When I was a boy, my dad made me can our own food, along with my two brothers and four sisters. He made us boys build a barn in the backyard with railroad ties. And that’s where the distributorship in seven states for Helman’s Mayonaise and Kraft Cheese began. My dad, Clinton White Hinshaw, used to walk into the old country stores with wooden floors and he would roll a jar of Helman’s Mayonaise down the aisle. He would say, “Look ladies and gentleman, the mayonaise that doesn’t seperate.” Then, he would twist the lid off and show them. My sisters would stand up on the back of a semi-truck at Camden Park and sing songs to entertain the crowd. Us boys would mosey through the crowd and give out samples of the mayonaise on crackers. Mr. Helman himself would spend the night at our house when doing business with my dad. My dad built a flee of seven semi-trucks. When old man Helman died, a large company bought my dad out. They wanted to buy my dad’s semi’s, and my dad replied, “I had a handshake with Mr. Helman.” The company said, “We are buying you out.” Dad said, “You can go jump in a lake, I’m not selling you my trucks.”
Later on in life, I started my own business in life, building houses. I took my dad’s gold pocket watch and a car that I bought after serving in World War II and traded it for a big lot that I made into two smaller lots. My wife and I dug the first basement, of the first house that we built, by hand. While my wife, Mary Rose, was pregnant with our first child Cheryl, she helped mix mortar and carry cinder blocks. I pushed our tools to work in a wheel barrow.
Later in our career of building houses, we had a mud slide from the hill above wipe out the foundation of a new house we were building. That is when I learned that you pour concrete in your basement cinder block walls for reinforcement. After digging out the mud slide, another slide occurred, but the walls were still there. But again, we had to dig them out by hand.
About forty-eight homes later, my boys Hugh and John Hinshaw incorporated and bought into our business. They paid fifteen hundred dollars each for a lot on Honeysuckle Lane. And as a incorporated family we built our first spec house and sold it with a profit.