Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 30, 1994 TAG: 9405300079
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MEADOW CREEK LENGTH: Long
The morning after Jim Mann died, his widow was confronted with a swirl of decisions about burying her husband of more than a half-century.
There were funeral arrangements to make, relatives to contact.
"I wasn't thinking straight," Mary Mann confesses.
But there was one thing she knew straightaway.
She wanted Charles Spraker to write the obituary.
In his farmhouse on Meadow Creek, Spraker sat down with pen in hand and his old hunting buddy in mind.
This would be no dull recitation of dates and places and memberships. He's read too many obituaries like that. "I like to bring a little humor to a sad situation," Spraker says. Most obituaries, he laments, "are so dry. Just to read about all the awards, did this and belonged to that - sometimes you get bored reading them. I like something with a little life."
A good obituary, in Spraker's view, must tell a tale in death as good as the subject himself might have told it.
"I sat down and spent about an hour on it," Spraker says. "If you get a good column, it'll just tumble out. Other times you can sit there and flail yourself to death and still get nothing."
The morning after Jim Mann's passing was one of those times that an obituary just "tumbled out," as clear and fresh as a mountain spring.
It went like this:
"James H. Mann, the last Mann on Meadow Creek is gone. James Hersey Mann, 87, crossed the Alleghenies late Saturday afternoon, May 14, 1994. Jim Mann was born in Craig County and has been a fixture here for his lifetime. For many years, he was a telephone man for Tulley Reynolds Phone Co. The old black '39 Chevrolet truck with the spotlight poking through the roof and the little man with the big cackle, hat and pipe, rattled over every road and pig path in the county . . . "
By the time Spraker put his pen down, he'd reminisced about Jim Mann's long, and eventually successful courtship of Mary Jones "down Thorny Hollow and over in the Gap," about Mann's love of "taters, baseball and roaming the mountains," about Mann's views on religion and politics ("two things Jim Mann was, a Methodist and a Democrat"), and, finally, a parting salutation from the friends and neighbors that Mann left behind. (The two were pretty much the same.)
"Goodbye Jim Mann," Spraker's obituary concluded, "we love you and will join you some day just over the Alleghenies."
It was, safe to say, not the standard obituary you'd read in the Roanoke Times & World-News or the weekly New Castle Record.
But it was a popular one.
The afternoon after Mann was buried, the mourners gathered at his widow's home at the foot of Earn Knob. The talk, as they crowded into the dining room and shared funeral cake, was about Jim Mann's life - and Spraker's obituary.
"This house was packed full all day today," Mary Mann exclaimed, "and everybody wants a copy."
In Craig County, the tender but enduring handiwork of the craftsman comes in many forms.
The way a farmer builds a sturdy fence.
The way a church sewing circle patches together a snug quilt.
Or the way Charles Spraker writes obituaries for his neighbors.
It's not, mind you, a job Spraker has sought out. "I'm not a writer," he protests. "It's just something that happened. I don't believe I could do it if I didn't know the person."
"He says he has to be in the mood," his neighbor, Lydah Caldwell, says.
Nevertheless, Spraker's vivid prose once earned him a warm mention in James J. Kilpatrick's syndicated column "The Writer's Art" which reprinted, in their entirety, two obituaries Spraker wrote about departed neighbors.
"These are obituaries, I submit, that are written as such pieces ought always to be written," Kilpatrick wrote in 1985. "They are marked by simplicity of statement, by a close knowledge of their subject, and by a kind of loving objectivity. . . . Most obituaries rattle on mechanically about dates, education, jobs and awards. Here we met Os and Amanda Carper, mountain people. As writers, let us profit from the introduction."
Kilpatrick's unstinting praise embarrassed Spraker so much that, for a time - say about eight years - he gave up writing obituaries altogether.
But when his dad died last year, he was moved to pick up his pen once more.
"Daddy's gone," he wrote. "Since we can remember there's always been Daddy . . . "
A couple of ridges over, Mary Mann was so impressed by Spraker's obituary for his father that, when the time came, she wanted him to write one for her departed Jim. "He had such a nice piece about his father," she remembers.
She's not the only one in Craig County who thought so.
"There's a lot of love behind 'em," Caldwell says.
And a story that goes back three decades.
Charles Spraker discovered Craig County the way some folks discover God.
