain,
had to come stand at the end.
If they were standing there before
some white person sat down,
that person standing the black person got served first,
and he was just very rigid about that.
And so we had that tradition
it don't sound like much today,
but we had that tradition.
[MUSIC]