ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 7, 1995 TAG: 9512070025
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
MEMO: NOTE: Also ran in December 10, 1995 Current.
A foil-wrapped chocolate Santa leans against the base of a lamp in Billy and Ethel Carter's Southeast Roanoke apartment.
It's from last Christmas, but neither of them is supposed to eat chocolate and the Santa means too much anyway.
Billy gave it to Ethel in their courting days, a reminder of how love can come no matter how old you are.
Love long evaded them. Ethel was raised by a cold, troubled foster mother. A year ago, she was a long-divorced grandmother who had just regained her independence after six months in a nursing home. She still had trouble getting around.
Billy Carter, 70, was back in his home area, a veteran of his own wars. After spending most of his life as a heavy-drinking street vendor in Washington, D.C., he moved into Morningside Manor, a city-run retirement home in Southeast, and became a committed Christian.
A year ago, he walked into Morningside Manor's laundry room. His hall neighbor, Ethel Watson, was pulling his clothes - his underwear included - out of the dryer, the couple recall with a giggle. She thought someone had forgotten some clothes.
Billy began showing up at her door with an apple, an orange, then that chocolate Santa. He leveled with her about his years of drinking.
Ethel, 74, wondered if she should get involved. She had been alone for 30 years. She might not be fit for love. She might drive him away. Her neighbors might talk.
Ethel Stump Patsell Watson Carter grew up in the Riverdale section of Southeast. Her mother died of tuberculosis, and her foster mother frightened her.
She married a railroad worker, and they had two daughters and two sons.
When her marriage ended in the 1960s, she despaired. She sold cosmetics at Miller & Rhoads and took in sewing. Later, she became a census taker and a tenant-landlord worker.
Her wit and writing make you wonder what she could have done if her foster mother had let her go to high school. A poem she wrote about Morningside Manor won praise from city officials.
William Martin "Billy" Carter Jr. was the son of a West Virginia coal miner. Billy was 9 when his mother died and he and his brother came to Roanoke. Billy sold The Roanoke Times downtown.
"We were a welfare case," he says. Ott and Lucy Poage, farmers in the Poages Mill section of Roanoke County, took in Billy and his brother.
Billy resented them. "I thought they were using us," he says, "but they were teaching us the real values of life." They tried to teach him how to care for himself.
But the boys were determined to join their father, by then a fish and vegetable vendor and lumber company guard in Washington, D.C. When Billy was 17, they left the Poages and moved into their father's room in the city.
Billy says he never was able to earn his father's love or talk him out of drinking. "I couldn't whip him, so I joined him," Billy says, making the motion of throwing back a liquor bottle. Billy, like his father, became an alcoholic.
He pumped gas, and he fried oysters in a famous seafood restaurant. "I've even worked in a burlesque house, selling peanuts." His chant was, "A prize in every box. Only a quarter, only a quarter."
His longest-lasting job was selling flowers, hot dogs, peanuts and souvenirs from a street cart. He wore a black cowboy hat and a black shirt. They called him "Cowboy."
Carter has seen all the presidents but one since Franklin D. Roosevelt. He left Washington before he got a look at Clinton.
His favorite was Roosevelt. Carter met him first when Roosevelt bought a Roanoke Times from him while here to dedicate Salem's Veterans Administration Hospital in 1934. Years later, Carter saw Roosevelt being carried out a back door at the White House in his wheelchair - an image the White House tried to hide from the public.
Carter was married to a government worker 20 years his senior, but he didn't love her, just the bottle. "Really and truly, I didn't know what the word 'love' was," he says. "It's a powerful thing; but boy, is it stepped on." They had no children. His wife died in 1978.
He quit drinking in the early 1980s and came back to Roanoke a year ago. "I call Washington, D.C., the devil's workshop. I'll never go back to Washington. I'll never go back to the bottle."
He asked Ethel to marry him on Valentine's Day.
A dream pushed her to take a chance. She says a voice told her: "All right now, you've got a good one. If you marry him, we'll work with you."
"Something," she says, "was telling me God wanted this to happen."
They asked their pastor for premarital counseling.
"They're as in love as any couple I've ever seen," says the Rev. Charles Hoffler of Waverly Place Baptist Church.
He married them in April. Her daughters walked down the aisle with her. Her sons died years ago.
The Carters' neighbors call them "the lovebirds." Their living room is cozy and comfortable. The Mill Mountain Star shines down through their sixth-floor windows.
"We enjoy life," Billy says. "See what I'm talking about? What God can give you? All you have to do is ask."
Her legs and feet hurt, so he runs the errands. His hearing and eyesight aren't good, so she does the reading. "She's my eyes and ears," he says, "and I'm her feet. I wouldn't trade her for any woman in Roanoke."
Their income dropped when they married, "but we're going to make it if we live in a chicken coop," Billy says, "because we're together. She's a scrapper, and I'm a scrapper. That's the way we're going to live our life - day by day.
"I have gained so much by coming back home. Even whipped cigarettes. All by the hand of God, honey. All by the hand of God."
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff. 1. Ethel and Billy Carter met inby CNBMorningside Manor's
laundry. Ethel was pulling his clothes out of the dryer because she
thought
someone had forgotten some clothes. 2. Ethel and Billy Carter,
married only eight months (ran on E-1). color.