Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 29, 1995 TAG: 9511290018
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE:
DATELINE: SALEM LENGTH: Medium
He'd be working yet, he says, if he hadn't developed trouble in the nerves of his right hand four years ago.
He uses a cane, but Reeves still is out on the road daily - visiting the sick, dropping in on a homebound sister, driving down to the old family farm in Franklin County or going to church.
He helps with a monthly game night at the VA,Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem
"As far as I can remember," says Reeves' daughter Frances Rose, "he held several jobs," leaving on weekdays before the girls were up and often returning late.
"He cut grass for probably one-third of South Roanoke. We saw him mainly on weekends. He was an excellent provider. We never did without."
"He's an amazing man," says Rose. "He's not large in stature, but to me he's the largest man I know."
The seventh of 12 children, Hermit Alfonza Reeves says that as an infant, he had bouts with whooping cough, and "they laid me out on the bed to die" several times during his first year. He says the disease stunted his growth but he's been healthy since.
Reeves grew up on a Franklin County farm where there were always chores. When he left that life for work in the city, he often held down two or three jobs at a time. "I've worked all my life, just about around the clock."
He learned his work habits from his parents, Robert and Rosie Reeves, who paid $500 in cash in 1890 for 150 acres, about 18 miles east of Rocky Mount.
The whole family tended tobacco, wheat and corn. Robert Reeves also worked as a blacksmith.
"My father never owed nobody in his life. Of course, back in those days, there was no such thing as credit."
Reeves left the farm in 1927, looking for a job, first at Norfolk and Western Railway, then in the West Virginia coalfields. Reeves went to work as an orderly at a Bluefield, W.Va., hospital, making $4 a week for six, 12-hour workdays. Later, he worked on a road crew in Franklin County, where he hauled down $9 a week for 15 hours a day.
"I was getting rich then. I bought an old T-model Ford to go back and forth to work.''
He married Estelle Atkins in 1936, and they moved to Roanoke two years later. Reeves worked as the night orderly at what was then Roanoke Memorial and Crippled Children's Hospital. His duties included keeping ice on hand for the operating room and for cooling patients in oxygen tents.
Reeves was a medic in the Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1945, serving in the United States and throughout Europe. After service, he started his 30 years at the VA, first as an orderly, then a custodian. For 27 years of those years, he also cleaned offices and apartment buildings on a contract basis, employing as many as three people, including his daughter and granddaughter.
"He's one of the hardest-working men I ever knew, and our mother was the strongest black woman I've ever known," daughter Shirley Robinson says.
"There's nothing he won't do. He never says `no,' and he won't let you pay him back," she says of her father.
"We have a cousin going through chemotherapy. He helps shave and bathe him and sits with him when his wife has to go out. He's always there for other people," Robinson says.
Reeves has helped cater parties - mainly tending bar - around Roanoke and Blacksburg for 50 or more years. "I could handle 200 guests easy. I was fast when I was young."
After his daughters graduated from Lucy Addison High School in the 1960s, Reeves put them through Cortez Peters Business College in Washington, D.C. He tried to get a loan to help finance their education, but no Roanoke bank would lend him more than $700. He figured he could earn what he needed.
"I knew I was a hustler, so I put my shoulder to the wheel." He took whatever other odd jobs he could get: mowing lawns, washing windows, painting.
"If you want something," says Reeves, "you work for it."
For example, his wife died at 5 p.m. on the last day of November 1989, and he returned her next month's check to the government. Maybe Uncle Sam wouldn't have noticed that she didn't quite survive into December, but "I've always been honest. I just wanted to do the right thing."
by CNB