Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 15, 1994 TAG: 9407150075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Every day, the nurses and relatives caring for Ruth Gassett are grateful her old house has such a thick wooden front door.
When they shut it behind them, it partly muffles the racket outside: heavy equipment hammering into the rocky ground across the street, throwing up dust and gas fumes and sounding like a rock quarry has taken up operation.
To give Gassett the peace she needs, her whole house would have to be soundproofed.
She is dying.
Her family has come from four states and other Virginia cities to help Gassett, 84, live out her wish to die at home. Thing is, her home is a few yards from Roanoke's hottest construction project.
For weeks, workers have been digging a long trench, 14 feet deep, to contain utility lines for the Hotel Roanoke restoration, its conference center and Gassett's neighborhood, Gainsboro. Soon, they will take part of her front yard and widen her street, Wells Avenue Northwest, to four lanes.
Her family moved the retired hairdresser and businesswoman to a back room of her home to make it as quiet as possible for her. They keep interior doors closed and hope the hum of a window air conditioner shuts out some of the sounds of the construction she has dreaded for so long.
Her sister, Maggie Encil Cumins from Mount Holly, N.J., has been with her for four months, but this week has been the worst. Trench builders for the state ran into solid rock in the parking lot of First Baptist Church, across the street from Gassett. They're going to blast the rock - maybe today, maybe next week.
Cumins feared the whole house might fall down on her, her sister and the whole family. Or she feared an explosion would send her sister over the edge.
"What if she hears this noise and she is disturbed by it?" Cumins asked. "She's sick enough as it is."
Cumins thought about moving Gassett out of the house temporarily, but she is so weakened by a brain tumor that Cumins and the nurses with Good Samaritan Hospice decided that moving her from her home would be even more traumatic than the noise.
The work on Wells Avenue is being supervised by the state, and Virginia Department of Transportation spokeswoman Laura Bullock was upset when she heard about Gassett. Bullock's 80-year-old uncle's funeral was Tuesday. "It just really hit home," she said.
Bullock said she wished she could put giant pillows around the house. "I wish I could tell you we could stop the work, but we can't," she said. "I just feel really bad."
The state's contractors, Branch Highways Inc., assured Cumins that the blast won't be like the dramatic explosions on television. Mike Branch, company vice president, said the dynamiting will be so muffled, the family may not even be aware it has happened. "It'll be over in about 25 milliseconds," he said.
Just to be sure Gassett and her family will be OK, the company late Thursday agreed to pay for a health professional of the family's choice to be with Gassett during and after the blasting. If that could not be arranged for today, blasting would be postponed until next week, said Thomas L. Partridge, another Branch vice president.
Cumins said Thursday she understands why workers don't want to halt construction for her sister, but she and all the family are heartsick that Gassett, who has fed hungry people from her front porch and taken in so many people who needed a home, has to live her last days like this.
When the first four of Cumins' six children were little, Gassett gave each a bicycle. She has no children, but treated her nieces and nephews like her own. She also has taken care of mentally disabled people and others in her home for many years.
She is one of Roanoke's pioneering career women. In the 1930s and for years afterward, she ran a Roanoke beauty school, a beauty shop, apartments and a restaurant, the Star City Chicken Shack.
Even with all the mess outside, beauticians still are doing hair at the salon on the side of her home at 16 Wells Ave. N.W. Gassett was right in there with them, setting hair in her Cosmopolitan Beauty Bar, until she got sick last winter.
Relatives believe worries about the street construction have speeded Gassett's illness. "This has a lot to do with her condition," said Gassett's niece, retired teacher Nina Medley. Last winter, Gassett said she couldn't sleep for her worries over the street.
"You just can't stop progress, I guess," Cumins said Thursday. "If you call that progress."
The work on Wells Avenue is being supervised by the state.
by CNB