Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 8, 1993 TAG: 9307080322
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DOUG DOUGHTY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I started with nothing," said Payne, who was 5 when his father died. "I was over at Washington Park, and this guy said, `Would you like to go to school?' "
"He said, `Meet me here at 6 o'clock.' He must have been talking to the coach down [at Virginia State]. So, I went home and got a shirt, pants, sweater and shoes. That's all I had to put in the bag."
That trip was the beginning of a long and illustrious career in athletics and education that was recognized recently when Payne returned to Petersburg for induction into the Virginia State Athletic Hall of Fame.
The record books show that Payne was a celebrated athlete who made All-Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association in football, basketball and baseball at a size (5 feet 7, 145 pounds) that nowadays would have limited his participation in at least the first two sports. Just as impressive, however, are his accomplishments after college.
Payne organized the first basketball team at Roanoke County Training School in Salem and later coached a Tri-State championship team at George Washington Carver High in Salem. When he retired in 1971, he had spent 39 years in school systems in Salem and Roanoke, and, for many, was the man who introduced them to athletics.
" `Pops' Payne was the man who first put a basketball in my hands," said Harold Deane, one of Payne's students at Harrison Elementary School in Roanoke and now the head basketball coach at Virginia State. "It was a real treat for all of us who were able to attend his induction ceremonies."
Payne recently turned 87, but he has the energy of a man half his age and still works in the yard of his spacious home on Pinehurst Street in Salem. It has been more than 20 years since Payne underwent surgery to remove cancerous portions of his spleen, pancreas and intestine, and he gives himself daily injections to combat diabetes.
"I've never been one to let something stand in my way," said Payne, who is married to the former Christine Keeling. They have a son, Tom, who is a school administrator in Prince William County.
"At Harrison [when he was a student], we had old cut-up desks and used books. It didn't bother me. I didn't like it, but you learn to labor and wait."
After Payne got out of college, he took a job teaching agriculture in Penhook - 20 miles from the nearest train and 10 miles from the nearest highway. The pay was $50 per month, but room and board was only $5, so he was able to save enough money in three years to buy a home on Eighth Street in Roanoke for $1,600.
By the time he sold that house 40 years later, it was worth $25,000. He also bought the seven-room house next door and personally converted it into four apartments, which he still owns.
"He did a lot of things through perseverance and by not letting anything stop him," said Douglas Dowe, who played on Payne's basketball teams at Carver and later was principal at Lincoln Terrace Elementary School in Roanoke.
"He was strict, but he was fair, which is what I liked about him. In '46, before I became a starter, he told us to be at the gym at 7:30 [p.m.] and, at 7:32, the first team walked in the door. He asked them what time it was and then made them sit up in the bleachers. We won that game, I might add."
Payne did not get paid for coaching the teams at Roanoke County Training School or Carver, but he produced three championships in the Western District, which included black schools from Roanoke, Lynchburg and Staunton. He took one of his best teams to the state tournament in 1946 in Petersburg, only to find out it couldn't play.
"They said our eligibility list wasn't there," Payne said. "That's when I left Carver and came to Roanoke. I said, `If we're going to treat youth like this, then I don't want to coach anymore.' That was it."
Carver won the Tri-State Championship (covering Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina) the next year with a new coach, "but," Dowe noted, "it was Coach Payne's system." The tournament was played in Fayetteville, N.C., and all five Carver starters were offered scholarships to Fayetteville State.
Payne spent the next seven years at Harrison, where he began the physical education department and devoted much of his energy to upgrading the facilities and equipment. He is universally credited for playgrounds being blacktopped all over the city.
"There wasn't asphalt then," he said. "I said, `We've got to do something,' so they put gravel out there. But those boys ground up the gravel so fine that there was dust just everywhere, all over the children and in the teachers' hair."
After the superintendent wouldn't act on his plea to have the playgrounds asphalted, Payne happened by the bus terminal and noticed 55-gallon drums of oil sitting unused.
"I asked the man at the bus terminal, `What're you going to do with this oil?' " Payne related. "He said he was going to dispose of it, and I said, `How about bringing it over there by my school?'
"There was an alley there and I had them put the barrels on that little incline. They poured that oil out and it came down the bank, across the yard, over in the street and people were tracking it all in their houses. They said, `This is a crazy man up here,' but you know what happened? I got every playground in Roanoke asphalted."
Payne moved in 1952 to Booker T. Washington, where he conducted physical education programs for girls and boys - such an imposing task that three people were hired to assist him after the first year. There were no basketball tournaments for girls until Payne started them.
"To me, he was more than just a coach, though," Dowe said. "He taught me biology, physics, chemistry. He always instilled in me, sportsmanship [and] scholarship first. He was a tremendous man. He was held in the highest esteem not just by the athletes, but by every student."
Virtually all of Payne's career in athletics came during an era when segregation was in full force, and it would be ridiculous to say he hasn't felt racism's sting. But Payne is too full of life to dwell on another man's small-mindedness.
"I can't say I appreciated [segregation]," Payne said, "but I figured, if there was a time for slavery, there was a time for freedom. [Our generation] wanted opportunity. What I can't understand now is when kids get an opportunity and don't use it.
"I remember a time when I couldn't go to the University of Virginia. We said we wanted integration; we got integration. That's the change I knew was going to come. I'd like for people to see how I started and how I am now. Don't anybody say there's something a person can't do."
by CNB