WALLACE REDD STORY

By: Michael A. Aun, FIC, LUTCF, CSP, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame

Wallace Redd was a man of character and persistence. I've knew him and his family all my life. They were neighbors of some of my favorite cousins, the Eli Mack kids.

As a child I delivered newspapers to their home and messed around in their Feed & Seed store on Main Street in Lexington. He was also one of my scoutmasters in Cub Scouts. I was a classmate of his son, Ronald Redd, so I guess you could say I was a surrogate family member.

Wallace and his dad ran what used to be called W.B. Redd & Son Feed & Seed on Main Street in the heart of Lexington, SC. Not only did they run the feed and seed, but also had a clothing store known as "Mathias & Redd," which later became the location of Mae's. He was a partner Andrew Mathias.

After a period of time, the business split and the senior Redd retired in the fifties and Wallace took over and ran the store until 1965. There were a cast of characters that inhabited the store including Henry Hentz, David Waldrop, Leonardo Padgett, Ansel Crapps, Heber Smith and Bub Powell, whose favorite idle time activity was to give young Ronald a ride on the hand truck from the front to the back of the store.

There were others who worked there from time to time including Malcolm Harmon, Vascoe Shealy, Vic Shealy, Bill Jacobs and Wayne Addy, who at one point in time owned the Pure Oil Station.

During those days many farmers bought their seed for planting from the Redd family, coming in from all parts of Lexington, Richland, Aiken, Saluda, Calhoun and Edgefield counties as well as other remote areas. The real fun and challenge was delivering the seed to the farm.

One day the Redd's had an extremely large order to deliver into Saluda County. The tag you purchase on a truck tells you the maximum weight it can carry. The heaviest truck in the Redd fleet at the time was five tons.

Ron and his cousins Brad Redd and Bill Jacobs were loading the truck that day and it got to the point where it was loaded to the max. Each bag tells you what the weight is.

"We had several more orders to fill," recalled Ron. "Dad was called to the loading area and told of the situation. He gave the go ahead to overload the truck. To this day I don't know how much it was overloaded. My cousin Brad was driving the truck and I was assigned to go with him."

The pair headed west out of town toward the Saluda area. "We got to where US 1and US 378 separate and what did we run into? You guessed it- the SC Highway Patrol, who had set up a weigh station right at that intersection," explained Ron.

"I am not going to share what Brad said when he saw the weigh station," quips Ron. "As we approached the weigh station, he told me not to say a word, and put the fear of God in me when he said it."

Fellow Lexington resident Buddy Sullivan was the Highway Patrolman on duty. He walks up to the truck and starts talking to Brad. "Brad, you aren't overloaded are you?" Sullivan asked. Brad replied: "No Sir!"

Like he often did for his fellow Lexingtonians, Sullivan looked the other way told Brad to move on and but to be careful. "I shudder to think how much over weight we were that day. Had I been in Brad's shoes, I would have been thrown under the jail."

Throughout the majority of the years the store was in operation, Security Feeds was the brand of feed we sold. At the time, the feed was delivered mostly by boxcar to the local railroad depot. A Mrs. Plowden was the station keeper at the Lexington Depot on North Lake Drive. The building has since been torn down.

"We would often get orders for feed that we could not fill until the boxcar arrived," explained Ron. "We had a time limit to unload the boxcar without having to pay demurrage. When a car load of feed came in we had to move pretty fast to unload it. On the occasions we could not fill an order from the store, we had to wait until the boxcar arrived with it. Nine times out of ten when the car came in, the feed we needed to fill the order was at the end of the boxcar on the bottom layer. This meant we had to dig through hundreds of bags of feed until we found the order we needed to deliver," smiled Ron.

Wallace Redd was not only a merchant but he was also an insurance salesman. He was the kind of guy who liked to help people and he never met a stranger. Always puffing on a pipe, he made you feel at ease when you were with him.

He attended Wofford College before being called to duty in the Pacific theater, later returning to Lexington where he was active in his church and community until he died in 2006.