Oral History Feature | John & Andrew Payne

The Payne family have been selling insurance in Watauga County for 4 generations. As part of the Way Watauga Works exhibition. We sat down with John and Andrew Payne to talk to them about the change they have seen in their lifetimes.

John Payne – Andrew acts like we didn’t have computers way back then. In 71 or 72 when I got out of the army, Gulf Oil sends me my credit card statement and on that credit card statement it says you can buy a hand held calculator about the size of a credit card that will add, subtract, multiply, divide for $99 dollars. We bought two of them, cause we knew it’d never be cheaper, now with your credit card they send you one for free. And we go to clients and they’d say, “What is that?” and you’d say, “Well it’s an adding machine,” and they’d say, “Multiply 48 by 93” and you’d do it and show it to them and they were excited. And then around 1980 or 83 I got my first computer which was a cassette tape recorder that had a calculator plugged into it and you could program this do to the calculations you wanted it to do through a cassette tape recorder, that was the memory. And then in the late 80s TRASH 80 (TRS-80) came out, or that’s when I bought one cause all the companies said if you don’t have your own computer system now you can’t generate the paper you need, so I spent $10,000 getting a computer that took up about the size of this table that had enough memory to turn on, looked like a 78 record what you put into it, that was the, CD or whatever you call it.

Read their full interview here: www.blowingrockmuseum.org/see/wataugaworks

Photo by Ashley Warren @naturalcraftphotography