I stopped to buy gas in Kinston, NC and the price was $3.129 for regular. I check my Tom Tom and sure enough it said that I was in Kinston, North Carolina and just then my memory kicked in. Kinston…Kinston, yes, Du Pont. How many years ago was it? Ten, twenty, twenty-five and probably more than that. It was for three days of speeches to kick off the New Year. What a way to start out the year and even though I had lost my voice and it was far from right yet I had accepted the job eagerly. I’d always wanted to work for Du Pont because they were reputed to be the #1 American corporation when it came to safety and, as it turned out, this particular Du Pont plant held the bragging rights as the safest plant in America. About ten years before I arrived there they had gone an amazing 66,645,000 consecutive work hours without a single injury. That was a force of 3,000 workers going 12 years and 11 months without a lost time injury. And then it happened. A woman, wearing high heels tripped on the carpet and sprained her ankle. It was a fatal injury. She really just sprained her ankle but when the safety committee discovered that she would be losing time from work they strangled her. Everything in the above is true except the fatality and the strangling. I just threw that in and now you can throw that out. Actually they just bruised here up a bit. So many years have passed now. Last time I checked the work staff was down to about 300 employees now. Just the same, it was a thrill to get gasoline so cheap and even better to recall what wonderful audiences they were there in Kinston.
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