Family archiveA trade learned through determination
In Slaughterville, Oklahoma, Carl Jacob Waggoner, the founder of Waggoners, was just a baby when he crawled up and stuck his hand on a wood-burning stove. Without the proper advances in medicine, the hand never quite healed right, leaving him with a permanent fist for a right hand. This injury was enough that, in 1939, he received a state-sponsored internship at a sheet metal shop, making 15 dollars a month. Without a reliable method of transportation, he would spend Monday mornings hitchhiking to the shop and, even with his crippling disability, spent his weeks learning all he could about metal and the industry. At night, he would sleep where he worked, only returning home on the weekends, where cows needed to be milked and crops tended.