Come Quittin’ Time is the third cotton mill life book by Wilt Browning following Linthead, about what life was like in mill villages of the middle of the 20th century, and The Rocks, the story of a good mill baseball team that for a season competed less than successfully yet made history at the professional minor league level.

Browning, a retired newspaper reporter, columnist and editor, also is the author of a true crime book, Deadly Goals. As a journalist who spent most of his career covering sports, Browning worked for the Topeka (Kan.) Daily Capital and State Journal, The Greenville (SC) News, Charlotte Observer, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Greensboro (NC) News & Record and the Asheville Citizen-Times. During a six-year period out of the newspaper business in the 1970s, Browning also served as public relations director for two National Football League teams, the Atlanta Falcons and the Baltimore Colts.

He is the winner of a number of journalism awards, including his five-time selection as North Carolina’s Sports Writer of the Year. For a decade he has served on the board of the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame including two years, 2007-08, as the Hall’s president.
Browning and his wife Joyce, the parents of five children who now are adults, make their home in Kernersville, NC.

In the early part of the 20th century, thousands of children, some of them as young as 5 and 6, were forced to forego education to go to work in the burgeoning textile industry in the southern United States. One of those children was Martha Chappell and Come Quittin’ Time is her true story.

Her story, as with many other child laborers, is one of struggle and triumph and deep faith. And her story offers a rare look at the human side of factory life because her life almost perfectly ran a parallel course to the robust life of the cotton industry. When she was young, the industry was young; when she grew old, much of the cotton mill industry grew old as well, and much of it died before she did.

Martha died a few days before Christmas 2002, but by then life as she had known it on the mill hill was already gone. In the end, she had gotten through it all with a dogged determination, an abiding faith, and a clear understanding of how to use her skills at baking home-made biscuits as bartering chips, even for her very life.