94-Year-Old Woman Remembers Her First Job At Bluff City Factory

Alice Smith Coleman, 94, may have been the youngest person who worked at the Bluff City Shoe factory, which was destroyed by fire Thursday night. She began working there at age 13, and worked periodically at local shoe factories for many years.

Alice has good advice for younger generations as they begin careers: "Work, and be good to other people."

Alice went to work as a child because her father had died, and she wanted to help her mother (a Bluff City worker) support the family. She had three younger siblings, the late Earl Smith, William Smith and Marguerite Smith Bush. Alice said she also wanted to go to work because she didn't like school.

She told how she got her job. Children could not work there until age 14, and "every morning I would get ready and go to the Bluff Shoe factory and ask the boss, 'Can I get a job?' Finally he said, 'I'll tell you what. If you can prove to me you are 14, I'll give you a job.'

"So I hurried home, and my mother and I went to the priest's house. He said, 'I"m not even going to look at the books. I'll write you a note.' So I hurried back down to Bluff, and I got my job."

Alice was a "back shoe girl," with the task of carrying an imperfect shoe back through the lines along with its mate, beginning at the cutting room. She spent her days walking through the huge shoe factory. "I loved my job," she said, "because I got to run all over everywhere."

She met her future husband, Cloyd Colemen, who was the same age, when he was a "back shoe boy" at Bluff City factory. They were married as teen-agers. (Her husband later worked at International Shoe Co. at the Seventh Street plant as a cutter for 38 years before he died of a heart attack in 1963.)

Alice was paid $1 a day in the beginning. Her family lived on South Sixth Street and she walked to work. She and her mother went home for lunch, when the noon whistle blew,

She was like a second mother to her younger brothers and sister, and one day Bill had a hole in the heel of his sock, so she used black shoe polish to color his foot black to match his sock. Bill worked at a shoe factory until joining the U.S. Marines in World War II. He later lived in California.

Earl - nicknamed Rubber Chin because he was talkative - worked at Bluff City for a long time. Marguerite worked as a back shoe girl at the shoe factory when young, then made her home in California.

When Alice was 16 she left the Bluff City plant to work at the International Shoe factory. "They didn't hire any young kids," she said. "You were considered old when you were 16." She was earning about $16 a week when she got married and quit.

Alice returned to the shoe factory after her children were in school. "But as soon as school was out, I would hit the trail for California," she said, to visit her sister. She has flown and ridden trains, and said, "I went every way but by ox cart."

The Colemans raised their family on Gordon Street. She remembers bread costing a nickel, and buying groceries at a little corner store, where you could run up a bill. If you paid it in full at the end of the week, you got a free bag of candy.

She liked to go dancing at "The Rose" which was above the former Rialto Theater.

After working at shoe factories, Alice later baked in the Stowell School cafeteria for 16 years before retiring. She said the students liked "big hot dogs and hamburgers, but they had to eat other stuff, too." After retiring she kept busy making crafts for many years, and said her favorite was bunnies.

For the past seven months, Alice has been a resident at Willow Care Center, after living with her daughter and son-in-law, Eleanor and Vernon Couch, for many years.

Her son and daughter-in-law, Joseph and Margaret Oslica Coleman, also of Hannibal, assisted in telling her story to the Courier-Post.

"I got a bunch of good kids" she said of her family. "These are the kind of people who make the world go around."

She had been "afraid of a nursing home" before moving there, Alice said, but she likes living at Willow Care, where "the girls are lovely" to her.

Alice has six grandchildren: Catherine Lovelace, Joe Couch, Patricia Hall, Mary Couch, Roy Couch and Barbara Couch. She also has eight great-grandchildren, Justin, Jason, Christina, Kerry, Kelly, Jacob, William and Adam.

Her son, Joseph, repaired shoe factory machines.

Joseph Coleman, Alice's son, also worked at the Bluff City factory prior to World War II. Then he enlisted in the U.S. Army infantry and served in the Philippines. He was in Nagasaki after the bomb was dropped and the war ended. He served with the occupation forces for six months.

After the war, he worked at Crown shoe factory in Palmyra and later in St. Louis. For 30 years he worked for a machine repair business, United Shoe Machinery, which brought him back to Hannibal on occasion to work on machines at the local shoe factories.

Joseph remembers while he was working in St. Louis, he once brought his white shirts home for his mother to wash, and she told him, "If you are smart enough to have that job and wear white shirts, you can take them down to the laundromat."

Alice explained in those day she was ironing with flat irons on the stove, and anyway, "I worked from 13 on up!"

Joseph and his wife met on a bus ride, when both lived in Hannibal and worked in St. Louis. They will celebrate their 50th anniversary this year.

He explained many people rode buses to St. Louis to work, returning home on weekends. Sometimes on holiday weekends it took up to three hours to cross the narrow bridge at St. Charles, he recalled.

Joseph said in his childhood, people had no trouble entertaining themselves. "We went to a lot of shows," and also played games, especially cards.