For him, it was almost a spiritual awakening.
This was in 1964, and Spraker, then a Roanoke firefighter, had been crossing the mountains every autumn to track deer. Like many city-bound hunters, in time he got to thinking about how he'd like to find himself a weekend place out in these faraway woods.
Then he heard about the old Carper place up on the mountaintop.
It took a four-wheel drive to negotiate the rutted road - more of a path than a road, really - up to the cabin. When Spraker got there, he knew he never wanted to leave. What he'd found was the abandoned homestead of a turn-of-the-century mountaineer, a hardscrabble farm with pure spring water bubbling out of the ground, carefully stacked stone walls that ran up through the overgrown fields, and a steep yard that gave way to a view that on a clear day stretched to West Virginia.
"It became an obsession then to get it fixed up," Spraker says.
Spraker also became obsessed with learning more about the old-time ways of his new neighbors in Craig County, older folks whose roots ran deep in forgotten hollows that had long since been retaken by the tangles of wild grapes.
"When I moved here," Spraker says, "every house on this road was full of old people. I mean older people. I'm an old person. I'm 65. But now it's changed, and changed so fast. It's really changing now, especially in the last 10 years," as those old-timers pass away and newcomers take their place.
"This whole area was pretty isolated till a few years ago," Spraker says. "Now the whole flavor of the county is changing so fast, 'cause the native people are dying off and everything's getting so homogenized. It's like the radio-TV people, you don't have the old accents anymore."
In Spraker's first years on Meadow Creek, he got a glimpse of another time. There were still folks around like Os and Mandy Carper, whose family homeplace he'd purchased.
Os and Mandy were a brother and sister who never married, dedicating their lives instead to running the family farm.
"Os had never been away from home but one night in his life," Spraker says, "and that was when Mandy was in Community Hospital." She begged him to stay with her, so her brother dutifully waited by her bedside until she drifted off into sleep.
"Then he slept in the bushes outside," Spraker recalls. "He was used to staying out with his sheep. He was just an old mountain man."
By the time Spraker got to know the Carpers, they'd given up on the old mountaintop farmstead, choosing instead to work their land down in the valley below. But oh, the stories they could tell about living up on that mountain.
"Mandy used to say there was a fellow living over in the next hollow who used to come by and ask what day it was," Spraker says. "A lot of times, he'd come over and want to know what month it was. We can't understand how isolated those people were."
Spraker is trying.
His wife died in 1973, so when Spraker retired from the Fire Department a few years ago, he chose to re-create a mountaineer's life for himself, living alone on his adopted mountaintop much of the time ("I have to look at the calendar sometimes myself to keep track of what day it is") and occasionally feasting on the rattlesnakes that slither by in the summer on their way between their mating dens. "It's got a taste between chicken and shrimp," he says.
In the process, Spraker has become something of a rustic philosopher, given to quaint observations about his surroundings. See those trees splintered by the winter ice storms? "One old lady told me, `It's just the Lord pruning the woods back a little.' I'd be more inclined to think it was the devil."
That's pretty much how the obituaries got started - Spraker's heartfelt observations on the old-time mountain people.
"He's done a lot of reading," his neighbor Caldwell says. "And he's good with a pencil. Of course, he's a good help any way around."
So when Os Carper died in the summer of 1983, Spraker thought he'd help out the best way he knew how, by writing the obituary. It turned into a tribute to a "vanishing breed of mountain men" and a fellow who was "respected and admired as a younger man for his ability and skill with the scythe cradle and double-bitted axe."
When Mandy Carper died a month later, Spraker penned another, even more colorful obituary, this one to remember a "quiet and shy" woman who "loved to be alone with her work" and "lit the lantern and left it sitting on the porch many a night for her father and brother to use unhitching and feeding the horses."
Those were the kind of telling details that captivated the curmudgeonly Kilpatrick. "Bill Buckley of National Review writes the best obituaries in the business," Kilpatrick opined. "The late Red Smith was another master of the craft. The writer of these two brief pieces was in their class."
Was - and now is once more, what with the ink still fresh from the farewell to Jim Mann. But Spraker remains wary of the attention his obituaries have brought to him and his beloved Craig County.
"I don't want to get too well known," he says. "You're always scared any more that people are going to find out where Shangri-La is."
by CNB