ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 22, 1995                   TAG: 9510210004
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: G-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RICHARD CLAYTOR

Richard Claytor says he tells a lot of people about Floyd and the winter of 1960. ``I like to tell them that we were right in there, we were the forerunners,'' says Claytor in phone interview from his home in Winston-Salem, N.C.

"It was a time that needed to happen.''

Before 1960, Claytor remembers traveling ``dirty dusty roads'' on the 90-mile round trip to Christiansburg Institute while the all-white Check High School sat two miles from his house.

``The only bad memory I have is riding that far to school,'' Claytor says. ``My momma would pack me some sandwiches. We'd pass three or four white high schools and I'd be so hungry on the way home that I'd eat them all, the chicken and the bones.''

On the first day of school at Check, Claytor remembers ``a little fright like any young person going into a new situation but I didn't think anybody would bother me because I knew everybody already anyway.''

Claytor remembers being barred from playing sports. The baseball coach at the time was also Claytor's math teacher. ``I might not have been able to play with them but I'd practice with them and go with them to games to keep score, things like that.''

Check did provide school transportation, a separate bus for the new black students, after the first year according to newspaper accounts. ``It wasn't a bus, it wasn't even a van,'' Claytor says. ``It was a '52 model Chevrolet Carryall or something.''

The bus story gets more unusual. ``I got my chauffeur's license that second year'' Claytor says. ``I was a substitute driver for us but I was younger so when James and them graduated I was the only one all by myself on that bus.''

And when James Walker, a black student a year older, did graduate he left quite a legacy to the younger Claytor. ``I, James Walker, will my ability to get along with the girls to Richard Claytor'' reads the senior will in the Check yearbook a year after integration began.

When Claytor graduated in 1962 he took various jobs at Norfolk and Western Railway, Appalachian Power Co. and studied elementary education in college before his current involvement in real estate.

His wife of the past 10 years and he share four children.

``It's hard for kids nowadays to believe the things we used to do and see, the difference in stores, bathrooms, where you had to eat,'' Claytor says. ``It's hard for them to comprehend that stuff.'' During Black History Week, Claytor reflects on integration in Floyd when he speaks to the younger children about ``what blacks have accomplished in the past years.''

Claytor goes back to Floyd once or twice a month and thinks he might like to retire there. ``There's no industry in Floyd, nothing to make a living with, you had to drive out of there to get a job,'' Claytor says.

Of those years at Check High School, Claytor says, ``I felt part of the class. It wasn't too bad. You know you always have one or two people that haven't been trained in the right way but hey, it all worked out.'' 


 by CNB