Tag #129789 - Interview #89857 (Mira Tudor)

He went back to Ramnicu Valcea after the war. The tradesman for whom he had worked, who hadn’t paid him a dime, but had lodged and fed him, gave him a certain sum – I couldn’t tell how much – which he used to open his own store. He became one of the richest tradesmen in Ramnicu Valcea, between 1920 and 1940. He had an interesting sign, ‘The Country Hora’. [Ed. note: Hora is a Romanian folk dance with a slow rhythm in which the dancers hold hands to form a closed circle.] It was what we call today a general store: clothes, footwear, linen, notions. People would come from the countryside – people in Valcea County were very hard-working and very wealthy –, buy everything they needed from my father’s, and fill their carts. They only paid later, in fall. They never paid for the merchandise on the spot. My father would put them on the credit list. After they had harvested their crops or sold their animals, they came back to pay their debt. This is how things went year after year. What I mean is that my father was a great businessman. It’s true, he had to take some chances, and he might have had some disappointments too, but I never heard him complain about unpaid debts. Even the townspeople used this system. The clerks bought on credit and paid when they got their salary. Clerks and teachers have always been poorly paid – even before the war [World War II]. We never owned any land in the countryside. All we had was our house. My father wasn’t into farming. He didn’t want to buy another house and rent it either. He was only into trade.